96 Fun Facts About Biotechnology

In the 1980 Chakrabarty ruling that living organisms can be patented, the engineered bacterium was designed to do what?

Break down crude oil: Ananda Chakrabarty built the bacterium at General Electric to clean up spills, and the Supreme Court's 5–4 ruling for him set off a wave of new biotech firms.

The Flavr Savr, the first genetically engineered food licensed for sale in the US in 1994, was a slow-softening what?

The Flavr Savr tomato, developed by the company Calgene, carried a reversed gene that slowed production of a rotting enzyme so the fruit stayed firm for longer.

Kary Mullis said the idea for PCR, the DNA-copying method that earned him a Nobel, came to him while doing what?

Driving in the countryside one night in 1983, heading for his Mendocino County cabin, Mullis hit on two primers bracketing a stretch of DNA, then pulled over to check the doubling sums on paper.

The heat-loving bacterium whose enzyme made PCR practical was first found in a hot spring of which national park?

Yellowstone's Mushroom Spring yielded Thermus aquaticus in the 1960s, yet the park has received no share of the money made from its Taq enzyme.

Károly Ereky, the agricultural engineer who coined the word 'biotechnology' in a 1919 book, came from which country?

Hungary was home to Ereky, whose Berlin-published book dealt with livestock production on large farms, so 'biotechnology' began as a farming word decades before gene splicing.

Which country in 2021 became the first to permit commercial planting of golden rice, the beta-carotene-enriched grain?

The Philippines issued the biosafety permit on 21 July 2021, though in April 2024 a Philippine appeals court ordered commercial propagation halted pending more evidence.

Which biochemist, whose microbes brewed the acetone for WWI cordite, later became Israel's first president?

Chaim Weizmann used the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum to brew acetone, and the process mattered so much to Britain's war effort that the microbe became known as the Weizmann organism.

AquAdvantage, the first genetically engineered animal approved as food in the US and Canada, is a fast-growing what?

AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon carry a growth-hormone gene from Chinook salmon switched on by a promoter from ocean pout, an eel-like fish, so they keep growing year-round.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the 2023 medicine Nobel for a chemical tweak that made which vaccines workable?

mRNA vaccines only became workable once the pair altered one of the RNA's bases, which stopped cells from treating the injected strand as an invader and raising inflammation against it.

Nexia's transgenic goats, the source of the BioSteel fibre, were engineered to make spider-silk protein in their what?

Milk from the goats carries the extra silk protein, which is extracted and spun into thread, and the work later moved to a herd kept at Utah State University.

23andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company that launched its saliva test in 2007, takes its name from what?

A diploid human cell carries 23 pairs of chromosomes, hence 23andMe; customers can download their raw genetic data and browse results chromosome by chromosome.

Theranos, founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, claimed its devices could run many lab tests from what?

Theranos said a finger-prick of blood in a tiny 'nanotainer' could replace a venous draw, but in January 2022 Holmes was found guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

In January 2022, Maryland surgeons gave a terminally ill patient a heart from a gene-edited animal of which species?

The pig carried 10 genetic modifications to limit rejection, and the recipient, David Bennett Sr., had been ineligible for a standard human heart transplant.

The first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat, Eat Just's chicken, took place in December 2020 in which country?

Singapore's restaurant 1880 served the cultured chicken seven years after Mark Post unveiled the first lab-grown burger, which had cost his team about €250,000 to make.

Green fluorescent protein, the glowing tag behind the 2008 chemistry Nobel, was first purified from which animal?

A jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, gave Osamu Shimomura the glowing protein in the 1960s, but it stayed a curiosity until the 1990s, when others cloned its gene and made it a tag for living cells.

GloFish, the fluorescent aquarium pets introduced to the US market in late 2003, were first created from which species?

Zebrafish were the first GloFish in pet stores, and in spring 2003 Taiwan became the first place to authorise the sale of a GM organism as a pet.

Arctic apples, cleared by the FDA in 2015, use gene silencing so that the fruit does not do what?

Arctic apple slices do not turn brown because RNA interference silences the enzyme polyphenol oxidase, which normally darkens damaged flesh; the first varieties were Arctic Golden and Arctic Granny.

Roundup Ready soybeans, which reached farms in 1996, were engineered to survive spraying with which herbicide?

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, kills almost any green plant, so Monsanto engineered soybeans to shrug it off; by 2005, 87% of US soybean fields were planted with resistant varieties.

Bt cotton, which carries a toxin gene from a soil bacterium, produces its own insecticide against which pest?

Bollworms, the moth larvae that bore into cotton bolls, die when they eat the Bt toxin, which is harmless to most other creatures; by 2014, 95% of India's cotton was the GM kind.

Drug names ending in -mab, such as adalimumab and trastuzumab, signalled until 2021 that the medicine was what?

A monoclonal antibody is made from a cell line cloned from a single white blood cell, and the -mab stem was given to every such drug named until 2021, when newer stems took over.

Trastuzumab, sold as Herceptin, targets the HER2 receptor and is best known for treating which disease?

Breast cancer and stomach cancer are trastuzumab's approved uses; it binds HER2 and slows cell replication where the receptor is over-produced.

Humira, which became the world's top-selling drug in 2012, was approved in the US in 2002 to treat what?

Rheumatoid arthritis was adalimumab's original US indication in 2002, and the drug went on to be approved for Crohn's disease, psoriasis and ulcerative colitis, hitting $16 billion in sales in 2016.

Zolgensma, the gene therapy listed at $2.125 million in 2019, treats which disease in children up to the age of two?

Spinal muscular atrophy stems from a faulty SMN1 gene, and Zolgensma's one-time infusion delivers a working copy, which made it the world's most expensive medication when approved.

Kymriah, a leukaemia therapy approved in 2017, genetically re-engineers what, taken from the patient's own body?

T cells are drawn from the patient, engineered to carry a chimeric receptor that recognises the CD19 protein on B cells, and infused back to hunt the leukaemia, an approach called adoptive cell transfer.

Oxitec's engineered male mosquitoes, cleared for release in the Florida Keys in 2020, are built so that what happens?

Female offspring die young, before reaching maturity, because they inherit a lethal gene from the released males, so the biting, disease-spreading half of the population collapses.

Ice-minus bacteria became the first GM organism released outdoors when they were sprayed in 1987 on a field of what?

Strawberries were the test crop: the altered bacteria lack the surface protein that seeds ice crystals, so coated plants resist frost, though the product, Frostban, was never marketed.

Which scientist shared the 2012 medicine Nobel for turning adult cells into stem cells using four genes?

Shinya Yamanaka began with 24 candidate genes, put them all into mouse skin cells at once, then dropped them one by one until only four were needed.

The gene gun, invented at Cornell in the 1980s to blast DNA into plant cells, was originally an adapted what?

A Crosman air pistol was adapted to fire dense tungsten particles coated with DNA; later versions switched to gold particles, which are less toxic to cells, and to helium as a non-explosive propellant.

Agrobacterium is used to ferry genes into crops because in nature it inserts its own DNA to cause what?

Crown gall tumours act as a larder for Agrobacterium tumefaciens: the genes it inserts make the plant's cells churn out opines, compounds the bacterium feeds on.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in 1978 in the garage of her rented house in which Indian city?

Bengaluru's Biocon began with seed capital of 10,000 rupees, and recruits were so hard to find that the founder's first employee was a retired garage mechanic.

The 1975 Asilomar conference, where Paul Berg and colleagues set safety rules for gene splicing, met in which US state?

California's Asilomar State Beach hosted the meeting in February 1975, where about 140 scientists, lawyers and physicians debated the biohazards of recombinant DNA and drew up their own voluntary guidelines.

Casgevy, Vertex's CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease, won its first approval in November 2023 in which country?

The United Kingdom authorised Casgevy in November 2023, weeks before the US FDA followed in December, making it the first medicine built on CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to reach patients.

Hawaii's Rainbow papaya, introduced in 1998 by Dennis Gonsalves's team, was engineered to resist what kind of threat?

A virus, papaya ringspot, had emerged in commercial farms in 1992 and by 1995 had made production in Hawaii's Puna region impossible; the transgenic varieties resuscitated the industry.

JCVI-syn1.0, the 2010 'synthetic cell' from Craig Venter's team, carried hidden watermarks in its DNA encoding what?

Coded text and quotations were written into the genome, among them a line from James Joyce, 'To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life', plus the authors' names.

Amgen's Epogen, made with recombinant DNA in cell culture, is a version of which hormone?

Erythropoietin is the kidneys' signal to the bone marrow to make red blood cells, so failing kidneys bring anaemia, and Epogen, a lab-made copy, fills the gap.

Genentech's Protropin, approved in 1985, replaced a children's growth hormone previously extracted from what?

Cadaver pituitary glands were the only supply, so only the most severely deficient children were treated; in 1985 the hormone was linked to a fatal brain disease and pulled, and Protropin was rushed through.

Brazil's Pró-Álcool programme, launched in 1975 to replace petrol with ethanol, ferments its fuel from which crop?

Sugarcane ethanol has made Brazil the world's second-largest producer of ethanol fuel, and the leftover cane waste, bagasse, is burned to supply the distilleries with heat and power.

In CRISPR editing, the Cas9 protein does what to the DNA sequence its guide RNA leads it to?

Cas9 cuts both strands of the targeted DNA, working like genetic scissors, and the cell's own repair machinery then introduces the edit by one of two methods.

Chinese researcher He Jiankui said in 2018 he had edited twin embryos to disable which gene, aiming for HIV resistance?

CCR5 codes for a protein that HIV uses to enter cells, and in December 2019 a Chinese court sentenced He to three years in prison for illegal medical practice.

The firm that later sold the PCR patent to Roche for $300 million paid Kary Mullis what bonus for the idea?

$10,000 was the bonus, against a $300 million sale of the patent to Roche Molecular Systems, and the gulf led Mullis to condemn colleagues who shared credit for developing PCR.

The first gene therapy widely accepted as a success began on 14 September 1990, treating a 4-year-old girl for what?

A rare immune deficiency, ADA-SCID, was treated by drawing the girl's own white blood cells, adding a working copy of her faulty gene and infusing them back into her body.

The first genetically engineered crop plant, reported in 1983 carrying an antibiotic-resistance gene, was which plant?

Tobacco was transformed by infecting it with Agrobacterium carrying a chimeric gene, then growing a whole new plant from a single cell that had taken the gene up.

Most industrial citric acid has been made since 1919 by fermenting sugar with which kind of organism, not from lemons?

A mould, Aspergillus niger, was found in 1917 by food chemist James Currie to be an efficient citric acid producer, and Pfizer began industrial production with it two years later.

Polylactic acid, the most widely used filament in 3D printing and a common compostable plastic, is made from what?

Fermented plant starch from corn, cassava or sugar beet pulp yields lactic acid, the building block of PLA, which can be biodegradable or long-lasting depending on how it is made.

Polly and Molly, transgenic ewes cloned in Edinburgh in 1997, carried a human gene for what kind of protein?

A blood-clotting factor, human factor IX, was the target protein, since people with haemophilia B lack it and need infusions; the ewes were cloned at the Roslin Institute, where Dolly had been made.

Which geneticist led the public Human Genome Project, then ran the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021?

Francis Collins first made his name as a gene hunter whose lab helped track down the cystic fibrosis gene, before steering the genome project and then serving 12 years as NIH director.

The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a sheep born at Scotland's Roslin Institute, was named after which singer?

Dolly Parton got the nod because the cloned cell came from a ewe's udder, as Ian Wilmut of the Roslin team openly admitted.

The first lab-grown beef burger, cooked and eaten in London in 2013, was bankrolled by which tech billionaire?

Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, was the anonymous investor who let Mark Post's Maastricht University team keep going after Dutch subsidies dried up.

The Vacanti mouse, a 1990s landmark often mistaken for genetic engineering, had cartilage on its back shaped like what?

A human ear, or what looked like one: cow cartilage cells were seeded onto an ear-shaped biodegradable scaffold and slipped under the skin, with no genes altered.

The Penicillium strain behind wartime mass production of penicillin was found in a Peoria fruit market on what?

A cantaloupe sold in 1943 gave the best sample of all, and blasting that 'cantaloupe strain' with X-rays later doubled its penicillin yield.

Exenatide, a diabetes drug approved in the US in 2005, is a synthetic version of a peptide from which animal's venom?

Gila monster venom yielded exendin-4, which endocrinologist John Eng isolated in 1992 and found could lower blood sugar in diabetic mice for hours.

Alec Jeffreys's DNA fingerprinting, discovered in Leicester in 1984, was first put to use to settle what?

An immigration dispute came first: in 1985 the test confirmed the identity of a British boy whose family came from Ghana. Its first murder inquiry followed in Leicestershire.

In August 2016, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins became the first person to do what aboard the International Space Station?

Sequence DNA: Rubins used a hand-held, USB-powered MinION sequencer, a step towards crews identifying microbes in orbit without sending samples home.

Agarose, the jelly-like slab used to separate DNA fragments by size in gel electrophoresis, is extracted from what?

Red algae supply agarose, which is purified from agar, the same seaweed jelly that fills Petri dishes; short DNA pieces thread through its pores faster than long ones.

Which 1997 film starring Ethan Hawke imagines a future society that ranks people by the quality of their genes?

Gattaca spells out its own theme: the title uses only G, A, T and C, the letters that stand for the bases of DNA.

Svante Pääbo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for sequencing the genome of which extinct human relatives?

Neanderthals proved to be family: Pääbo's team concluded that they interbred with the ancestors of modern Eurasians, leaving traces of their DNA in present-day people.

Humulin, in 1982 the first medicine made by genetic engineering, is human insulin produced inside which microbe?

E. coli given the human gene make insulin identical to our own; earlier supplies had to be extracted from the pancreases of slaughtered farm animals.

Which lab tools, whose discovery won Werner Arber and two others a 1978 Nobel, cut DNA at specific sequences?

Restriction enzymes evolved in bacteria as a defence that chops up invading DNA; biotechnologists borrowed them to cut genes out precisely for splicing.

Which small rings of bacterial DNA, named by Joshua Lederberg in 1952, are the most common vectors for cloning genes?

Plasmids replicate independently of the cell's main genome, so a gene spliced into one is copied again and again as the bacteria multiply.

In gel electrophoresis, DNA fragments move to the positive electrode because which part of DNA is negatively charged?

Its phosphate backbone gives DNA a negative charge along its whole length, so the gel sorts fragments by size alone: shorter pieces slip through the pores faster and travel farther.

In RNA, which base takes the place of the thymine found in DNA and pairs with adenine?

Uracil is simply thymine without a methyl group; the swap to thymine is thought to have made DNA the more stable molecule for long-term storage.

Each three-letter codon in messenger RNA, read by the ribosome in translation, specifies one of which building blocks?

Amino acids number just 20 in the standard set, yet 64 codons exist, so most are spelled several ways, and three codons simply mean stop.

Which French chemist took up fermentation at Lille after a manufacturer sought advice on souring beetroot alcohol?

Louis Pasteur went on to show that yeast, not chemistry alone, converts sugar into alcohol, and the heat treatment he devised to keep wine from spoiling bears his name.

In vitro, the term for experiments run in test tubes and dishes instead of whole organisms, is Latin for what?

In glass is the literal meaning, a nod to the test tubes, flasks and Petri dishes of the laboratory; IVF, in vitro fertilisation, made the phrase famous.

Chymosin made by engineered microbes, on sale since 1990, replaced an enzyme from calves' stomachs in making what?

Cheese made the switch quickly: by 2008 some 80 to 90 percent of commercial cheeses in the US and Britain were set with the microbe-made enzyme.

The first human vaccine made by recombinant DNA methods, approved by the FDA in 1986, protects against which disease?

Hepatitis B vaccine is brewed, not harvested: yeast cells carrying one gene from the pathogen make its harmless surface protein, the vaccine's active ingredient.

Biogas, made when microbes digest manure and food waste without oxygen, is mostly carbon dioxide and which fuel gas?

Methane is what makes biogas burn, and capturing it in a digester also keeps a potent greenhouse gas from escaping off rotting waste.

Biomining, which uses microbes to free metals from low-grade ores, is mainly used to recover gold and which other metal?

Copper suits the method because bacteria such as Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans thrive in metal-rich mine water and draw their energy from the sulphide ores they help dissolve.

The Impossible Burger, unlike most plant-based patties, contains which molecule, brewed in engineered yeast?

Heme is the iron-rich molecule abundant in animal muscle; the company copies a version found in soy roots and makes it by a process much like brewing beer.

Quorn, the meat substitute launched in Britain in 1985, is made from which kind of organism grown in fermentation tanks?

A fungus called Fusarium venenatum, discovered in a soil sample in 1967, is grown in a continuous fermenter and then bound with egg white to give it a meaty bite.

Which enzymes in biological laundry detergents break down stains such as blood and egg?

Proteases snip a stain's long protein chains into fragments that rinse away; the first detergent enzyme, tried by chemist Otto Röhm, was trypsin taken from slaughtered animals.

Which enzyme lets jeans makers create a stonewashed look without pumice by wearing away the surface of cotton fibres?

Cellulase took over as pumice grew costly and its residue became a disposal problem; cotton fibre is about 90 percent cellulose, so the enzyme fades denim with no stones at all.

In biotechnology's colour code, red stands for medicine and green for agriculture; what does blue stand for?

Sea resources are the blue branch; the palette runs on through white for industry and yellow for food to 'dark' biotechnology, the label for bioweapons.

In Jurassic Park, scientists patch the gaps in dinosaur DNA taken from mosquitoes in amber using DNA from which animals?

Frogs prove a fateful choice: some can change sex when a population is all one sex, which is how the park's dinosaurs begin to breed.

Which biochemist raised in Hilo, Hawaii, shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR genome editing?

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier proposed in 2012 that a bacterial defence system could be reprogrammed to edit genomes; the Nobel followed just eight years later.

Which enzyme, discovered in 1970 by Howard Temin and David Baltimore, lets labs copy messenger RNA back into DNA?

Reverse transcriptase, found in retroviruses, won its discoverers a 1975 Nobel and widened the central dogma to include information passing from RNA to DNA.

The Southern blot, a 1975 method for detecting specific DNA sequences, gets its name from what?

Its inventor's surname: British biologist Edwin Southern published the method, and the later northern, western and eastern blots were all named as puns on it.

Which light-emitting enzyme, best known from the firefly Photinus pyralis, do biotechnologists use as a reporter gene?

Luciferase glows whenever the gene it is coupled to is switched on, letting researchers measure a gene's activity simply by measuring the light.

Which private firm, launched by Craig Venter in 1998, raced the publicly funded Human Genome Project to read human DNA?

Celera Genomics set out to do for $300 million what the public project budgeted roughly $3 billion for; the two published their results side by side in February 2001.

Over 70 percent of the Human Genome Project's reference genome came from one anonymous man from which US city?

Buffalo supplied the donor known only as RP11, 'RP' for the city's Roswell Park research centre; his DNA library was used far more than the others because of its quality.

Which country's scientists produced Snuppy, an Afghan Hound born in 2005 and the first dog ever cloned?

South Korea's Seoul National University gave Snuppy his name, SNU plus puppy; it took 123 surrogate mothers to produce the one surviving clone.

Which extinct animal was brought back by cloning in 2003, only for the newborn to die within minutes?

Pyrenean ibex cells frozen from the last of the animals, lost in 2000, yielded one live kid, making the subspecies the only animal to have gone extinct twice.

Friedrich Miescher, who first isolated DNA in 1869 and called it nuclein, got the cells he needed from what?

Pus-soaked bandages from a nearby hospital gave Miescher cells in quantity; his real struggle was washing them off the cloth without damaging them.

The word 'clone', coined by plant scientist Herbert Webber in 1903, comes from the Greek word for what?

A twig is the root of the word because gardeners have long cloned plants from cuttings: a snipped shoot grows into a genetic copy of its parent.

Frances Arnold won a 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering which method of breeding better enzymes in the lab?

Directed evolution mutates a gene at random, keeps the best performers and repeats, round after round; one of Arnold's evolved enzymes converts sugars directly into a fuel precursor.

Amgen, the drugmaker founded at Thousand Oaks in 1980, takes its name from a contraction of which phrase?

Applied Molecular Genetics was the company's original name, and the early spelling 'AMGen' shows exactly where the three words were welded together.

Limulus amebocyte lysate, widely used to test injectable drugs for bacterial toxins, is extracted from which animal?

Horseshoe crab extract gels on contact with bacterial endotoxin, a reaction first reported by Fred Bang in 1956; a recombinant substitute has been on sale since 2003.

Genome Valley, the 2,000-acre biomedical cluster that houses vaccine maker Bharat Biotech, lies in which Indian city?

Hyderabad's cluster grew out of a biotech park that Bharat Biotech's founder, Krishna Ella, proposed to the state's chief minister; the firm later made its COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin there.

Caenorhabditis elegans, the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome read, is what kind of animal?

A roundworm about a millimetre long and see-through: Sydney Brenner proposed it in 1963 as a simple animal in which to study how a nervous system develops.

The 1952 Hershey–Chase experiments, which helped confirm DNA as genetic material, are nicknamed after which appliance?

A blender did the decisive job: its whirling shook loose the empty protein coats clinging to infected bacteria, showing that only the DNA had gone inside.

What name is given to a near-copy of a biologic medicine, a class the European regulator has authorised since 2006?

A biosimilar can never be an exact generic, because biologic drugs are large, complex molecules that are sensitive to small changes in how they are manufactured.

Okazaki fragments, named after the Japanese couple who found them, are joined up to make what during DNA replication?

The lagging strand has to be built backwards, away from the replication fork, so it is made in short bursts that DNA ligase later seals into one continuous piece.

Which bacterium, in 1995, became the first free-living organism to have its entire genome read, by Craig Venter's team?

Haemophilus influenzae owes its name to an 1890s error, when Richard Pfeiffer wrongly blamed it for the flu pandemic; Venter's team read it by the shotgun method.

Eduard Buchner won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing that fermentation can proceed without what?

Living cells proved unnecessary: juice pressed from pulverised yeast went on fermenting sugar, a blow to vitalism that pointed to molecules inside the cell doing the work.

Which hormone, made in 1977 by Herbert Boyer's group, came from the first human gene ever expressed in bacteria?

Somatostatin proved that bacteria could be made to read a human gene; a year later the same approach at the young Genentech delivered human insulin.

Which cell structures carry their own small genome, inherited in most animals from the mother alone?

Mitochondria from the sperm are usually destroyed by the egg after fertilisation, which is why genealogists can follow a maternal line far back in time.