I'd just like to take a minute to digress
here to a trip I made upon my return from Hawaii which was extremely
important. This was a trip to Cold Spring Harbor to give a talk. When
I got there Joe Sanbrook and Phil Sharp called me aside and showed me
an electrophoresed agarose gel containing ethydium bromide stained
adenoviral DNA generated by the Eco R1 endonuclease.
This technologic development just blew me
away and it provided an analytical tool which I think hastened the
development of recombinant DNA research significantly. I don't think
it has received the proper recognition that it deserves.
But we
incorporated it into our laboratory repertoire and within a matter of
weeks we really had our first results on the in vitro
recombination of DNA and recovery of recombinant molecules from
bacterial cells. I think the publication was in the spring of 1973 but
I think it was late the year before when we had actually done the
experiments.
Those experiments were
really quite easy, and it was easy to recover
recombinant plasmids
because of the drug resistant markers. When Bob Helling
and I, (Bob
was a former graduate student on sabbatical in my lab), looked
at
this gel, it was the first gel, and it demonstrated the success of
the
recombination experiment, it was as if one could look into the
future. And as
we stood in that darkroom looking at those fluorescent
orange molecules
neatly arranged throughout the gel we knew that the
biomedical sciences would
go into warp speed.
  
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Winding Your Way Through DNA Resource Book Index
