Biotechnologies and Biomedicine

"Biotechnologies," which are by simplest definition a fusion of biology and technology, provide the very means through which this progressive rewriting and reinvention of nature can be realized. This chapter first gives a sense of how biotechnologies themselves have advanced over the past century. Second, it reveals how profoundly they have altered our understandings of, and relationships with, the natural world. Finally, the chapter reveals their immanent capacity to rewrite our relations to nature in even more dramatic ways than previously envisaged in the years to come. These are achieved through three short case studies: the first on agricultural biotechnology, the second on stem cell applications, and the third on the cutting-edge frontier of biotechnology in the twenty-first century: synthetic biology.