UW-Madison and Biotechnology

Biotechnology Home | University Communications | UW Home | Feedback

The Future is Now
The goal of any researcher in the biological sciences is to understand life well enough to improve it. Curing genetic diseases before a symptom even arises, finding a way to grow nutritious foods that can help feed the world, protecting people from the crippling effects of sicknesses caused by bacteria -- it's all the stuff of a biologist's dreams. At least it has been -- until now.

The emerging field of biotechnology has researchers excited, because they can see very real possibilities for accomplishing all those goals. Researchers are just beginning to see how they can grasp the power of life, and they are quickly pushing the frontiers of science and technology, developing tools and techniques that harness life to solve some of our most fundamental problems.

Biotechnology represents a massive research effort, encompassing fields from agriculture to genetics to pediatric medicine to ethics. For details about UW-Madison's commitment to biotechnology, see this fact sheet.

So what makes them all part of biotechnology? The answer has to do with the ways in which scientists are decoding and learning to manage life. They may be, for example, using high-powered computing equipment to analyze the genes of the human body, so that they might learn which specific genes do things like cause disease, and why. Or they might be in the laboratory, isolating and breeding microbes that break down chemicals and could help naturally clean our water supply. Other researchers look at food crops and carefully alter their genetic makeup to make them more resistant to disease and frost.

The common element is the belief that society can be improved if we can use genetics to our advantage. Researchers have long known that life is the ultimate machine -- more powerful and more capable than anything humans have ever conceived. Biotechnology simply tries to find ways to hook into the ultimate machine.

One of the highest-profile efforts in biotechnology, for example, is in the field of genomics. Most people have probably heard that scientists across the country are trying to sequence the entire human genome. This massive undertaking would give us a complete catalog of every gene that occurs in humans.

Such an achievement would be akin to revealing the blueprints for human life. As just one possibility, scientists could identify which genes are responsible for causing cells to become cancerous, which would make it easier to diagnose diseases and to design drugs to stop them.

Genomics is just one of the promising fields emerging on the rapidly changing terrain. Change everywhere in the biosciences is almost constant, as new technologies are being developed every day to facilitate the laborious work of sifting through billions of pieces of genetic information. Much of the progress in biotechnology right now is coming in outfitting the revolution; inventions such as UW-Madison's development of optical mapping or DNA chip technologies are making possible work that might have taken decades before. As Biotechnology Center director Michael Sussman says, "We've gone faster than any of us expected." But tomorrow promises even yet more than today.

Why biotechnology?

What is BioStar?

The Biotech Adventure (On Wisconsin, Winter 2000)