Abstract

The 50-year anniversary of the first 1972 laboratory demonstration of transgenesis resulting in biotechnology (or Biotech for short), provides an opportunity to review this historical development with real evidence. Our evidence-based review shows a field dominated by high, unmet expectations, and underplayed damage and failure. Biotech’s agricultural promises and hopes, as well as its few commercial products, raise questions of centralization and control, erosion of diversity, emergence of new dependencies, and more. But institutions have also changed; in this chapter, we analyze transformations of regulatory frameworks and ask how Biotech forced institutional trajectories. Each application of Biotech carries ethical questions – most of them unresolved and often not even acknowledged – including Biotech-generic questions, as well as those specific to the application. Biotech’s history would demand extensive ethical questioning impossible to do here. Instead, by focusing on a few examples we aim at providing a frame of analysis that may be useful for further application as the extraordinary history of Biotech’s failures, and its counted successes, continues to evolve.