Biology deployed for industrial and medical ends.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life
Frances H. Arnold · 2018
Argues that directed evolution - mutating a gene at random and screening for improvement - lets chemists create enzymes for reactions nothing in…
Primary sources and full treatments.
Studies on Fermentation
Louis Pasteur · 1876
Argues fermentation is caused by living microorganisms rather than a purely chemical process, and shows different microbes produce different…
+8 more at this level
10 works
Frances H. Arnold
Argues that directed evolution - mutating a gene at random and screening for improvement - lets chemists create enzymes for reactions nothing in nature ever evolved to do, without having to understand the protein first.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Louis Pasteur
Argues fermentation is caused by living microorganisms rather than a purely chemical process, and shows different microbes produce different fermentation products and spoilage.
about 10 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore T. Puck & Philip I. Marcus
Develops a feeder-layer technique letting single mammalian cells grow into countable colonies, turning cell culture from a qualitative craft into a quantitative, reproducible technique.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore Friedmann & Richard Roblin
Proposes that inserting a functioning gene to correct an inherited defect will become medically possible, and argues for the ethical safeguards such treatment will need before it is attempted on people.
Georges Köhler & César Milstein
Fuses an antibody-producing spleen cell with a myeloma cell to create a hybridoma that divides indefinitely while secreting one pure antibody, founding monoclonal antibody technology.
Robert Fraley et al.
Demonstrates that a bacterial gene can be inserted into a plant cell and expressed there, showing plants can be genetically engineered by the same recombinant methods already used in bacteria.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas A. Kunkel
Describes a method for introducing a chosen mutation anywhere in a cloned gene without needing to screen for it, which became the standard tool for engineering proteins by design.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael L. Shuler & Fikret Kargi
Treats a bioreactor as a chemical reactor with a living catalyst, and works through the mass-transfer and kinetic limits that decide whether a fermentation scales from bench to plant.
Andreas Liese, Karsten Seelbach & Christian Wandrey
Catalogues the enzymatic processes actually running at industrial scale, arguing that an enzyme's usefulness as a catalyst is decided by process economics as much as by its chemistry.
Yusuf Chisti
Argues microalgae can outproduce every land crop grown for biodiesel per hectare by a wide margin, and works out what closing the gap between that potential and current technology would take.