Boyer, Robert

DONALD E. BOYER ROBERT S. DONE JOHN FEHRER JOHN HANUSIN CHARLES R HOOVER ROY NELSON HUNT... 

The first biologically functional chimeric DNA molecules constructed in vitro were assembled from parts of different plasmids in 1973 by Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang, Herbert Boyer, and Robert Helling. These plasmids were used to transform recipient E. coli cells transformation means the uptake and repli-... 

Genentech was founded in 1976 by scientist Herbert Boyer and the venture capitalist Robert Swanson. Headquartered in San Francisco, it employs almost 5000 staff worldwide and has 10 protein-based products on the market. These include hGHs (Nutropin, Chapter 11), the anti-body-based products Herceptin and Rituxan (Chapter 13) and the thrombolytic agents Ac-tivase and TNKase (Chapter 12). The company also has 20 or so products in clinical trials. In 2004, it generated some US 4.6 billion in revenues. 

Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr Herbert W. Boyer, and the changes in state and federal laws (the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act) paved the way for universities and academicians to participate in fostering business alliances and creating new companies. 

The age of biotechnology started in the USA with the foundation of the first biotech company. Genentech was founded by the renowned biochemist Herbert Boyer and the young visionary venture capitalist Robert Swanson. (Of the... 

It has now been more than fifteen years since Robert Swanson, a young man who understood both finance and science, invited Herbert Boyer, a shy molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, out for a beer. Swanson described his vision to Boyer that the techniques and ideas that Boyer had devised... 

Genentech, Inc. was founded in by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr. Heibert W. Boyer. In the early 1970s, Boyer and geneticist Stanley Colien pioneered a new scientific field called recombinant DNA technology. 

In 1976 Herbert Boyer, one of the discoverers of the rDNA technique and a member of the faculty at UCSF, and Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist with MIT degrees in chemistry and business, formed Genentech. As Swanson put it, in terms reminiscent of those of Landau in chemicals, For Genentech, the strategy from the beginning was to be able to make and sell our own products. Therefore we needed not only to generate products but to manufacture them and build the marketing force to sell them. ... 

To achieve credibihty before acquiring personnel and facilities, Boyer intentionally selected an easily replicated cell with a simple composition, sometostain, Derdak, ed.. International Directory, vol. 8 (1994), p. 209. Pages 209-211 provide a useful overview of Genentech s evolution see also Robert Teitelman, Gene Dreams Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology (New York Basic Books, 1989), pp. 11-14, 24-26, 193-194. 

Robert Boyer of H. Ford s Edison Institute was awarded an important patent in 1945 (Boyer et al., 1945) for producing textile fibers from soybean meal for use in automobile upholstery. In addition to soy protein, casein, corn zein, and peanut protein were also used to produce regenerated protein fibers. H. Ford once wore a suit made from soy protein fibers, which was reportedly quite itchy when dry and odiferous when wet. Soy protein fiber technology never attained commercial textile production... 

Genetic engineering is the manipulation of an organism s DNA. In 1976, with venture capitalist Robert Swanson, Herbert Boyer founded a company called Genentech to use recombinant DNA technology to produce medicines. In 1978, the company successfully inserted the human insulin gene into E. coli bacteria and then grew them to produce commercial amounts of insulin. 

Recombinant DNA technology would eventually become so omnipresent in discovery research that people would rarely think about it anymore, like Manhattanites going about their jobs oblivious to the technology that made the skyscrapers they work in possible. The license revenues from Boyer s and Cohen s patents would bring over a quarter billion dollars to Stanford. In 1976 the first company to exploit this technology commercially, Genentech, founded by Dr Boyer along with venture capitalist Robert Swanson, would produce revolutionary new medicines, save lives, enrich shareholders, and would eventually come to be seen as a sort of milestone in the history of modern therapeutics. 

Ford researchers found more practical uses for the soybean. They mixed the oil into enamel car paint, and they molded soybean meal to make horn buttons, gearshift knobs, door handles, and even acceleration pedals. Robert Boyer, Ford s main soy researcher, made plastic sheets of soybeans that could replace steel. He installed a soy trunk lid on one of Henry s... 

Although one might imagine that at USC Simha s interests were focused solely on solution viscosity and statistical thermodynamics, he found time to be involved in such diverse topics as computation of DNA sequences (with Jovan Moacanin from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), in glass transition phenomena and thermal expansion of polymers (with Moacanin and Ray Boyer of the Dow Chemical Co.), observation of multiple subglass transitions in polymers (with a research associate, Robert Haldon), and thermal degradation (another collaboration with Leo Wall from NBS). 

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