GC: n

S: Bio.org – https://www.bio.org/articles/what-biotechnology (last access: 19 June 2015); Nature – http://www.nature.com/subjects/biotechnology (last access: 19 June 2015).

N: 1. biotechnology: also bio-technology, 1947, “use of machinery in relation to human needs;” 1972 in sense of “use of biological processes in industrial production,” from bio- + technology.

2. The application of science and engineering to the direct or indirect use of living organisms or parts or products of living organisms in their natural or modified forms.

3. biotechnology: term and definition extracted from the Plant Health Glossary of Terms of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

4. biotechnology, the use of biology to solve problems and make useful products. The most prominent area of biotechnology is the production of therapeutic proteins and other drugs through genetic engineering.

5. People have been harnessing biological processes to improve their quality of life for some 10,000 years, beginning with the first agricultural communities. Approximately 6,000 years ago, humans began to tap the biological processes of microorganisms in order to make bread, alcoholic beverages, and cheese and to preserve dairy products. But such processes are not what is meant today by biotechnology, a term first widely applied to the molecular and cellular technologies that began to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s. A fledgling “biotech” industry began to coalesce in the mid- to late 1970s, led by Genentech, a pharmaceutical company established in 1976 by Robert A. Swanson and Herbert W. Boyer to commercialize the recombinant DNA technology pioneered by Boyer and Stanley N. Cohen. Early companies such as Genentech, Amgen, Biogen, Cetus, and Genex began by manufacturing genetically engineered substances primarily for medical and environmental uses.

6. For more than a decade, the biotechnology industry was dominated by recombinant DNA technology, or genetic engineering.

S: 1. Etymonline – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=biotechnology&searchmode=none (last access: 3 September 2014). 2 & 3. TERMIUM PLUS (last access: 3 September 2014). 4, 5 & 6. EncBrit – http://global.britannica.com/technology/biotechnology (last access: 3 September 2014).

SYN: bio-technology

S: GDT (last access: 3 September 2014); OED – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=biotechnology&searchmode=none (last access: 3 September 2014).

CR: biocatalysis, mitochondrion.