What is biotechnology and what is it used for?

The cells of living organisms are tiny, but powerful chemical machines. Biotechnology harnesses this biochemical process to manufacture drugs and industrial compounds, energy, and substances for environmental remediation. The term “biotechnology” means different things to different people, but it has primarily been used by scientists to describe any application of living organisms to create consumer or industrial products. The earliest known form of biotechnology is the process of fermentation, which has been used in food preparation for centuries.

Since the development in the early 1970s of recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques, or gene-splicing, the term biotechnology has often been used colloquially to refer just to these more precise methods of manipulating small pieces of genetic material at the molecular level. Even when gene-splicing is used, however, it is often accompanied by a range of other methods, both old and new, such as tissue and cell culture, cell fusion, selection, hybridization, induced mutation, and many others. Indeed, gene-splicing itself consists of a broad set of tools and natural processes, many of which have been used by scientists for decades. And, many of the same types of products that are produced with gene-splicing can be accomplished using only those more conventional forms of genetic modification. Importantly, then, biotechnology should be seen as neither a discrete new technology nor a “category” of products.

Biotechnology is sometimes sorted into the following categories:

· When it is applied in the medical sciences, it is referred to as red biotechnology. This term includes conventional medications, diagnostics, and imaging agents derived from live plant or animal cells, as well as the application of biological matter as a treatment in itself. Some familiar examples of the latter include vaccines, insulin to combat diabetes, and the use of bone marrow to treat cancers. Both conventional biotechnology and rDNA are used to produce products in each of these classes.

· Green biotechnology refers to the use of biotechnology in agriculture, including micro-propagation, in which a plant is cultured from cells rather than a seed. Genetic modification of plants and animals has been accomplished over the last several millennia with selection, hybridization, tissue culture, and induced mutation techniques. But, during the last three decades, rDNA methods have also been used to alter the genetic structure of plants for various purposes.

· White Biotechnology is the use of these methods in industrial processes, to produce enzymes and biomass more efficiently than a conventional chemical process can. Enzymes are specialized proteins produced by living cells, where their function is to catalyze chemical reactions. Naturally produced enzymes have been used for decades in industrial processing, and a variety of old and new biotechnologies have been used to modify cell cultures to produce more efficient and effective enzymes.

· Biotechnology related to the ocean and aquatic organisms are referred to a blue biotechnology. Some examples of blue biotechnology products include fish proteins that have a natural antibiotic function, Omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients derived from algae and seaweed, as well as farmed fish and other seafood species.

Is biotechnology safe?

Biotechnology is a set of tools, or enabling technologies, but it is neither inherently safe nor unsafe. But, while critics have charged that rDNA technology—sometimes known colloquially as genetic modification, genetic engineering, or bioengineering—is a fundamentally unsafe, untested, and unpredictable technology that it is likely to give rise to dangerous pathogens, “superweeds,” and other nasty outcomes, nothing could be further from the truth. As long ago as 1987, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences determined that the risks associated with the introduction of recombinant DNA-modified organisms are the same in kind as those associated with the introduction of unmodified organisms and organisms modified by other methods.

In 1989, a committee of the NAS’s National Research Council concluded that:

“Recombinant DNA methodology makes it possible to introduce pieces of DNA, consisting of either single or multiple genes, that can be defined in function and even in nucleotide sequence. With classical techniques of gene transfer, a variable number of genes can be transferred, the number depending on the mechanism of transfer; but predicting the precise number or the traits that have been transferred is difficult, and we cannot always predict the phenotypic expression [or characteristics] that will result. With organisms modified by molecular methods, we are in a better, if not perfect, position to predict the phenotypic expression.”

The mere fact that a biotech product—including a living organism, such as new plant variety—was developed with rDNA or more conventional techniques does not determine whether it is safe or dangerous; nor should it determine how the product or organism should be regulated. When considering how, or whether, such a product should be regulated, it is appropriate only to consider the actual characteristics of the product and how it is to be used.