ABSTRACT
A final area in which elements of the military–industrial–academic complex combined with aspects of big science during the Cold War to produce a technoscience is biotechnology. By the early twentieth century, developments in microbiology and organic chemistry led to a shift away from fermentation and toward a broader focus on what was becoming labeled as biotechnology, a term first used just after World War I. A major breakthrough took place in 1953 when Francis Crick and James Watson determined the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) which provided a way to link biotechnology to genetics. The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA was a significant step towards understanding how cells replicate themselves, but there was still the problem of exactly how DNA carried genetic information and what was the role of ribose nucleic acid (RNA) in that process. Genetic engineering provided a great potential for treating human diseases.
