Phillip A. Sharp has enjoyed a front-row seat for the revolution known as biotechnology. As a young professor of biology at MIT in 1977, he checked out-at the request of several venture capitalists-an obscure California company called Genentech, which had the preposterous notion of using recombinant DNA to create pharmaceuticals. Later that year, when Genentech announced it had made a human protein from a synthetic gene, the world learned publicly what Sharp had understood privately: Genetic engineering technology would transform medicine.

Select from the choices above to read the entire article.