Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene (1987) 29/01/06. Reviewed by Jon Turney Stephen Hall's account of high stakes and high drama at the dawn of the new biotechnology.

This beautifully wrought account of one of the key moments in the early days of biotechnology was one of the best popular science books of its day. Read it now as history and it takes on a new cast. It is still an involving story, but also shows how far we have come in a few decades.

Hall's story begins in 1976, just after the tools in the genetic engineers' kit had first been put together - the era of so-called recombinant DNA research. Among those trying to answer the tantalising question of what to do with their shiny new collections of enzymes that cut and spliced DNA, were three groups of scientists thinking about insulin. This was a well-understood and life-saving protein, already regulating the blood sugar of tens of thousands of diabetics. But they were dependent on insulin extracted from animal pancreases from slaughterhouses. Might it not be more elegant, and more profitable, to use the new technology to persuade bacteria to make the human hormone?

Maybe, but to do that you had to get the right DNA sequence into the ever-obliging bug E. coli. How to do that? There were two possible answers - fish out the DNA from human cells, or synthesise it from scratch.

Nowadays, cloning a gene is a simple routine and long stretches of synthetic DNA can be put together more or less on demand by machine. Back in the 1970s, both were breathtakingly ambitious ventures at the limits of technique. Little was known about how genes are organised in larger stretches of DNA, and how the RNA transcripts are processed on the way to protein production. Hall's fast-paced book tells how the three teams raced to be the first to do the job. Their prize, apart from huge scientific kudos, would be access to a billion-dollar world market for the hormone.

Hall gets right inside all three groups, one at Harvard led by the redoubtable Walter Gilbert, one at the University of California and one at the new-born biotech start-up Genentech. If you thought Jim Watson's classic 'The Double Helix' described a race, then this is some kind of extreme sport. Rarely has science ever been more competitive. Lab vies with lab. Within labs, legions of postdocs, who do most of the work, fight for credit with their nominal bosses. And, of course, the postdocs, underpaid and insecure, fight among themselves for the next job.

Add the huge public controversy then breaking over whether recombinant DNA research should be allowed at all and the gold-rush mentality driving biotech investment, and you had a problem that would either make careers or break them. Still, as Hall shows, none of this was a bar to good science getting done, and he chronicles every twist and turn of the effort.

The high point of the narrative, though the low point for those involved, was the Harvard team's tragi-comic four-week sojourn at Britain's Porton Down, the only high-containment facility they could find where they could work with human, rather than rat, DNA. Their competitors at Genentech were exempt from these soon to be abolished requirements because they chose the synthetic route. But that had its own tribulations.

History records who won, but if you happen not to know the book still offers a story of real suspense. If you do, it remains a great read and a vivid sketch of the sociology of biotechnology, 1970s-style.

Book details

Hardcover (July 1987)
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Language: English
ISBN: 0871131471