Biotechnology Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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B iotechnology has recently emerged as a technology of promise and peril in the lexicon of environmental controversies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines biotechnology as “The application of Science and Technology to living organisms as well as parts, products and models thereof, to alter living or nonliving materials for the production of knowledge, goods and services.” The Convention on Biodiversity defines biotechnology in similar terms in regard to its biosafety protocol and its revenue-sharing agreements for genetic resources.

Early applications in biotechnology promised significant improvements in society roughly corresponding with the enthusiasm for the project of modernism. The vision of putting life processes to work for humans was naturally an extension of the high modernism of dead engineering. The Baconian ideal of controlling nature was in many ways a reproduction of Enlightenment ideas. For example, early in this century it was suggested that bioreactors could produce single-cell proteins that could be a food source for developing countries. Even today biotechnology enthusiasts describe genetic solutions to hunger, environmental degradation, and cancer that can be solved by the technology. However, with the advent of genetic engineering, biotechnology became associated in some circles with the negative consequences of industrialism and capitalist-led research and development. Activists and scientists who were concerned with the uncontrollability and irreversibility of some manipulations of life’s processes questioned the technology.

Some suggest that the earliest products of biotechnology were plants domesticated through human selection. Others date the beginnings of biotechnology to Egyptian beer brewing and the use of yeast to bake bread. The work of Louis Pasteur on microbial origins of fermentation is often described as the earliest scientific work in biotechnology with significant implications for industry. The work of Pasteur led to the widespread adoption of pasteurization. In The Uses of Life, Robert Bud takes this broad definition for biotechnology to mean any technology that directs life processes toward production or product development. He bases his definition on the language commonly used to describe fermentation reactors in the early to mid-20th century.

In the 20th century, biotechnology emerged out of chemical engineering and its marriage to biochemistry, bacteriology, and industrial microbiology. Zymotechnology, a discipline that harnesses life processes for industrial processes such as fermentation, was an early precedent. Again influenced by the work of Pasteur, zymotechnologists understood how to industrially produce alcohol through fermentation. It was at this time that Karl Ereky, a Hungarian agricultural scientist, coined the term Biotechnologie.

By World War I, biotechnology was being used to produce lactic, citric, and butyric acids; industrial alcohols; treated sewage; and isoprene to make rubber. With the war cutting off grain supplies to Germany, where zymotechnology was at its zenith, 60% of the fodder protein needs of the nation were provided by yeast cultivation on molasses, preventing widespread wartime famine.

By the World War II, biotechnology became well known for the industrial production of antibiotics and research on the threat of biological warfare. The production of penicillin is regarded by historians of technology as a major feat of engineering because of the complications of producing the living organisms at considerably larger scales. This era of industrial microbiology saw the scaling-up of biological production of acetic acid, penicillin, and enzymes, ushering in a pharmaceutical industry based on microbiology. Some of the world largest chemical companies, Pfizer, BASF, and Dow, were among the first commercial producers of the products of biotechnology.

Because of cheaper alternatives from synthetic chemistry, based on inexpensive fossil fuels, many of the promises of biotechnology in these early years remained unfulfilled. Other major chemical companies preferred stocks derived from petroleum and coal. However, popular writers like Aldous Huxley continued to write about the utopian vision and aesthetic of biotechnology. Even social critic Lewis Mumford adopts the historical category he labels the Biotechnic to describe a utopian epoch of production that was good for both the worker and the consumer.

Promises and Pitfalls

The increasing support for molecular biology in universities also played a large role in the development of biotechnology. MIT (1939) and UCLA (1947) had units in biological engineering and biotechnology. Together with private sector support, universities helped initiate the development of continuous process fermentation, as opposed to batch fermentation, which significantly shaped the industrial production of living organisms. The National Institutes of Health saw dramatic increases in funding availability in biomedicines in the postwar period, which help spur growth in areas like the Santa Clara Valley in California and Cambridge, MA.

By the 1970s, with decreasing support for university research and incentives for private-public research partnerships, biotechnology in universities came under significant scrutiny. It was asserted that the quest for patents in the public sector was contrary to the public mission of the university, and would affect both the free flow of information and materials in the university. Yet, many universities today have patent offices explicitly to deal with the products of biotechnology.

Much like nuclear power, the public discourse about biotechnology remained benign and an efficient answer to the effects of industrialization. It was particularly in the context of the famines of the 1960s that biotechnology was viewed with great promise. Biotechnology would produce plants that could fix nitrogen and eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers, and its fermentation vats would provide low-cost industrial foodstuff to the world’s poor. Likewise, with the energy crisis of 1973, biotechnological products like biogas and gasohol were seen as viable alternatives to fossil fuels-and still are, particularly in places like Cuba and Brazil.

But beginning in the 1980s, biotechnology was discussed in the context of potential nefarious social and environmental consequences of industrialization. Critics of biotechnology often describe the wider implications of technological change as well as the direct consequences. In particular, genetic engineering, genetically modified organisms, and agricultural biotechnology has raised the ire of activists.

The controversies associated with the new biotechnologies are both political and in part a consequence of the scale of scientific intervention. Beer, bread, and penicillin all intervene as the level of the organism. New techniques characterized as biotechnology move to smaller scales such as the molecular or cellular scale, or as with nanotechnology, at the atomic scale. The new biotechnologies include recombinant DNA transfer, protoplast fusion, and tissue culture, all techniques that are widely used in the sciences today.

Today the private firms that engage with the commercial development of biotechnology are known as the life sciences industries, which are politically and commercially represented by The Biotechnology Industry Organization. With the life sciences industries emerging out of the much-disdained chemical industry, great skepticism was associated with biotechnology. Much of today’s controversy stems from questions about intellectual property rights. A key Supreme Court decision, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, ruled that living organisms were subject to patents after a General Electric biologist developed a microorganism to eat crude oil, an environmental application that could be applied to oil spills. Central to the question about patenting organisms is what exactly constitutes an improvement worthy of patenting, as well as many of the other questions attributed to the process of commodification. For example, farmers have improved plants through selection for eons, yet their work falls into the domain of common heritage. However, scientific improvements using genetic engineering fall under the auspices of patentable subject matter, implying a labor theory of value that favors modern science and the developed world.

Developments in cloning have also raised many ethical and political questions. The cloned sheep known as Dolly introduced much of the world to the implications of new biotechnological interventions at the cellular level. Because cloning often involves significant numbers of miscarriages, birth deformations, and clinical failures, human cloning is quite controversial beyond questions about social justice and reproductive technologies, but about the direct loss of human life consequent to the cloning process itself.

While biotechnology still holds much promise, the controversies around genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms continue to take center stage. Today, the promising tools coming out of biotechnology include the development of biosensors as well as plant breeding techniques that could help breed perennial crops. But until questions about property rights, economic concentration, the shape of the research trajectory, and any social consequences of biotechnology are sorted out, the promises of biotechnology will remain embattled in the realm of discourse.

Bibliography:

Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University Industrial Complex (Yale University Press, 1986);
Jack Kloppenburg Jr., First the Seed: A Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000 (University of Wisconsin, 1988).