On the Origin of Modern Biotechnology

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is hosting their 2009 Annual Meeting in Chicago this year, with plans to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of his publication On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 150 years later, the origin of life as we know it is still hotly debated in the USA, among many other countries in the world, but research in biotechnology, gene cloning, and many other fields of biology have helped clarify at least some of the mysteries surrounding our existence.

Of significance, was a major breakthrough coming at around the same time as Darwin's book, 144 years ago, when the theory of spontaneous generation was finally discarded. The theory existed under growing scrutiny in the early 1800's, but by 1864 was definitively disproven, the nail driven home by the experiments of Louis Pasteur, one of the fathers of microbiology and biotechnology. In the process, Mr. Pasteur also inadvertently discovered pasteurization and the cell theory, which laid the groundwork for the many discoveries in biotechnology that we use every day.