Recombinant Innovation - Drawing from oral histories, Hughes describes the origins, growth, and fall of the biotech pioneer Genentech.

Recombinant Innovation
Gerald Barnett
Drawing from oral histories, Hughes describes the origins, growth, and fall of the biotech pioneer Genentech.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1497.full

Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011. 229 pp. $25, £16. ISBN 9780226359182. Synthesis.

E-mail: gerald.barnett@gmail.com

Genentech was one of the early and most successful companies formed in the biotech revolution. Sally Smith Hughes's Genentech chronicles a progression of events from Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer's invention of recombinant DNA in 1973 through the company's initial public offering in 1980—including the efforts to raise money and the race to prove the technology by making a commercially valuable product (such as insulin and human growth hormone). Drawing on oral histories, Hughes supplements her narrative with a wealth of archival material from the University of California (UC) and Genentech.