Biotechnology, the use of biology to solve problems
Biotechnology , the use of biology to solve problems and make useful products. The most prominent area of biotechnology is the production of therapeutic proteins and other drugs through genetic engineering . History of biotechnology People have been harnessing biological processes to improve their quality of life for some 10,000 years, beginning with the first agricultural communities . Approximately 6,000 years ago, humans began to tap the biological processes of microorganisms in order to make bread, alcoholic beverages, and cheese and to preserve dairy products. But such processes are not what is meant today by biotechnology , a term first widely applied to the molecular and cellular technologies that began to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s. A fledgling “biotech” industry began to coalesce in the mid- to late 1970s, led by Genentech , a pharmaceutical company established in 1976 by Robert A. Swanson and H...