Paul Berg
Paul Berg
Paul Bergis an American biochemist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids. Berg received his undergraduate education at Penn State University, where he majored in biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. Berg worked as a professor at Washington University School of Medicine and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 June 1926
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Harland Wood, the department head, was an inspiring scientist and teacher but he was also devoted to his students and colleagues.
Literally hundreds of millions of experiments, many inconceivable in 1975, have been carried out in the last 30 years without incident.
Notably, some nations have enacted legislation that prohibits genetically-modified plants and animals from entering into their food supply.
Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.
By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.
Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.
With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.
Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable.
Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.
Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.
By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.
But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.
But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.
Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.