What is biotechnology?

 

The biotechnology (biotech) industry is incredibly diverse. Recently, I wrote about the dimensions of the biotech industry, which is, of course, associated with how biotechnology is defined. As a strict definition, biotechnology is that the use of biology to show raw materials into useful products. However, the act of developing a biotech product requires many enabling technologies, reagents, and services that form today's modern industry.

The term biotechnology was first coined in 1919 by Károly Erek, a Hungarian agricultural engineer, who foresaw a time when biology might be used for turning staples into useful products. The emerging field of synthetic biology represents the natural progression of this concept as our ability to synthesize gene sequences and engineer biochemical pathways and even entire microorganisms in rational designs for a myriad of purposes from specialty chemicals, to food, to energy, improve.

 

While biotechnology products like bread, wine, and beer, are around for millennia, the earliest biotechnology companies, as exemplified by Genentech was founded within the late 1970s after the initial discoveries of restriction enzymes and therefore the realization they might be harnessed to be used in DNA cloning. Many of those companies focused on producing human therapeutic proteins, like human insulin, in cost-effective ways. to hold out this work, these companies also needed reagents like restriction enzymes that were in themselves biotech products. Hence, an ecosystem of companies developed into a bigger industry.