Herbert (Herb) Boyer (born 1936) is a Co-recipient of the 1996 Lemelson-MIT Prize and founder of Genentech.

Genentech's approach to the first synthesis of insulin won out over Wally Gilbert's Biogen's approach which used genes from natural sources rather than built up from the nucleotides.

While teaching at University of California, San Francisco, Boyer discovered that bacteria could be combined with genes from higher organisms. In August 1978, he produced the first synthetic insulin, followed in 1979 by growth hormone.