IMPACTS OF CONTEMPORARY BIOTECHNOLOGY-ANIMAL SCIENCE 77

THE FUTURE

 It is indeed a tribute to recombinant DNA technology that it has, in
slightly more than a single decade, seriously depleted science's storehouse
of interesting genes to manipulate. As an example, the interferons took
centuries to be discovered, decades to be characterized, and only a few
years to be cloned. Even though the pace of science has accelerated mark-
edly since the discovery of interferons fifty years ago, it still takes far
longer to discover an important effect and to characterize the proteins and
genes responsible than it does to clone those genes. Thus, contemporary
biotechnology has given us more power over life's processes but it has not
removed the major obstacle to exercising that power which remains, as
always, our incomplete understanding of those processes. Increased under-
standing will come only from research of the most basic type and the
majority of this research must be supported by public monies and done at
universities and other nonprofit institutions. It cannot and will not be done
by the corporate sector simply because there is in this world no stock-
holder, financial analyst, or C.E.O. who has the patience to support dec-
ades of expensive research whose potential cannot even be defined. Thus,
the future progress of biotechnology will depend in a very direct way on
the extent to which public funds support basic research and the traditional
centers of basic research like universities and nonprofit institutes.
 The related question concerns the type of training future scientists must
have so that they will be able to perform this basic research and exploit its
results. There have been serious comments that conventional biological
disciplines will be swallowed by the combined discipline of biochemistry/
molecular biology and equally serious comments that biochemistry/molec-
ular biology will be swallowed by the conventional disciplines. In either
case, the point is made that the biological sciences are converging at a rate
unthinkable even five years ago, and the future scientist must have inter-
disciplinary training which will enable him to conceptualize a research
problem at any intellectual level from intact animal to nitrogenous base
pair. It is a clear and difficult challenge to the university system to produce
scientists who have this breadth of training.


 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

 The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments of Dr. Dale
Bauman (Cornell University), Drs. J. Egerton, L. Gordon, H. Hafs, G.
Koo and J. Schmidt (MSDRL), and Mr. G. Barringer (MSD AGVET). The