October 9th, 2007
The importance of gene targeting and persistence
This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the discovery of “gene targeting,” which is now a vital technique not just in isolating diseases to specific genomes but in producing study subjects.
The study subjects in this case are mice, which can now be produced with any of hundreds of gene sequences “knocked out,” so that the resulting animal can be studied at any stage of development. Since mice have 95% of the human genome, this allows mass studies of diseases and cures with relative humanity, in a relatively controlled environment. (I know, PETA will disagree.)
What is also remarkable, in reading the life stories of the scientists involved, is the role of persistence in their lives, and what that should tell anyone who is ever told “no” by authority.
Mario Capecchi, for instance, barely escaped Dachau, where his mother was taken late in World War II. He was forced to wander Italy at age 4, and the story reads like the plot of Montgomery Clift’s first film, The Search.
More important is what happened decades later, when Capecchi abandoned his Harvard lab for the University of Utah because the Utes would let him do more long-term research. Friends called him crazy. Yet he persisted.
Oliver Smithies, now at the University of North Carolina, was born in Great Britain and denied a visa for years. He dropped out of medical school to work in chemistry. Martin Evans, of Cambridge University in England, said he was often denied grants because, he was told, his experiments could not be done, and he felt like a “lone scientist.”
All these men persisted, against the odds, against the wishes of friends, and of the professional establishment. They all took the harder road because they believed in what they were doing.
That lesson may be as important as their discovery. It’s something worth thinking about next time someone tells you “it can’t be done.”
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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