Historical Perspective

Biotechnology's history did not begin with a laboratory breakthrough - it began, roughly 8,000 years ago, with people fermenting bread and fruit juices using yeast, long before anyone understood the microbiology behind it. The scientific understanding came far later and in a fairly compressed burst: Lavoisier explained the chemistry of alcoholic fermentation in 1770, Jenner demonstrated the first viral vaccine in 1798, and by 1876 Pasteur had shown that living microorganisms, specifically yeast, were the actual cause of fermentation - closing a two-century gap between practice and theory. The twentieth century then compressed an enormous amount of foundational biology into a few decades: the 'one gene-one enzyme' hypothesis (1941), identification of DNA as the genetic material (1944), the DNA double helix (1953), the discovery of restriction enzymes (1972), and the first deliberate rDNA experiment - fragmenting and recombining DNA with a plasmid (1973) - which is the direct ancestor of everything covered later in this chapter. From there, progress accelerated further: PCR (1986), the first transgenic animal, Dolly the sheep (1997), the first sequenced plant genome (2000), and the completed Human Genome Project (2003). The timeline closes within living memory - …