Biotechnology

Biotechnology is the combination of biology, chemistry, physics, and various technical sciences. Biotechnology utilizes living organisms or their products together with a technical discipline, such as electrical engineering or computer science, to create some new product or method that has novel benefit to humanity.

Biotechnology has it's roots in the early 1900's with experiments that combined microbiological cultures with human use. For example, a bacteria known as Clostridium acetobutylicum was utilized in 1917 by Chaim Weizmann, an organic chemist and the first president of modern Israel, in aiding the creation of corn starch for acetone production. Modern biotechnology has been in practice for approximately 30 years, following the landmark 1980 U.S. case, Diamond v Chakrabarty, allowing genetically-modified microorganisms to be patented.

The two major areas of biotechnology are medicine and agriculture. Applications in medicine include pharmaceutical products, gene identification, gene therapy, cloning, genetic testing, bioinformatics, and biological simulation.

1. Pharamaceutical Products: Research and production of novel drugs to cure disease and improve human life.
2. Gene Identification: Identifying genes in DNA, such as the Human Genome Project
3. Gene Therapy: To treat and cure genetic based diseases such as cancer using a viral vector
4. Cloning: The duplication of cells, tissue, organs, or whole organisms. Dolly, the sheep, is the most famous cloned organism.
5. Genetic Testing: Based on a genetic test, determine possible future disease processes and specialized treatments for an individual.
6. Bioinformatics: using computational techniques to organize and analyze biological data
7. Biological Simulation: using computational techniques to simulate living processes, such as neurons in the brain or a drug's effects on a cell.

Applications in agriculture include genetic modification for yield, nutrition, taste, and resistance to disease. Agricultural goals include increasing the supply and local availability of nutritious foods that resist climatic swings (drought, heavy rain) and disease (bacteria, fungus, insects). Agricultural biotechnology is in it's infancy and the suitability of lab-engineered food products for long-term human consumption is still being determined.