The power of cloning

By the 1970s, microbiologists were routinely taking apart E. coli to study its reproduction, enzymes, and virulence. The chemical industry had lost some luster with each new discovery of environmental pollution, and biology again looked like the science for the future: clean, quiet, and nonpolluting.

In biotech’s infancy, “cloning” became the buzzword for the power of this new technology: The ability to take a single gene and produce millions of identical copies. E. coli became a living staging area in which genes were cloned by the following general scheme:

1. Extract DNA from an organism possessing a desirable trait (a gene).
2. Cleave the DNA into many smaller pieces with a specialized enzyme called restriction endonuclease (RE).