LAB IN THE BOX🦠🔬🧪

HISTORY OF BIOTECHNOLOGY: 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, Paul Berg, 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. For

Evolution and Adaptation Biological evolution is the change in a population's genetic makeup over time. According to scientific evidence, populations of organisms adapt to changes in environmental conditions through biological evolution, known more simply as evolution. Evolution involves the change in a population's genetic makeup through successive generations. Populations not individuals-evolve by becoming genetically different. According to the theory of evolution, all species descended from earlier, ancestral species. In other words, life comes from life. This widely accepted scientific theory explains life has changed over the past 3.7 billion years and why it is so diverse today. Religious and other groups may offer other explanations, but evolution is the accepted scientific explanation. Materials provided by Environmental Science Now ™M

Effects of Human Activities on the  Earth's Biodiversity Human activities are decreasing the earth's biodiversity. Speciation minus extinction equals biodiversity, the planet's genetic raw material for future evolution in response to changing environmental conditions. though extinction is a natural process, humans have become a major force in the premature extinction of species. Al- According to biologists Stuart Primm and Edward O. Wilson, during the 20th century, extinction rates in- creased by 100-1,000 times the natural background extinction rate. As human population and resource con- sumption increase over the next 50-100 years, we are expected to take over a larger share of the earth's sur- face and net primary productivity (NPP) (Figure 3-20, p.50). According to Wilson and Primm, this may cause the premature extinction of at least one-fifth of the earth's current species by 2030 and half of those species by the end of this century. If not checked, this trend