The Second most valuable discovery in medical science.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Covid-19 is no exception.

This pandemic has done wonders to the medical science both at international level as well as in our backyard. Only yesterday, a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test was a mirage for us. Today, tens of thousands PCR tests are conducted in Bhubaneswar and all over Odisha. Unbelievable.

Wait. There is one more unbelievable thing is happening around us. The genome of a virus is getting sequenced in a lab in our backyard at Nalco Square precisely.

As Institute of Life Sciences under Department of Biotechnology will be doing the genomic sequencing of this virus for eastern zone, it seems the amazing discoveries of Watson and Crick has finally came down to ground reality in our state.

This article is dedicated to Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer two little known names who have done more to bring the Watson-Crick model to our backyard.

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Stan Cohen was a doctor of medicine from the Stanford. Herbert Boyer was a graduate with biology and chemistry. It was a period of great hybridisation of medical streams. Earlier Francis Crick a physicist had worked with James Watson a zoologist to study life at molecular level. Together they discovered the now famous double helix of DNA ( the most important discovery of 20th century). A new branch of life sciences took birth that day- Biophysics. Now a chemist worked with a doctor to unravel the mysteries of life a bit further. This will create another branch in life sciences.

Here is making the long story of Biotechnology short.

By the 70s, we already knew that shortage of insulin causes Diabetes. Insulin is synthesised by some special cells inside our Pancreas. A gene inside the cell controls this synthesis. Any defect in this gene can lead to complete absence of insulin. The baby then goes into coma right from childhood and will never recover from that coma. Frederick Banting and his colleagues got the pancreas of a pig ground and injected this powder to few such comatose babies in the Toronto hospital. In front of the eyes of their desperate parents, these babies who were already left to die for sure, suddenly woke up and started drinking milk.

That was one of the unparalleled  dramatic moments in the history of modern medicine.

Insulin doesn’t occur in nature. You have to kill a pig or cow to get one ounce of crude insulin. So in 1972, Cohen and Boyer sliced the insulin gene of a human cell and pasted it in the chromosome of one bacteria. We know bacteria multiply very rapidly. One single E Coli will multiply into two in half an hour. In 24 hours the E Coli that received human insulin gene multiplied into 2^50 bacteria inside their lab, each capable of making its own human insulin. Soon their lab became an insulin making factory.

Stan Cohen and Herbert Boyer patented their technology as the Recombinant DNA Technology on December 2,1980. That day a new branch of science took birth. It was called the Biotechnology.

After the discovery of the double helix of DNA by Francis and Crick, this is the second most important discovery that has happened in medical field. 

Today any biological molecule with the adjective human that we synthesise in our lab, be it the human Growth Hormone, or human insulin or human antibody is based on this technology. Biotechnology brought the Homo sapiens into our lab. It is also used for Gene mapping, Gene sequencing and of course preparing mRNA vaccine against the spike protein of SARS COV-2