Brewing beer counts as one of humanity's oldest biotechnologies
Long before anyone spliced a gene, people in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India were putting microbes to work. Malted grain turned starch into sugar, and added yeast turned sugar into alcohol. Nobody understood the process until Louis Pasteur's work in 1857, but brewing was among the first uses of living organisms to transform food.
Biotechnology means harnessing living things, or parts of them, to make products and provide services. The term was first used by Karoly Ereky in 1919, but by a broad definition the practice is ancient. Domesticating animals, cultivating plants and breeding them for desirable traits all qualify, and farming may be the earliest biotechnological enterprise of all. Selective breeding of corn, for instance, yielded larger, sweeter crops, and farmers discovered that certain organisms could restore nitrogen to soil and control pests.
The twentieth century made the approach industrial. In 1917 Chaim Weizmann used a pure bacterial culture to make acetone from corn starch, which Britain urgently needed for explosives in the First World War. In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered the Penicillium mould, and work by Howard Florey, Ernst Boris Chain and Norman Heatley turned its product into penicillin, available as medicine from 1940.
Modern biotechnology is usually dated to 1971, when Paul Berg's gene-splicing experiments at Stanford first succeeded. The next year Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen transferred genetic material into a bacterium so that it copied the imported genes. Then on 16 June 1980, in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a modified microorganism could be patented. Ananda Chakrabarty, working for General Electric, had created a bacterium able to break down crude oil for cleaning up spills.
Today the field spans genetic engineering, tissue culture and fermentation, producing medicines, biofuels, modified crops, biodegradable plastics and microbes that clean polluted sites. It also raises ethical questions about genetic modification and intellectual property, so its use remains the subject of ongoing debate and regulation.
Source: Biotechnology
