Biochemist, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at Pittsburgh, and from 1966 worked at the University of California, San Francisco. In collaboration with Stanley Cohen (1935 ) of Stanford University, he successfully spliced a gene from a plasmid of one organism into the plasmid of another (1973). The technique they developed became the foundation of genetic engineering. Boyer is a director of a leading biotechnology company, Genentech, which he co-founded in 1975. In 2004, Boyer and Cohen received the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.
Boyer received his bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Saint Vincent College in the Pittsburgh suburb of Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1958. He received his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and participated as an activist in the civil rights movement. He spent three years in post-graduate work at Yale University, then became an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where he discovered that bacteria could be combined with genes from higher organisms.
Boyer with Robert A. Genentech's approach to the first synthesis of insulin won out over Wally Gilbert's approach at Biogen which used genes from natural sources.
Reference
They Made America by Harold Evans (Little Brown, 2004) and in the subsequent WGBH television series.
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