VINTAGE, AUGUST 2011
Molecular biology has not achieved its potential. Why do people still die from cancer? Why are there so few effective antivirals? Where is the HIV/malaria/common cold vaccine? Why aren’t genetic diseases routinely treatable with gene therapy? Certainly we can point to plenty of successes—the papilloma virus vaccine made from recombinant pseudovirions and rapid diagnostics for many diseases are two examples—but even the optimists among us must concede that molecular biology is not where we might have hoped 25 years ago. What went wrong?
Simply put, life on the molecular scale is much more complicated than we imagined. Molecular biology roared onto the scene in the mid-20th century when James Watson and Francis Crick illuminated the “too beautiful not to be true” structure of DNA and ...
