Herbert W. Boyer is a researcher and entrepreneur in biotechnology.  Herb Boyer was born on July 10, 1936 in Derry, Pennsylvania.  He received his bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1958. He received his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and participated as an activist in the civil rights movement. He spent three years in post-graduate work at Yale University in the laboratories of Professors Edward Adelberg and Bruce Carlton, then became an assistant professor at theUniversity of California, San Francisco and a Professor of Biochemistry from 1976 to 1991, where he discovered that genes from bacteria could be combined with genes from eukaryotes. He received the National Medal Of Science in 1990.