Stanley Norman Cohen

Stanley Norman Cohen co-developed recombinant DNA technology in 1973, along with Herbert Boyer of UCSF. Their method allowed scientists to cut DNA from one organism and insert it into another, creating the foundation of modern genetic engineering.

Cohen collaborated with Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Their partnership combined Cohen's expertise in plasmids at Stanford with Boyer's work on restriction enzymes, which are molecular 'scissors' that cut DNA at specific sequences.

The breakthrough experiments were conducted in 1973, when Cohen and Boyer demonstrated that foreign DNA could be inserted into a bacterial plasmid and replicated in E. coli. The results were published that same year and are widely regarded as the birth of genetic engineering.

Cohen was a professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University, where he conducted his pioneering recombinant DNA research. He spent the bulk of his academic career at Stanford, and his work there led to patents that generated significant licensing revenue for the university.

The Cohen-Boyer recombinant DNA technology was patented by Stanford University and the University of California, with the patents running through the 1980s and 1990s. These patents became among the most lucrative in academic history, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees.