Biotechnology Industry

Biotechnology Industry. Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer founded the Genentech Corporation in South San Francisco, California, in April 1976, giving birth to the biotechnology industry. In a broad sense, biotechnology has a long history. People have modified plants and animals for millennia by selective breeding to generate better agricultural plants and more productive livestock. Makers of wine, beer, and cheese have long relied on fermentation with microorganisms. However, the term “biotechnology” in the late twentieth century came to denote procedures involving genetic engineering and the tools of molecular biology. Genetic engineering became possible in 1973 when Stanley Cohen at Stanford University and Herbert Boyer at the University of California–San Francisco accomplished the first recombinant DNA experiment. Joining together two independent pieces of DNA, they introduced that hybrid DNA molecule into an E. coli bacterium, where the DNA was inherited as part of the bacterium's genetic material. Genes, discrete pieces of DNA that commonly code for specific proteins, could now be manipulated. The next important discovery showed that it was possible to put a human gene in bacteria, and express the protein that the gene encoded. This feat was accomplished when Genentech expressed human somatostatin protein in bacteria in 1977. Genentech then cloned the gene for human insulin into bacteria and, in 1982, marketed human insulin purified from the genetically engineered bacteria as the first recombinant DNA technology‐based drug.

By the early 1980s, numerous biotechnology companies, including Biogen, Cetus, Genex, and Amgen had appeared. Bio‐technology gave rise to an independent industry, while at the same time contributing to other more established industries—pharmaceutical, agricultural, and medical—and to the manufacture of various industrial and consumer goods (e.g., oil‐eating bacteria and enzymes that are high‐grade detergents). The major pharmaceutical companies all purchased biotechnology companies in the 1980s and 1990s and established multibillion‐dollar research‐and‐development divisions using the tools of biotechnology. The resulting pharmaceutical products included human growth hormone (somatropin), erythropoietin (EPO), tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), interferon‐alpha (INF‐α), GM‐CSF, the hepatitis B vaccine, and Herceptin, as well as human insulin.

Major agribusiness companies used biotechnology to engineer better crops. The first genetically modified crop was a virus‐resistant tobacco plant, produced in 1983. The first genetically modified whole food marketed to consumers was the rot‐resistant Flavr‐Savr tomato, introduced in 1994. Many other genetically modified plants (cotton, soybeans, and corn, among others) were made in the 1980s and 1990s. Most were resistant to viruses, insects, or herbicides. Genetically modified foods sometimes led to controversy, particularly in Europe, where some people feared that the genetic modification might be hazardous to human beings, plants, or animals. However, most short‐term field trials of such foods showed them safe for both human beings and the environment.

Biotechnology, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, could be very expensive. To bring a product to market sometimes cost upwards of $100 million and ten years of effort. Approximately nine out of ten biotechnology products failed commercially because of patent, production, efficacy, or side‐effect problems.

The future of the industry at the beginning of the twenty‐first century looked promising, but advances came slowly. Three major scientific developments—the cloning of Dolly the lamb in Scotland in 1997, the first successful gene‐therapy trials (2000), and the complete mapping of the human genome (2000)—generated particular excitement. The cloning of a lamb by Ian Wilmut was important less because of the cloning per se, than because the technology paved the way for more rapid and extensive transgenic livestock development. Gene therapy—the process of introducing a gene into a human being to remedy a genetic disease—offered hope to persons suffering from such diseases as hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes. The mapping of the full human‐genome sequence, the molecular blueprint for human life, was simultaneously completed by the National Institutes of Health Human Genome Project and the biotechnology company Celera Genomics. Although the mapping of the human genome seemed unlikely to lead to immediate medical breakthroughs, it promised substantially to influence biotechnology and medicine for many years to come.
See also Agriculture: Since 1920; Bioethics; Biological Sciences; Food and Diet; Medicine: Since 1945; Science: Since 1945; Watson, James D.

Bibliography

James Watson,, Michael Gilman,, Jan Witkowski,, and and Mark Zoller , Recombinant DNA, 1992.
Robert Bud , The Uses of Life, 1993.
Cynthia Robbins‐Roth , From Alchemy to IPO: The Business of Biotechnology, 2000.
Shane Crotty , Ahead of the Curve, David Baltimore's Life in Science, 2001.

Shane Crotty