Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when
used in
agriculture, food science, and medicine. The United Nations Convention
on Biological Diversity has come up with one of many definitions of
biotechnology: "Biotechnology has contributed towards the
exploitation of biological organisms or biological processes through
modern techniques, which could be profitably used in medicine,
agriculture, animal husbandry and environmental cloning."Biotechnology
is a popular term for the generic technology of the 21st century.
Although it has been utilized for centuries in traditional
production processes, modern biotechnology is only 50 years old and in the last
decades it has been witnessing tremendous developments. Bioengineering
is the
science upon which all Biotechnological applications are based.
With the
development of
new approaches and modern techniques,
traditional biotechnology industries are also acquiring new horizons
enabling them to improve the quality of their products and increase the
productivity of their systems.Before 1971, the term,
biotechnology, was primarily used in the food processing and
agriculture industries. Since the 1970s, it began to be used by the
Western scientific establishment to refer to laboratory-based
techniques being developed in biological research, such as recombinant
DNA or tissue culture-based processes. In fact, the term should be used
in a much broader sense to describe the whole range of methods, both
ancient and modern, used to manipulate organic materials to reach the
demands of food production. So the term could be defined as, "The
application of indigenous and/or scientific
knowledge to the management
of (parts of) microorganisms, or of cells and tissues of higher
organisms, so that these supply goods and services of use to the food
industry and its consumers.There has been a great deal of
talk—and money—poured into biotechnology with the hope that miracle
drugs will appear. While there do seem to be a small number of
efficacious drugs, in general the biotech revolution has not happened
in the pharmaceutical sector. However, recent progress with monoclonal
antibody based drugs, such as Genentech''s Avastin suggest that biotech
may finally have found a role in pharmaceutical sales.Biotechnology
combines disciplines like genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry,
embryology and cell biology, which are in turn linked to practical
disciplines like chemical engineering,
information technology, and
robotics.
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