Interviewee: Walter Gilbert. Walter Gilbert talks about close but no cigar.

We had this, tried to obtain the human sequence, not the rat sequence, and tried to make it in large enough amounts to be commercially useful. In our case, we failed by a little bit, we had to make twenty milligrams per litre of insulin in order to become commercially useful, we got to nineteen, just under the cut-off line, and the project never became successful. Genentech's case they actually made the human insulin and that human insulin made by a somewhat different procedure, finally went to market. Nowadays of course the only insulin you would get on the market would be synthetically made by these recombinant DNA techniques.

recombinant dna techniques,human insulin,rat sequence,walter gilbert,gilbert walter,human sequence,genentech,milligrams,litre,cigar,little bit