50 Fun Facts About Biotechnology

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

Ananda Chakrabarty's Pseudomonas bacterium was built to break down crude oil for cleaning up spills, and the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that his living organism could be patented.

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 Californian 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?

Mullis was driving in the countryside near his Mendocino County home in 1983 when he hit on using two primers to bracket a stretch of DNA and copy it over and over.

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

Thermus aquaticus came from Mushroom Spring in Yellowstone National Park, yet neither the park nor Wyoming has received any share of the profits 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, who published the book in Berlin and served as Hungarian Minister of Food in 1919; he defined biotechnology as turning raw materials into more useful products.

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.

Moderna, maker of the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, says its name combines 'modern' with which two other terms?

Modified and RNA, plus modern, give Moderna its name; the company focuses on messenger RNA products, from Spikevax to the RSV vaccine Mresvia and the flu vaccine Mflusiva.

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

The silk protein was harvested from the goats' milk and purified by chromatography, and Nexia, now defunct, was the only company ever to spin fibres from spider silk made this way.

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?

Osamu Shimomura purified GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in the 1960s, alongside aequorin, a separate protein that releases light as it breaks down luciferin.

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 via gene silencing, were engineered so that sliced 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 the cry1Ac 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.

Luxturna, the first in vivo gene therapy approved by the FDA, in December 2017, treats an inherited form of what?

Luxturna treats Leber congenital amaurosis, an inherited retinal disorder causing progressive blindness, and its first sale in March 2018 was the first sale of any gene therapy product in the US.

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, the CAR-T 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, the first GM organism released into the environment, were sprayed in 1987 on a field of what?

Strawberries were the test crop because the altered Pseudomonas syringae, developed as a product called Frostban that was never marketed, lacks the gene for the surface protein that seeds ice crystals, so coated plants resist frost.

Kendall Square, dubbed 'the most innovative square mile on the planet', where Biogen set up in 1982, is in which city?

Cambridge, Massachusetts hosts the square, where the Harvard spin-off Genetics Institute and then Biogen set up in the early 1980s after Boston and Somerville had turned the former away.

Shinya Yamanaka reprogrammed adult mouse cells into stem cells in 2006 by inserting how many specific genes?

Four genes, c-Myc, Oct4, Sox2 and KLF4, now called the Yamanaka factors, did the job, whittled down from a starting list of twenty-four candidates, and the work earned Yamanaka a 2012 Nobel Prize.

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

Crown gall tumours form on more than 140 species of plants infected by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and that natural gene-transfer trick is what makes the bacterium so useful in the lab.

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

Bengaluru's Biocon grew from that garage into Asia's largest insulin producer, and its 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 that boosts red blood cells?

Erythropoietin stimulates erythropoiesis, so Epogen is prescribed for the anaemia that accompanies chronic kidney failure and chemotherapy; Amgen won approval for it in 1989 as the first recombinant erythropoietin product.

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

Cadaver pituitary glands were the only source, and supplies were so limited that only the most severely deficient children were treated until the product was withdrawn and Protropin 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, left Ashanthi DeSilva without the enzyme adenosine deaminase, and French Anderson's trial was the first direct insertion of human DNA into the nuclear genome.

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.

PhiX174, the first DNA genome ever fully sequenced, by Fred Sanger's team in 1977, is what kind of organism?

A bacteriophage that infects E. coli, phiX174 has a tiny single-stranded DNA genome, and in 2003 Craig Venter's group made it the first genome assembled entirely from synthesised DNA.

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 need infusions of it; Polly and Molly were the first mammals both cloned from an adult cell and transgenic.

Which microbiologist coined the acronym CRISPR in correspondence with Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University?

Francisco Mojica, of the University of Alicante, proposed the acronym to end the confusion of competing names for the repeated DNA sequences he had found in bacteria.

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

Francis Collins ran the NIH under three presidents, and before that headed the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the NIH's 27 institutes and centres.