Introduction to Environmental Biotechnology - Environmental Biotechnology: Theory and Application - page 2

presentation before the Linnaean Society with Alfred Russell Wallace, who had,
himself, independently come to very similar conclusions. Their contribution was
to view evolution as the driving force of life, with successive selective pressures
over time endowing living beings with optimised characteristics for survival.
Neo-Darwinian thought sees the interplay of mutation and natural selection as
fundamental. The irony is that Darwin himself rejected mutation as too delete-
rious to be of value, seeing such organisms, in the language of the times, as
'sports' - oddities of no species benefit. Indeed, there is considerable evidence
to suggest that he seems to have espoused a more Lamarckist view of biological
progression, in which physical changes in an organism's lifetime were thought
to shape future generations.
Darwin died in 1882. Ninety-nine years later, the first patent for a genetically
modified organism was granted to Ananda Chakrabarty of the US General Elec-
tric, relating to a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa engineered to express the
genes for certain enzymes in order to metabolise crude oil. Twenty years on from
that, the first working draft of the human genome sequence was published and the
full genetic blueprint of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster , that archetype of
eukaryotic genetics research, announced - and developments have continued on
what sometimes feels like an almost daily basis since then. Today biotechnology
has blossomed into a major growth industry with increasing numbers of com-
panies listed on the world's stock exchanges and environmental biotechnology
is coming firmly into its own alongside a raft of 'clean technologies' working
towards ensuring the sustainable future of our species and our planet.
Thus, at the other end of the biotech timeline, a century and a half on from
Origin of Species , the principles it first set out remain of direct relevance, although
increasingly in ways that Darwin himself could not possibly have foreseen.
The Role of Environmental Biotechnology
If pharmaceutical biotechnology represents the glamorous end of the market,
then environmental applications are decidedly more in the Cinderella mould. The
reasons for this are fairly obvious. The prospect of a cure for the many diseases
and conditions currently promised by gene therapy and other biotech-oriented
medical miracles can potentially touch us all. Our lives may, quite literally, be
changed. Environmental biotechnology, by contrast, deals with far less apparently
dramatic topics and, though their importance, albeit different, may be every bit
as great, their direct relevance is far less readily appreciated by the bulk of
the population. Cleaning up contamination and dealing rationally with wastes
is, of course, in everybody's best interests, but for most people, this is simply
addressing a problem which they would rather had not existed in the first place.
Even for industry, though the benefits may be noticeable on the balance sheet, the
likes of effluent treatment or pollution control are more of an inevitable obligation
than a primary goal in themselves. In general, such activities are typically funded
on a distinctly limited budget and have traditionally been viewed as a necessary