The Invention of Recombinant DNA Technology

Berg, Boyer, Cohen

Team Actelion

In the 1980s, hundreds of biotechnology firms were established with the express intent of becoming fully integrated pharmaceutical…

Mr. Pseudomonas

“A live, human-made microorganism is patentable.”

Mathilde Krim

A Life of Causes

In 1944, near the end of World War II, an eighteen-year-old University of Geneva…

Oral History Spotlight

Dennis Gillings: Calculated Risk and Reward

Dennis Gillings has always been a risk taker. In 1982, he gave up a secure career as a professor at a top university to build Quintiles, the biostatistical consulting company he had…

Double Helix: The Supporting Cast

The other players in the discovery of the molecular configuration of…

Probiotic Philosophy

A Brief History

Biotech Battles
Ebola

As the 2014 Ebola outbreak claimed lives in West Africa and threatened to spread beyond its region of origin, many…

In Conversation with Don Francis

Ebola in the Sudan, 1976

Oral History Spotlight

George Poste: Embracing Complexity

George Poste is a big picture guy. He believes that progress in science and medicine requires understandings of complex wholes, and that reductionism is foolhardy. “With reductionism,” he says, “you delude…