Biotechnology Trivia
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96 free Biotechnology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Biotechnology is where biology stops being something you study and becomes something you build: bacteria that eat oil spills, goats that spin silk, fish that glow, and a pair of genetic scissors that earned a Nobel Prize. Most of it happened within living memory, and a surprising amount of it was first argued out in a courtroom or a patent office. These fifty questions range across the toolkit (copying, cutting and sequencing DNA), the products (engineered crops, cloned animals, antibody drugs and gene therapies) and the people and companies who made them, from a garage start-up in India to a Silicon Valley fraud. Every answer comes with an explanation that adds the detail worth remembering. It suits a science pub-quiz round, a biology class warm-up or anyone who wants to know what the headlines about gene editing actually mean.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the 1980 Chakrabarty ruling that living organisms can be patented, the engineered bacterium was designed to do what?
Break down crude oil
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.
Q 02The Flavr Savr, the first genetically engineered food licensed for sale in the US in 1994, was a slow-softening what?
A tomato
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.
Q 03Kary 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
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.
Q 04The heat-loving bacterium whose enzyme made PCR practical was first found in a hot spring of which national park?
Yellowstone
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.
Q 05Károly Ereky, the agricultural engineer who coined the word 'biotechnology' in a 1919 book, came from which country?
Hungary
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.
Q 06Which country in 2021 became the first to permit commercial planting of golden rice, the beta-carotene-enriched grain?
Philippines
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.
Q 07Which biochemist, whose microbes brewed the acetone for WWI cordite, later became Israel's first president?
Chaim Weizmann
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.
Q 08AquAdvantage, the first genetically engineered animal approved as food in the US and Canada, is a fast-growing what?
Atlantic salmon
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.
Q 09Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the 2023 medicine Nobel for a chemical tweak that made which vaccines workable?
mRNA vaccines
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.
Q 10Nexia's transgenic goats, the source of the BioSteel fibre, were engineered to make spider-silk protein in their what?
Milk
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.
Q 1123andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company that launched its saliva test in 2007, takes its name from what?
23 pairs of chromosomes
A diploid human cell carries 23 pairs of chromosomes, hence 23andMe; customers can download their raw genetic data and browse results chromosome by chromosome.
Q 12Theranos, founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, claimed its devices could run many lab tests from what?
A finger-prick of blood
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.
Q 13In January 2022, Maryland surgeons gave a terminally ill patient a heart from a gene-edited animal of which species?
Q 21Trastuzumab, sold as Herceptin, targets the HER2 receptor and is best known for treating which disease?
Breast cancer
Breast cancer and stomach cancer are trastuzumab's approved uses; it binds HER2 and slows cell replication where the receptor is over-produced.
Q 22Humira, which became the world's top-selling drug in 2012, was approved in the US in 2002 to treat what?
Rheumatoid arthritis
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.
Q 23Zolgensma, the gene therapy listed at $2.125 million in 2019, treats which disease in children up to the age of two?
A pig
The pig carried 10 genetic modifications to limit rejection, and the recipient, David Bennett Sr., had been ineligible for a standard human heart transplant.
Q 14The first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat, Eat Just's chicken, took place in December 2020 in which country?
Singapore
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.
Q 15Green fluorescent protein, the glowing tag behind the 2008 chemistry Nobel, was first purified from which animal?
A jellyfish
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.
Q 16GloFish, the fluorescent aquarium pets introduced to the US market in late 2003, were first created from which species?
Zebrafish
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.
Q 17Arctic apples, cleared by the FDA in 2015, use gene silencing so that the fruit does not do what?
Turn brown
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.
Q 18Roundup Ready soybeans, which reached farms in 1996, were engineered to survive spraying with which herbicide?
Glyphosate
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.
Q 19Bt cotton, which carries a toxin gene from a soil bacterium, produces its own insecticide against which pest?
Bollworms
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.
Q 20Drug names ending in -mab, such as adalimumab and trastuzumab, signalled until 2021 that the medicine was what?
A monoclonal antibody
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.
Spinal muscular atrophy
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.
Q 24Kymriah, a leukaemia therapy approved in 2017, genetically re-engineers what, taken from the patient's own body?
T cells
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.
Q 25Oxitec's engineered male mosquitoes, cleared for release in the Florida Keys in 2020, are built so that what happens?
Female offspring die young
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.
Q 26Ice-minus bacteria became the first GM organism released outdoors when they were sprayed in 1987 on a field of what?
Strawberries
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.
Q 27Which scientist shared the 2012 medicine Nobel for turning adult cells into stem cells using four genes?
Shinya Yamanaka
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.
Q 28The gene gun, invented at Cornell in the 1980s to blast DNA into plant cells, was originally an adapted what?
Crosman air pistol
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.
Q 29Agrobacterium is used to ferry genes into crops because in nature it inserts its own DNA to cause what?
Crown gall tumours
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.
Q 30Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in 1978 in the garage of her rented house in which Indian city?
Bengaluru
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.