History of Biotech

Undergraduate / Graduate

In 2007, the physicist Freeman Dyson declared that while the twentieth century had been the "century of physics," the twenty-first century would belong to biology. This course explores the scientific, social, economic, and political histories of biology and biotechnology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including topics such as the birth of Mendelian genetics; the discovery of DNA; eugenics and population science; synthetic biology and genetic engineering; the sequencing of the human genome; and the explosive growth of corporate and commercial biotechnology and the patenting of life itself. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, including scientific papers, legal decisions, corporate reports, and popular fiction, we will explore how our present "Century of Biology" came to be.