Purdue News
Purdue News
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March 12, 1999
Biotech parallels computer industry, experts sayWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Twenty-five years after the birth of the technology that allows genetic engineering, the biotech industry is poised to explode in the consumer marketplace just as the computer chip did 25 years after its invention."We are at the same stage in biotechnology as the personal computer industry was in 1982," says Victor Lechtenberg, dean of agriculture at Purdue University. "We're just starting to see the first products come on the market." There are economic, social and scientific parallels between the two industries, but for business people, the proof is in the profits. On Wall Street, the enormous potential for new products has led to a sort of gold rush as investors and companies try to position themselves for maximum profit in biotech. "The economic potential of biotechnology is tremendous, both for the nation and for Indiana," Lechtenberg says. "Like the early days of the Internet, there are going to be amazing economic opportunities for those who stake out a place early in this field." The excitement over biotech has fueled several high-profile corporate mergers in the past two years, and some of them involved agricultural biotechnology companies merging with pharmaceutical companies. For example, in May 1998 chemical giant Dupont sold its oil unit Conoco so that it could plow the $25 billion from the sale into biotechnology products. That same month, Monsanto bought seed companies DeKalb and Delta Pine & Land for a reported $4.1 billion. In June 1998, the pharmaceutical company American Home Products merged with Monsanto, for a reported a $34.6 billion. "These types of corporate connections will speed the interweaving of pharmaceutical and agricultural products," Lechtenberg says. "Consumers are going to see scores of new products, such as foods that contain vaccines or super-nutritious foods that will change the way people view agriculture." The analogy that the biotechnology industry is like the computer industry works on a technical side, too, because there's a parallel between genetic code and computer code. Computers and living organisms both organize their essential information in a similar fashion. Computers are directed by a series of ones and zeroes, which is known as the binary code. Living organisms all use a code made up of four parts, a quaternary code. Instead of ones and zeroes, the information is conveyed by a series of four chemicals, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, which geneticists simply call A, T, G and C. Like a computer code, the arrangement of these four chemicals strung together form genes, which contain the information that tells the cells whether you are to be a linebacker-sized human or a lemming. Scientists first learned that they could manipulate these four chemicals to form new genes in the mid-1970s. "Recombinant DNA was first developed in 1974," says Mark Hermodson, head of the biochemistry department at Purdue. "Today, even high school kids can stitch genes together. The development of the science has been mind-boggling, and so has the rise of the industry in the United States." Hermodson says that genetic engineering has allowed breakthroughs in the laboratory to come at incredible speed. "The beauty of biotechnology is that it has speeded up biological research enormously," he says. "It's given us understanding of how things are regulated in living organisms that we couldn't have approached 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe some people think it looks slow because 10 or 15 years ago there was a lot of loose talk about how fast these things would be adapted, but if you put it in the context of the development of medicine or ag chemicals in the 1950s, it's moving pretty quickly."
Sources: Victor Lechtenberg, (765) 494-8391; Victor_Lechtenberg@acn.purdue.edu Mark Hermodson, (765) 494-1637; hermodson@biochem.purdue.edu Writer: Steve Tally, (765) 494-9809; tally@aes.purdue.edu Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; e-mail, purduenews@purdue.edu
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