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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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