Historians of science writing about the commercialization of biology over the past forty or fifty years have debated what exactly we mean by the term “biotechnology.” Is it better to use it to refer only to commercial applications of the molecular biology and genetic advances made since the 1970s? Or is it better to think of “biotech” as any applied use of life science knowledge, including things that we have been doing for thousands of years, like using yeast to make bread? Organic chemist and patent attorney Pam Ancona points out that it’s a very “nebulous descriptor. Even now it’s very broad, and it covers so many things that it’s arguably meaningless.”
