Genentech

About 30 years ago, Robert Swanson and Dr. Herbert Boyer were advancing on the new field of recombinant DNA technology. Both saw that this could be a way to help many people and started their own biotechnology company, Genentech. This corporation is thought to be the beginning of businesses that help others through biology. Their main way of creating products is by splicing genes and inserting them into fast-breeding bacteria. Genentech has also produced the first human protein through the bacteria E. Coli and successfully cloned human insulin. Along with this, they have created products that help anybody that has any sort of deficiency. Today, Genentech is still one of the top biotech companies that market to everybody.

This company has also won its fair share of awards, such as: MedAdNews' World's Most Admired Biotech Company Companies List, Barron's List of "World's Most Respected Companies", The Annual Helix Award at the BIO 2006 International Conference, BusinessWeek's "100 Most Innovative Companies" List, and a bunch more. Genentech's standards for itself are very high and they are interested in helping anyone who has an unmet medical need. One of their main goals is to become an entrepreneur in helping and improving the treatment of patients with cancer, immunological diseases, and angiogenic disorders. They are always looking for a better way to help the medicine world, right now they have over 100 projects in experiement. Although this company has only been functioning for about 30 years, I think in that short period of time they have managed to complete way more than they thought was possible. Genentech's wise sense of what people need helps them provide to the community in the best way they possibily can.

The Eye

During class on Thursday we had a guest lecturer come talk about the eye, and who better to talk about the eye then an optometrist. Her name was Dr. Pamela Fong. She had a lot to talk about considering the eye is a very complex organ. First she showed us a model of an eye and all the main parts of the eye, such as the: iris, lens, optic nerve, retina, pupil, and cornea. The iris is the colored part of someone’s eye and also identifies the person, because everyone’s iris is slightly different. The cornea is the very front of the eye, if the cornea is too strong you’re near-sighted or myopic and if it’s too weak you’re far-sighted and hyperopic. If someone has astigmatism their cornea is aspheric or warped. The lens flattens and rounds to focus what you see. The optic nerve connects your eyes to the brain; this is also where your blind spot is located. The retina lines the inside of the eye and contains rods and cones. These rods and cones are light-sensitive and help you see in dim light or the dark. In the retina is a black spot, called the macula that contains cones, it helps your depth perception.

After this, she showed us pictures she had taken of the back of people’s eyes. It turns out you can learn a lot about the person just by looking at those pictures. The macula was located on opposite sides for the right and left eye. This would show which one you were looking at. If there is a sheen around the macula it means you are looking at a young eye. In the eye there are arteries and veins, by the width or size of the veins you can tell if someone was sick or had a problem with their body. People with light eyes usually have light-colored hair and vice versa, and depending on what the shade of the eye is you can tell what their hair color is. So by looking at the back of an eye you can tell all that, that’s pretty impressive.

One thing that Dr. Fong said that interested me was the fact that everyone sees things differently because our brains think differently.

Sheep Eye Dissection
Few minutes later we had a sheep eye dissection. I thought it’d be interesting to dissect an eye, but I also thought it’d be gross. When we cut open the eye all this clear goo spilled out, that was the vitreous humor, it helped the eye keep its shape. The lens was a hard clear object shaped like an actual lens. The sclera, covering of the eye, was grayish, attached to the end of the eye was the optic nerve. The inside of the eye was a metallic blue and the retina lining it was yellowish white. I learned a lot about the anatomy of the eye from this dissection.