Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction to Environmental
Biotechnology
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines
biotechnology as 'the application of science and technology to living organ-
isms, as well as parts, products and models thereof, to alter living or non-living
materials for the production of knowledge, goods and services' (OECD, 2002).
Despite the inclusiveness of this definition, there was a time when the biotechnol-
ogy sector was seen as largely medical or pharmaceutical in nature, particularly
amongst the general public. While to some extent the huge research budgets
of the drug companies and the widespread familiarity of their products made
this viewpoint understandable, it somewhat unfairly distorted the picture. Thus
therapeutic instruments were left forming the 'acceptable' face of biotechnology,
while elsewhere, the science was all too frequently linked with an uneasy feeling
of unnatural interference. The agricultural, industrial and environmental applica-
tions of biotechnology are potentially enormous, but the shadow of Frankenstein
has often been cast across them. Genetic engineering may be relatively common-
place in pharmaceutical thinking and yet when its wider use is mooted in other
spheres, such as agriculture, for example even today much of society views the
possibility with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
The history of human achievement has always been episodic. For a while, one
particular field of endeavour seems to hold sway as the preserve of genius and
development, before the focus shifts and the next wave of progress forges ahead
in a dizzy exponential rush in some entirely new direction. So it was with art in
the Renaissance, music in the eighteenth century, engineering in the nineteenth
and physics in the twentieth. Now it is the age of the biological - in many ways
forming a kind of rebirth, following on from the heyday of the great Victorian
naturalists, who provided so much input into the developing science.
It is then, perhaps, no surprise that the European Federation of Biotechnology
begins its 'Brief History' of the science in the year 1859, with the publication
of
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
by Charles Darwin.
Though his famous voyage aboard
HMS Beagle
, which led directly to the for-
mulation of his (then) revolutionary ideas, took place when he was a young
man, he had delayed making them known until 1858, when he made a joint
