70th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure
BBC Inside Science
00:00
The Benefits of Genetic Engineering
The first example of genetic engineering was in 1975 when scientists put the precursor to insulin into a microbe and it started churning this stuff out. This does, in principle, lead to cheaper and more widely available and better medicines but that also requires a health care system which actually can deliver them cheaply or better still freely to the population. It's complicated because science doesn't exist on its own. Neither does medicine. And if you just think about insulin, so everybody who listens is listening, who takes insulin, that insulin was made in a genetically engineered microbe. That was the first example of Genetic Engineering In 1975.
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