Word: biotechs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These molecular structures are called fullerenes, or buckyballs, in honor of the American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Smalley sits on the board of C-Sixty, a biotech company that builds fullerenes into molecules that researchers hope will attach to and deactivate HIV molecules and blow up cancer cells on cue. "Buckyballs are not quite like nanosubmarines that target deadly diseases"--as seen in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage--"but because of their size and shape, they are well suited for drug discovery," says Stephen Wilson, co-founder of C-Sixty, based in Houston...
Solving the problem is difficult, mostly because of the ferocious debate over how to do it. Biotech partisans say the answer lies in genetically modified crops--foods engineered for vitamins, yield and robust growth. Environmentalists worry that fooling about with genes is a recipe for Frankensteinian disaster. There is no reason, however, that both camps can't make a contribution...
...from exhaustion and erosion. Old-fashioned cross-breeding can yield plant strains that are heartier and more pest-resistant. But in a world that needs action fast, genetic engineering must still have a role--provided it produces suitable crops. Increasingly, those crops are being created not just by giant biotech firms but also by home-grown groups that know best what local consumers need...
...such crops as sorghum and cassava--hardly staples in the West, but essentials elsewhere in the world. The key, explains economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is not to dictate food policy from the West but to help the developing world build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce the things it needs the most. "We can't presume that our technologies will bail out poor people in Malawi," he says. "They need their own improved varieties of sorghum and millet, not our genetically improved varieties of wheat and soybeans...
...congressional investigators dug into the troubled biotech firm ImClone in June, they had a simple but explosive question for Martha Stewart, a friend of former ImClone CEO Samuel Waksal's: Did she receive inside information that prompted her to sell her ImClone stock just a day before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected ImClone's cancer drug and sent the share price tumbling...