John Stanford
speaker
1,479 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
John Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Could we use living cells within our own bodies as miniature factories to improve health?
The answer to that question launched the biotechnology revolution.
In the 1970s, researchers developed recompetent DNA techniques that allowed genetic instructions to be inserted into microorganisms.
Those organisms could then produce useful human proteins.
Insulin again was a defining example.
Traditional insulin came from the pancreases of pigs and cattle.
It worked, but supplies depended on animal tissue, and the resulting insulin was not chemically identical to human insulin.
Scientists at the young biotech company Genentech used genetically modified bacteria to produce human insulin.
Genentech then partnered with Eli Lilly, which had the manufacturing experience and infrastructure needed to produce it commercially.
In nineteen eighty two, the FDA approved HUMULIN, the first approved medicine produced using recombinant DNA technology.
It was far more than a new version of an existing treatment.
It demonstrated that scientists could program living cells to manufacture medicine.
That idea opened an entirely new frontier that would dominate the rest of the century.
We engineered hormones, clotting factors, enzymes, and other biological therapies.
It also helped establish a distinctly American model of biomedical innovation that looks familiar to us today.
University science and entrepreneurial startups, backed by venture investment, could then lead the way to established manufacturers and federal regulators, everyone contributing different pieces of the same process.
No single institution could do everything, but together they could transform a scientific insight into a medicine used around the world.
The biotech revolution that Genentech kicked off changed not only how medicines were manufactured, but how precisely they could work.
One of its most important tools was the monoclonal antibody, a laboratory-made protein engineered to recognize a specific target.
Think of traditional chemotherapy as an attack on rapidly dividing cells.
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