Biotechnology

• 1. Introduction

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  Biotechnology got its name in 1919, when the Hungarian engineer Karoly Ereky coined the word to describe making products from raw materials with the help of living organisms. The idea was older than the word. Long before anyone could name a gene, farmers were quietly bending biology to human purposes. They bred the best crops, brewed grain into beer, and fermented milk into cheese without understanding why any of it worked. Today the same impulse runs through laboratories that splice genes, grow tissue in dishes, and engineer bacteria to make medicine. How did a practice as old as planting seeds become a multidisciplinary field spanning medicine, agriculture, industry, and the environment? What separates the farmer crossing two plants from the scientist rewriting an organism's DNA? And why does a technology meant to improve lives also provoke fierce debate about ethics and ownership?

• 2. An Ancient Practice

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  The cultivation of plants may be the earliest biotechnological enterprise of all. Since the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture became the dominant way of producing food, and the earliest farmers chose and bred the crops best suited to feed a growing population. They favored the highest yields. As fields grew larger and harder to maintain, people discovered that certain organisms and their by-products could fertilize soil, restore nitrogen, and keep pests in check. Through breeding crops in new environments and crossing them with other plants, farmers altered the genetics of their harvest without ever intending to.

  Beer carried these same biological methods into early Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India. Malted grains hold enzymes that turn the starch in grain into sugar. Brewers then add specific yeasts, and the carbohydrates break down into alcohols such as ethanol. Other cultures developed lactic acid fermentation, which preserved foods like soy sauce, and the same chemistry raised leavened bread. The process was not fully understood until Louis Pasteur's work in 1857, yet it remains the first use of biotechnology to turn one food source into another.

  Selective breeding shaped livestock and crops for thousands of years, mating organisms with desirable traits to pass those traits to their offspring. Corn was pushed this way toward its largest and sweetest forms. Animal and plant scientists were already practicing such breeding before Charles Darwin's life and work. Darwin added his observations about how science could change a species, and those accounts fed directly into his theory of natural selection.

• 3. The Birth Of The Modern Field

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  In 1917, Chaim Weizmann ran the first pure microbiological culture inside an industrial process. He used the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum to turn corn starch into acetone, a chemical the United Kingdom urgently needed to make explosives during the First World War. The early twentieth century had given scientists a deeper grasp of microbiology, and they began hunting for ways to manufacture specific products.

  Alexander Fleming discovered the mold Penicillium in 1928. His finding led Howard Florey, Ernst Boris Chain, and Norman Heatley to purify the antibiotic the mold produced, creating what we now call penicillin. By 1940, penicillin was available as a medicine to treat bacterial infections in people.

  Modern biotechnology is generally said to have been born in 1971, when Paul Berg of Stanford had early success splicing genes. In 1972, Herbert Boyer of the University of California at San Francisco and Stanley Cohen of Stanford pushed the technology further by moving genetic material into a bacterium so that the imported material would copy itself. The field's commercial future widened on the 16th of June 1980, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that a genetically modified microorganism could be patented. Ananda Chakrabarty, born in India and working for General Electric, had altered a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas to break down crude oil, intending it for oil spills. His work transferred whole organelles between Pseudomonas strains rather than manipulating genes directly.

• 4. A Spectrum Of Colors

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  Practitioners have organized biotechnology into a palette of named branches. Red biotechnology covers medicine and pharmaceuticals, producing vaccines, antibiotics, hormones, stem cells, antibodies, artificial organs, and new disease diagnostics. Green biotechnology applies the science to agriculture, including the selection and domestication of plants through micropropagation and the design of transgenic plants. Engineering a plant to express its own pesticide, as with Bt corn, removes the need to spray pesticides externally, though whether such products are truly more environmentally friendly remains a subject of considerable debate.

  White biotechnology, also called industrial biotechnology, designs organisms to make useful chemicals and uses enzymes as industrial catalysts, tending to consume fewer resources than traditional processes. Yellow biotechnology serves food production through winemaking, cheesemaking, and brewing, and also extends to insects. Blue biotechnology exploits sea resources, leaning on photosynthetic micro-algae to produce bio-oils.

  The colors keep multiplying. Gold biotechnology, or bioinformatics, attacks biological problems with computational techniques across functional genomics, structural genomics, and proteomics. Gray biotechnology guards biodiversity and removes pollutants, while brown biotechnology manages arid lands and deserts with seeds that resist harsh conditions. Violet biotechnology wrestles with law, ethics, and philosophy. Microbial biotechnology reaches into space and microgravity. Darkest of all is dark biotechnology, the color of bioterrorism and biological weapons that use microorganisms and toxins to spread disease and death.

• 5. Medicine Rewritten

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  In 1978, Genentech produced synthetic humanized insulin by joining the insulin gene with a plasmid vector inserted into the bacterium Escherichia coli. Insulin had long been extracted from the pancreases of slaughtered cattle or pigs for treating diabetes. The genetically engineered bacteria could now make large quantities of synthetic human insulin at relatively low cost. These were among the first genetically engineered products, all medicines built to treat human disease.

  Pharmacogenomics blends pharmacology with genomics to study how a person's genetic makeup shapes their response to drugs. Researchers correlate gene expression or single-nucleotide polymorphisms with how well a drug works or how toxic it becomes. The aim is to optimize therapy for each patient's genotype, achieving maximum effect with minimal harm, a path toward what is called personalized medicine.

  Genetic testing reads changes in chromosomes, genes, or proteins, most often to find alterations tied to inherited disorders. It can confirm or rule out a suspected condition, gauge the chance of developing a disorder, or trace parentage and ancestry. As of 2011, several hundred genetic tests were in use. Because the results can raise ethical or psychological problems, genetic testing is often paired with genetic counseling. By 2021, nearly 40 percent of the total company value of pharmaceutical biotech firms worldwide sat in oncology, with neurology and rare diseases the other two large areas.

• 6. Engineering The Harvest

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  Commercial sale of genetically modified foods began in 1994, when Calgene marketed its Flavr Savr delayed-ripening tomato. Genetically modified crops carry DNA altered through genetic engineering, usually to introduce a trait that does not occur naturally in the species. The traits range widely: resistance to pests, diseases, harsh environments, and herbicides, plus reduced spoilage and richer nutrient profiles. Most modification has focused on cash crops in high demand, such as soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil.

  Farmers embraced the technology fast. Between 1996 and 2011, the land cultivated with GM crops grew by a factor of 94. By 2010-10 percent of the world's crop lands were planted with them. As of 2011-11 different transgenic crops were grown commercially across 29 countries, including the United States, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, and China. GM livestock followed more slowly, and in 2015 the FDA approved the first GM salmon for commercial production and consumption.

  There is a scientific consensus that food from currently available GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, though each must be tested case by case. The public is far less likely than scientists to view GM foods as safe. Opponents raise environmental worries, doubts about necessity, and economic concerns rooted in the fact that these organisms fall under intellectual property law. Golden rice, engineered for higher nutritional content, points toward another use: transgenic biofortification in cereals has been considered a promising way to combat malnutrition in India and elsewhere.

• 7. Building With Cells

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  The yield of 1,4-butanediol, a chemical used in fiber manufacturing, rose from 0.9 to 1.8 grams per liter when researchers re-engineered the metabolic pathways of Escherichia coli. They used CRISPR to induce a point mutation in the gltA gene, knocked out the sad gene, and knocked in six genes while a CRISPRi system silenced three competing genes. This is industrial biotechnology at work, using cells and their enzymes to make useful products across chemicals, food and feed, detergents, paper and pulp, textiles, and biofuels.

  Synthetic biology has become a cornerstone of this work. Engineering model microorganisms with genome-editing tools lets scientists boost the production of bio-based medicines and fuels. In one approach, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae work together in a co-culture to make precursors of the chemotherapy agent paclitaxel. By drawing on renewable raw materials, industrial biotechnology pushes toward lower greenhouse gas emissions and away from a petrochemical-based economy.

  Environmental biotechnology pulls in the opposite direction, cleaning up the messes industry leaves behind through biofiltration and biodegradation. Bioremediation tackles oil spills and chemical leaks. The field also reveals biotechnology's double edge: cleaning environmental waste is an application, while the escape of genetic material from transgenic organisms into wild strains is an implication. Some cities have installed CityTrees, which use biotechnology to filter pollutants from urban air.

• 8. Rules And Training

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  Governments diverge sharply on how to handle genetic engineering, and the most marked differences fall between the United States and Europe. Regulation shifts with the intended use of a product. A crop not meant for food generally escapes review by food-safety authorities. The European Union splits approval for cultivation inside the EU from approval for import and processing, having cleared only a few GMOs to grow while allowing more to be imported. To track these organisms, the EUginius database offers companies, private users, and authorities precise information in English on the presence, detection, and identification of GMOs in the European Union.

  Training the next generation began in earnest in 1988, when the National Institute of General Medical Sciences set up a funding mechanism for biotechnology training after prompting from the United States Congress. Universities nationwide compete to establish Biotechnology Training Programs, each funded for five years before it must be renewed. Graduate students who win acceptance receive stipend, tuition, and health insurance support for two or three years of their PhD work. Nineteen institutions offer these NIGMS-supported programs, with further training available at the undergraduate level and in community colleges.