Silver-bullet jubilee

FOR all the buzz that surrounds biotechnology, you might imagine it was a brand new science. In fact, it is old: so old, indeed, that one of the cornerstones of modern biotech, the monoclonal antibody, celebrated its 25th birthday on August 7th. When César Milstein and Georges Köhler, two researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, first published a way to produce highly specific antibodies in a test tube, they speculated that it might have some commercial value. But as Dr Milstein points out, they never imagined their invention would grow into a multi-billion dollar market used to diagnose and, more recently to treat, disease.