What biotechnology is and where it came from

Biotechnology means using living cells, or molecules made by living things, to make useful products. The word was first used by the Hungarian scientist Karl Ereky in 1917, but people practised it long before it had a name.

Ancient biotechnology. The first farmers grew wheat and barley and tamed sheep, goats and cattle. Each season they kept the best plants and animals to breed from: selective breeding. People also learned to ferment food: bread, cheese, wine, beer, vinegar and soy sauce, and in India dahi, idli and kinema. Nobody then knew that tiny microbes were doing the work.

Louis Pasteur, in the 1850s and 1860s, showed that yeast and other microbes cause fermentation. Fermentation then became an industry. In World War I it was used to make glycerol for explosives. In World War II the modern fermenter, or bioreactor, a large controlled tank for growing microbes, was developed to mass-produce the antibiotic penicillin.

Meanwhile biology was finding out how life works, step by step:

• 1590: Janssen built the compound microscope.
• 1665: Robert Hooke saw tiny boxes in cork and called them "cellulae" (cells).
• 1676: Leeuwenhoek saw living "animalcules" (microbes).
• Schleiden and Schwann: the cell theory; 1858, Virchow: all cells come from cells.
• From 1857: Mendel's experiments with pea plants, the start of genetics.
• 1869: Miescher found "nuclein" (DNA) in the nucleus.
• 1952: Hershey and Chase showed that DNA is the genetic material.
• 1953: Watson and Crick described DNA's double helix.

Modern biotechnology rests on recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology: cutting DNA and joining pieces together, then putting this new (recombinant) DNA into a host cell. In this way a gene can be moved from one organism to another. Branches of biotechnology are often named by colour: red (medicine), green (plants, farming and the environment), blue (sea and freshwater life) and white (industry).