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PROFESSOR: Recombinant DNA, often referred to also as genetic engineering. This is a series of techniques, series of methods that allow us to manipulate DNA for a variety of reasons. Now, we take it for granted. It's very much part of our everyday life in the laboratory. It's made a huge impact on the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries as well. It wasn't always so uncontroversial. In fact, in the 1960s and '70s, when this technology was first being developed, it was great concern about scientists manipulating DNA, manipulating genetic material. In the city of Cambridge, in fact, had a moratorium for a while on the practice of genetic engineering or recombinant DNA technology, which fortunately, ultimately was overcome with good practices and I think good education about what the real limits of risk and benefit were so that now it's used very widely and, I would also say, very safely. The bottom line for what we're going to talk about today...

PROFESSOR: Now having cut DNA, we then need to do something else. What's the next thing we have to do? AUDIENCE: Paste it. PROFESSOR: Paste it right. Oh, I put past. It should be paste. There we go. We should paste it. So, how are we going to paste our DNA? So let's take some human DNA. We'll take your human DNA. We'll add EcoR1 to it. And your human DNA is going to get cut up in lots of little pieces of length about 4,000. And I'm writing R1 at the ends because these pieces of DNA have EcoR1 sites. Now, I can take that human DNA and I can combine it with other pieces of DNA. Here's a piece of DNA. Remember it had this overhang like that. T-T-A-A was this piece here of human DNA. And I could take another piece of DNA that matched it a A-A-T-T. And it doesn't have to be human. It could be something else. It could be zebra. Some human DNA, some zebra DNA, and by that base pairing of those four bases, they'll sort of stick. It's not that s...