Mary Claire King Biography

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The field of biotechnology is very young, it has only been created in the past few decades. However, in these few decades it has changed the world greatly.The program of biotechnology has an interesting history and has had many influential contributors
David Baltimore is a famous biotechnologist who has made a great impact on the field of biotechnology. But he is more than a biotechnician, Baltimore is an accomplished researcher, educator, administrator, and public advocate for science and engineering and is considered one of the world’s most influential biologists. (Broad Institute, n.d.). During his career he discovered the enzyme reverse transcriptase in the virus particles, this helped prove the process of RNA to DNA conversion. At the …show more content…

King was the first person to show that breast cancer can be inherited within different generations of families, as a result in the mutations to the gene she named the mutation BRCA1( World Science Festival, n.d.). She has also studied mental disorders, human genetics and evolution. Throughout her career she has received 13 honorary doctoral degrees from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Leuven (Belgium) Tel Aviv (Israel), and Ben Gurion (Israel) Universities; the State University of New York; and Carleton, Smith, Bard, and also from Dartmouth Colleges. Also, she has pioneered the use of DNA sequencing for human rights investigations, developing the approach of sequencing mitochondrial DNA preserved in human remains, then applying this method to the identification of kidnapped children in Argentina and as a result, has led to cases of human rights violations on six different continents. An essay King wrote with Allan Wilson that was required to acquire her PhD in 1973 was the demonstration that protein coding sequences of humans and chimpanzees are 99% …show more content…

Although has already passed away, he is widely considered one of the fathers of the biotechnology industry. (New York Times, 2012). Being a new field of science there were only a handful of companies that were involved in genetic engineering during the 1980; when Dr. Rathmann was recruited from Abbott Laboratories to run Amgen, which was little more than a vague idea by some venture capitalists to start a company, without knowing what the company would try to accomplish. Dr. Rathmann thought that splicing genes was one of the most important things he had ever seen at the time. While Abbott, the company that Dr. Rathmann had been at, tried to keep Dr. Rathmann, he joined a new company. Abbott then invested $5 million in Amgen for a stake that it eventually sold for $250 million, Mr. Schuler said. Dr. Rathmann eventually acquired the nickname, “the golden throat,” because of his persuasiveness, his tactics on negotiating raised money for Amgen and other companies that were involved in biotechnology. Bill Gates, one of the co-founders of Microsoft, invested in Icos, a company Dr. Rathmann was involed in, in part because of Dr. Rathmann

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