Wonderful Life: An Interview with Herb Boyer

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, before restriction enzymes were ordered from a New England Biolabs catalog and vectors arrived in neat packages from Promega, and before molecular biologists added patents or a company to their CV, there was Herb Boyer. One can almost define the revolution in molecular genetics by Herb’s story alone—the discovery of the iconic restriction enzyme EcoR1 and the definition of its sticky ends, the collaboration with Stan Cohen that produced recombinant DNA, and the genesis of the enduring gold standard in biotechnology, Genentech. I had been fascinated by Herb’s story for many years, as I myself had the good fortune to do a post-doc at Genentech in the early 1980s. Much has been written about Herb Boyer (Image 1), so I chose not to talk with him about his role in the founding of Genentech in 1976, nor the landmark Boyer-Cohen patent, nor the mid-1970s moratorium on recombinant DNA research. Instead, I was interested in what came before all of that—how Herb developed as a scientist, how he become interested in restriction enzymes and in vitro recombination—and by what came later. I’m sure you’ll agree, this is equally rich reading. Gitschier: I know you grew up in the little town of Derry, Pennsylvania. What role do you think your upbringing played in some of the choices you made in your life? Boyer: My mother graduated from high school, and she immediately married my father at the age of 18. My dad was 12 years older than she. My dad left school after the 8th grade and went to work. He came from a large family with six siblings. He was the oldest boy, so the story was he quit school to help support his family. I’m trying to write my memoirs now, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my early childhood. My upbringing was in a town of about 3,000 people and the principal industries were the railroad and a Westinghouse manufacturing facility. I went to a small school, only 32 in my graduating class, and I loved sports and the outdoors. I used to hunt and fish with my father. Gitschier: Where did your father work? Boyer: He worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. My father never owned a car, never had a driver’s license. He’d walk to work at the dispatch station, which was about a hundred yards away from our house. He was a brakeman on the freight trains and would live on a caboose for a couple of days at a time. I always thought that was rather romantic. He worked in terrible winter weather and stifling summer heat. By the time he retired, at age 72, he was a conductor, and at that point he was making $12,500 a year. That was my starting salary at UCSF [University of California San Francisco]. High school for me was football, basketball, baseball, girls, hunting, and fishing. And I worked at odd jobs. I dug ditches, mowed lawns for 50 cents, painted houses, distributed door-to-door advertisements, and of course I was a newspaper boy. Gitschier: Was your father encouraging about your staying in school and going to college? Boyer: I can never remember getting encouragement from my mother or father to go beyond a high school education, though they weren’t opposed to it. I just knew I had to get out of Derry, and that was the only way I knew how to do it! Gitschier: Your father lived at least 10 years after you became an assistant professor at UCSF.