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"Interview with Linus Pauling." 1960. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The Future of Enzyme Research and Treatments. (1:23)

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Interviewer: I believe there are about two million mental defectives in the United States, and this would account for about twenty-thousand patients having this disease. But are you implying that you could conceivably inject a catalyst into one of these phenylketonurics and have them oxidize phenylalanine to tyrosine?

Linus Pauling: Well, I am implying this. Two or three years ago I gave the Edsel Ford lecture in Detroit. It was about the future of enzyme chemistry. And in this lecture I said, if I look forward, attempt to look forward fifty years or even twenty-five years - no fifty years is what I was talking about. Fifty years from now I think it may well be that we shall be treating patients with phenylketonuria - children who, infants who are born with this disease, which can be recognized shortly after birth. We shall be treating them by sewing into a blood vessel a little capsule, open-ended tube, containing a synthetic enzyme that will carry out the chemical reaction that they are not able to carry out naturally because of their hereditary defect, due to the gene mutation. Yes, I think this is the sort of progress that will be made in medicine.

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Date: 1960
Genre: sound
ID: 1960v.34
Copyright: More Information

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