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Article: Building proteins from the ground up. (genetic engineering and mutant proteins)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- October 29, 1988
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1988 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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COMMON-or-garden genetic engineering has proved to be a powerful tool, but it would be nice to go one better genetic engineer transfers genes from one living thing to another; an advantage of this is that it enables him to mass-produce useful proteins. But the proteins he manipulates are only the ones that nature has already provided-albeit in small quantities and sometimes not in the new "mutant" proteins from scratch?
Researchers discovered the basic tools for such a project in 1983. Experiments by Dr Greg Winter, of Britain's Medical Research Council, and Dr Alan Fersht and his colleagues, then at Imperial College in London, showed that mutant proteins could ...