Genentech Inc. (NYSE: DNA), a composite of Genetic Engineering Technology, Inc., is a leaing biotechnology corporation, which was founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr. Herbert W. Boyer. It is considered to have founded the biotechnology industry. One of its founders, Boyer, is considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of recombinant DNA technology (the company's ticker symbol reflects Boyer's contribution to the field). Boyer with a fellow researcher, Stanley Norman Cohen, in 1973, invented recombinant genetic engineering, by realizing that restriction enzymes could be used as "scissors" to cut DNA fragments of interest from one source, to be ligated into a similarly cut plasmid vector. While Cohen returned to the laboratory in academia,Robert Swanson contacted Boyer to found the company. Boyer worked with Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura from the Beckman Research Institute, and the group became the first to successfully express a human gene in bacteria when they produced the hormone somatostatin in 1977. David Goeddel and Dennis Kleid were then added to the group, and contributed to its success with insulin in 1978.