Good or bad? New or old? The rich connotations of the word 'biotechnology' reflect a history that stretches back more than seventy years. To some, the concept describes the evolving crafts of industrial production using micro-organisms. To others, biotechnology is a product of the recombinant techniques only recently developed by molecular biologists. It has been seen simply as a means of wealth production and as a new kind of technology--sometimes as distinctively benevolent and at all other times as particularly dangerous.

Robert Bud shows how the hopes and fears for the combination of...

This authoritative reference covers 325 scientific instruments ranging from antiquity to the present, and from the mundane to the highly sophisticated. Entries explain how they work and trace their invention, development, distribution and use. Fully illustrated and complete with bibliographies, it will be particularly useful to students and scholars of modern science and technology. Reflecting contemporary practice, it examines instruments used for testing and monitoring, as well as those used for research, and even considers a number of widely used laboratory organisms (such as drosophila...

Penicillin is the drug of the twentieth century. It was the first of the antibiotics that, for decades after the Second World War, underpinned a popular belief that infectious disease had at last met its match. With the emergence of "superbugs" in recent decades these hopes have faded. Across the world, we are warned that widespread antibiotic abuse will inexorably erode the drugs' efficacy and our own earlier confidence in them. Penicillin pulls these different but conjoined stories into a compelling narrative spanning the second half of the twentieth century. Using a wealth of new research,...

Kaum ein anderes Wort wird weltweit kontroverser diskutiert als der Begriff "Biotechnologie." 1988 wurden in den Niederlanden 1 700 Er wachsene telefonisch nach ihrem Verstandnis des Wortes Biotechnologie befragt. Mehr als der Halfte von ihnen war der Begriff bekannt, obwohl ein Drittel keine klare Vorstellung von seiner Bedeutung hatte. Derarti ge Ergebnisse wurden in allen Landern der Erde gefunden. T rotz groger Obereinstimmung was die Bedeutung angeht, waren sich selbst Experten bei dieser Frage uneinig. Einige verbinden damit den zunehmenden Einsatz von Mikroorganismen bei der...