Biotechnology for Not Yet Techies

Biotechnology is a broad term referring a variety of ways we as a species are learning to engineer biology itself. That is, living organisms, including ourselves. In a sense, humanity has been practicing biotechnology since the first time cave people cleared an area of weeds to help a blueberry bush grow more easily.

Biotechnology today especially refers to genetic manipulation. We have practiced this for thousands of years by deliberately breeding plants and animals to make them more edible and productive, but now we're going straight to the DNA.

Also, biotechnology can refer to a lot of medical procedures that combine engineering with medicine. My mother just got a knee implant. Miniature spheres of plyvinyl chloride, polystrene and other substances are being injected into arteries to destroy tumors and benign growths.

St Louis has long had an institution called the Missouri Botanical Garden. It's a collection of plants that is fun to walk through. Under director Peter Raven, it has been collecting samples of plants from all over the world. It now contains over 5 million plant specimens and is an important research institute that is preserving natural genetic structures.

Long known for its chemical business, especially the herbicide Roundup, Monsanto has genetically modified a number of important crops to be tolerant to in-crop application of Roundup® herbicide. These include Roundup Ready® Canola, Roundup Ready® Corn, Roundup Ready® Cotton, Roundup Ready® Soybeans, and Roundup Ready® Sugar Beets. Monsanto owns the rights to these important genetically altered plants that are being grown all over the world, feeding many people who might otherwise starve.

Barnes Hospital, now BJC, has often been listed as the country's fourth best hospital. I know that when in a Navy hospital on a base in North Carolina a baby was born to two sailors with an extremely rare genetic disorder that made it unable to breath, he was flown to Barnes.

How long will it be before we can manipulate the genetic makeup of babies before they're born so such children are never produced? How soon before we become able to have children made according to our specifications? Biotechnology is trending in that direction, like it or not.

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