Biotechnology is a sector of technology that deals with biology. It mostly deals with the use of different biological techniques and processes to manipulate biological organisms in order to make them better serve certain objectives.

Biotechnology has been the popular term used to describe a generic technology that has witnessed tremendous developments during the last five decades. It has currently helped in providing breakthrough products and systems that have been in use in agriculture, medicine, animal husbandry and food science.

In the 70's, the term biotechnology was more popularly used in the food processing and agriculture industries. But it has since widened its scope to include the development of techniques and methods used in biological research such as those involving tissue culture and recombinant DNA. 

Biotechnology combines a variety of scientific disciplines such as biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, cell biology and embryology in the hopes of developing biological organisms to serve a wide variety of functions.

Biotechnology may seem like a fairly new field, but it has already been practiced for hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Ancient farmers developed new plants that provide higher yields and more resistant to pest and drought through breeding.

The ancient process of brewing beer makes use of biotechnology in using malted grains to convert starch into sugar and then adding specific types of yeasts in order to produce beer. Ancient cultures have made use of biotechnology in order to develop medications by combining plants and other organisms.

It is modern biotechnology that has put the field into prominence in the public eye. It is the recent developments in genetic engineering that has allowed scientists to transfer or modify individual genes between organisms and further boosted the ability to produce or develop desired traits and characteristics in plants as well as animals.

Modern biotechnology can be a more precise form as compared to traditional methods which did not rely on direct manipulation of an organism's genetic make-up in order to develop desired characteristics in them.

Although the field of modern biotechnology seems to hold promise as one of the most important technologies today, there are certain questions that seem to bother some people concerning its already widespread use. People have been concerned for quite a time now about the possible long term effects of a number of products brought about by the use of biotechnology methods and processes.

The fact that modern biotechnology now deals with directly manipulating the genes of an organism seem to be a cause of concern for a number of people. Biotechnology seems to have both beneficial as well as some detrimental effects, the wide ranging effects of both still remains to be widely debated by different camps.