Biotechnology
Biotechnology is usually defined as the use of living organisms in technological processes, although that definition has sometimes been restricted to the use of microorganisms. The narrower definition excludes agriculture and animal husbandry from the classification, and reduces biotechnology’s early history to the production of alcohol by managed fermentation. On the other hand, the definition can be expanded to take in the technological manipulation of biological products; those kinds of technology have a much more elaborate history, cooking and clothing becoming the ‘‘primal biotechnologies’’.
Whichever definition is used, biotechnology became far more significant than ever before in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in connection with food science and medical technologies. Princess Vera Zaronovitch’s Mizora (1880–1881) is an early example of biotechnological science fiction, featuring an allfemale society whose members reproduce by means of artificial parthenogenesis and apply similar technological methods to other kinds of production. A new kind of biotechnology seemed imminent when Alexis Carrel followed up experiments in skin grafting carried out in the 1890s with more elaborate attempts to grow and maintain tissues in vitro. His tissue cultures were not very successful, mainly because specialised cells could not divide indefinitely in nutrient solutions, but the basic idea seemed sufficiently promising to inspire Clement Fe´zandie’s ‘‘The Secret of Artificial Reproduction’’ (1921), J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1923), and Julian Huxley’s ‘‘The Tissue-Culture King’’ (1926). Following Aldous Huxley’s satirical extrapolation of biotechnological possibilities in Brave New World (1932), however, their image was badly tarnished. Even such farces as Eddin Clark’s ‘‘Double! Double!’’ (1938), in which a technology for producing whole animals from single cells goes awry, retain a horrific edge, although ecological parables such as Julian Chain’s ‘‘Prometheus’’ (1951)—in which industrial civilisation is swept away by spinoff from research into plant hormones—were sometimes prepared to employ biotechnological plot levers.
The evolution of biotechnological speculation was closely allied with the notion of genetic engineering, and was long restricted by the difficulty of imagining how the genetic material might be directly manipulated; it was not until the structure of DNA had been clarified that would-be speculators obtained a clearer view of what that kind of biotechnological manipulation might involve. Until then, such stories as S. P. Meek’s ‘‘The Murgatroyd Experiment’’ (1929)— in which humans are equipped with chlorophyll-laden blood in order to alleviate their need for food—were devoid of any real argumentative basis. The ideas Haldane attempted to popularise in Daedalus received scant attention for the next half century; his sister, Naomi Mitchison, politely waited until he was dead before extrapolating them in a dourly cautionary fashion in Solution Three (1975) and Not by Bread Alone (1983).
By the 1970s several science fiction writers, most notably Samuel R. Delany and John Varley, had begun to take it for granted that biotechnologies would have a significant impact on near-future societies; such scenarios as those detailed in Delany’s Triton (1976) and Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), feature multiple applications. Their lead was followed by other writers, including Joan Slonczewski, in the novels A Door into Ocean (1986), Daughter of Elysium (1993), and The Children Star (1998); Brian Stableford, in stories collected in Sexual Chemistry (1998) and Designer Genes (2004) and the series of novels launched with Inherit the Earth (1998); and Alison Sinclair, in the novels Blueheart (1996), Cavalcade (1998), and Throne Price (2000, with Linda Williams). Individual works of note featuring multiple applications of future biotechnology include Rebecca Ore’s The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid (1991), Ian McDonald’s Hearts, Hands and Voices (1992; aka The Broken Land ), Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Scab’s Progress’’—whose biotechnological jargon was equipped with explanatory hyperlinks in the online version published on 29 December 2000—and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). Thomas A. Easton’s Organic Future series, comprising Sparrowhawk (1990), Greenhouse (1991), Woodsman (1992), Tower of the Gods (1993), and Seeds of Destiny (1994), offers an elaborate fictional account of a future in which biotechnology has taken over almost all the functions of organic technology.
Forms of biotechnology that did not involve genetic engineering or *cyborgisation became rare in the late twentieth century, although surgical modifications and various kinds of organic augmentation formed a substantial fringe to both subgenres. As with other literary uses of *biological ideas, constructive speculative accounts of new biotechnologies and their application have been heavily influenced by the Frankenstein complex and its amplification by the yuck factor. The vast majority of novels elaborating biotechnological premises are alarmist technothrillers, melodramatic *horror stories, and dark anticipations of biotechnological weapons. The formularisation of such works—usually requiring that threats be overcome—inevitably encourages the construction of biotechnological ‘‘fixes’’ whose implications are intrinsically positive, but such fixes are often seen as improvisations temporarily holding back an inexorable tide of disaster.
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