The Biodesign Institute: Biotech 101 - History

The Biodesign Institute: Biotech 101 - History: "21st Century and the Era of Convergence: Nanotech, Biotech, Cognitive and Information Sciences The dawn of a new millennium began with an announcement that will provide a fulcrum for 21st century science. In 2000, a rough draft of the human genome, or the map of human life, is completed by Celera Genomics and the Human Genome Project. In 2001, the sequence of the human genome is published. With the publication, a future era of genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and personalized medicines is made possible. In addition to advances in biomedicine, a new scientific renaissance is now emerging. It is clear that 21 st century scientific progress will depend on the convergence of so-called NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and cognitive) technologies. These technologies combine the immense knowledge generated from the past 30 years of biotechnology with our new found ability to manipulate matter at the scale of atoms, or nanotechnology, and fifty years of computing advances (information technology) and the science of understanding the human brain (cognitive sciences). The revolution that began in biotechnology with the discovery of the structure of DNA fifty years ago has roughly paralleled advances in computing no less dramatic, with the generation of the first integrated circuit by Jack Kilby in 1958 to modern computers packed with over a bil"