| 情報・電子系応用分野 |
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| 生命系応用分野 |
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| 環境系応用分野 |
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理事長武田郁夫から武田賞を受け取るハンカピラー氏。 |
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I also would like to give my profound
thanks to Dr. Takeda, the Directors of the Takeda Foundation
and the rest of the staff and the people on the Selection
Committee for presenting me with one of the first Takeda
Techno-Entrepreneurship Awards, and particularly to Dr.
Takeda for having the foresight to recognize the value
not only of technical innovation but the ability to provide
that innovation to the world in useful forms, sometimes
in risky projects, but also taking into account the fact
that the technology, when properly applied, should have
benefit to mankind.
In the case of the life sciences, one of the things that we were interested in in developing tools and technology to support basic research worldwide was to enable what we consider a noble endeavor to improve the condition of mankind through basic biomedical research and to quickly take the knowledge gained through that research and put it to use in improving people's health and longevity.
It was less than 50 years ago that Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the
basic secrets of DNA and how encoded in a relatively simple or somewhat large
molecule was the ability of organisms not only to carry out life processes but
to instruct their own replication.
It took 25 years for Fred Sanger and his colleagues at Cambridge in the United Kingdom to figure out how to unravel the chemical sub-unit structure of DNA so that one could begin to understand why one gene, or element of DNA structure in our chromosomes, differs in its structure and function from another.
It took scientists, headed by Dr. Venter at the Institute for Genomic Research,
another 20 years before the first free living or fully self-replicating organism,
the bacterium Haemophilus influenza that causes ear infections in infants and
children, to be sequenced so that its genomic structure was completely known.
It took only 4 years after that before the first complex organism, the fruitfly, had its genome discovered, and less than a year later for the human genome to be published in sequence in its completeness.
The technology that arose over that 50-year time frame that allowed going from sort of understanding what the basic structure of DNA was likely to be, to be able to uncode the 3 billion base pairs of sequence information encoded in the chromosomes in every one of the cells in our body, really is a pretty remarkable achievement and it's not one that a single individual did alone. It really requires, as I said, standing on the shoulders of giants in order to figure that out, but it requires working with a team, in our case in a company funded by risk venture capital money initially, in order to carry out that program, and it was the culmination of a technology, spurred on by the needs of the science, that myself and the colleagues at Applied Biosystms that I work with has driven to provide the world, and we thank, I thank on behalf of them, Dr. Takeda and his Foundation for the recognition of that work.
Thank you. |
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