the.com/biotechnology
the art of convincing microbes to do your chemistry homework for profit.
means The use of living organisms, cells, or their molecular machinery to make products or solve problems in medicine, agriculture, and industry.
from A modern compound stitched from Greek roots: bios, 'life,' plus technologia, 'systematic treatment of an art or craft' (from techne, 'skill,' and -logia, 'study of'). The word surfaced in the early 20th century — often credited to a Hungarian agricultural engineer writing about turning farm output into useful goods — and later swelled to cover everything from brewing to gene editing as biology and engineering kept marrying each other.
- ancient roots
- Beer and bread are 10,000-year-old biotech
- insulin shift
- Once harvested from pig pancreases, now brewed by bacteria
- glowing tools
- Jellyfish proteins let scientists watch cells light up
- crispr scissors
- Bacterial defense system now edits human genes
- spider silk
- Goats engineered to produce silk proteins in milk
crispr gene editing — jennifer doudna and emmanuelle charpentier's 2020 nobel prize-winning technology for precise dna editing
mrna vaccines — pfizer-biontech and moderna covid-19 vaccines deployed globally starting 2020
insulin production — genentech's 1978 genetically engineered human insulin, first fda-approved biotech drug in 1982
synthetic biology — craig venter's 2010 creation of synthia, the first organism with synthetic genome