Biotechnology

Biotechnology has recently emerged as a technology of promise and peril in the lexicon of environmental controversies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines biotechnology as “The application of Science and Technology to living organisms as well as parts, products and models thereof, to alter living or nonliving materials for the production of knowledge, [Page 136]goods and services.” The Convention on Biodiversity defines biotechnology in similar terms in regard to its biosafety protocol and its revenue-sharing agreements for genetic resources.

With genetic engineering, biotechnology became negatively associated with for-profit development.

Early applications in biotechnology promised significant improvements in society roughly corresponding with the enthusiasm for the project of modernism. The vision of putting life processes to work for humans was naturally an extension of the high modernism of dead engineering. The Baconian ideal of controlling nature was in many ways a reproduction of Enlightenment ideas. For example, early in this century it was suggested that bioreactors could produce single-cell proteins that could be a food source for developing countries. Even today biotechnology enthusiasts describe genetic solutions to hunger, environmental degradation, and cancer that can be solved by the technology. However, with the advent of genetic engineering, biotechnology became associated in some circles with the negative consequences of industrialism and capitalist-led research and development. Activists and scientists who were concerned with the uncontrollability and irreversibility of some manipulations of life's processes questioned the technology.

Some suggest that the earliest products of biotechnology were plants domesticated through human selection. Others date the beginnings of biotechnology to Egyptian beer brewing and the use of yeast to bake bread. The work of Louis Pasteur on microbial origins of fermentation is often described as the earliest scientific work in biotechnology with significant implications for industry. The work of Pasteur led to the widespread adoption of pasteurization. In The Uses of Life, Robert Bud takes this broad definition for biotechnology to mean any technology that directs life processes toward production or product development. He bases his definition on the language commonly used to describe fermentation reactors in the early to mid 20th century.

In the 20th century, biotechnology emerged out of chemical engineering and its marriage to biochemistry, bacteriology, and industrial microbiology. Zymotechnology, a discipline that harnesses life processes for industrial processes such as fermentation, was an early precedent. Again influenced by the work of Pasteur, zymotechnologists understood how to industrially produce alcohol through fermentation. It was at this time that Karl Ereky, a Hungarian agricultural scientist, coined the term Biotechnologie.

By World War I, biotechnology was being used to produce lactic, citric, and butyric acids; industrial alcohols; treated sewage; and isoprene to make rubber. With the war cutting off grain supplies to Germany, where zymotechnology was at its zenith, 60% of the fodder protein needs of the nation were provided by yeast cultivation on molasses, preventing widespread wartime famine.

By the World War II, biotechnology became well known for the industrial production of antibiotics and research on the threat of biological warfare. The production of penicillin is regarded by historians of technology as a major feat of engineering because of the complications of producing the living organisms at considerably larger scales. This era of industrial microbiology saw the scaling-up of biological production of acetic acid, penicillin, and enzymes, ushering in a pharmaceutical industry based on microbiology. Some of the world largest chemical companies, Pfizer, BASF, and Dow, were among the first commercial producers of the products of biotechnology.

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