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¹ Scientific disciplines are all similar in that they use the scientific method. Some of them are also more closely related to each other because they share information, as in the case of biotechnology. There is an increasing connection today between the study of living organisms and the applications of the knowledge gained from this study.

² Human beings have highly-developed brains which enable them to use logic to understand the world around them and to communicate by using language. They can solve problems by using a combination of these two abilities. They can modify the environments they live in and use their observations of their environment to solve problems by using technology.

³ Technology can be simply defined as the application of ideas to produce tools, instruments and machines. Each period of time in human history has had an enabling technology which has allowed certain secondary technologies to develop. In the Stone Age, the enabling technology consisted of the stone tools that were used to make objects such as the wheel, weapons, clothes and of course, other tools. The invention of boats, and later ships, may have been the result not only of people observing fish swimming in seas and rivers, but also from knowing that wood floats in water. The idea of flying in the air came from human beings watching birds and traditional stories in all cultures in the world describe flying people and animals.

⁴ Technology developed when people began to expand their knowledge and use of materials, from stone to copper, bronze and finally iron. The Industrial Revolution, which started in the mid-eighteenth century, was part of the Iron Age, when machines changed the focus away from materials to the use of energy combined with materials, i.e. the invention of machines for transport and manufacture.

⁵ Living organisms have always been used by human beings as a source of food and transport. Animals have been domesticated to supply food and transport and plants have been grown for food. These plants and animals were, and still are, modified by breeding programs that have relied on artificial selection and hybridization. These breeding programs depended on people’s observation of these organisms and then on repeated attempts to modify them. Physical factors, such as size, in this way could be modified. So it can be said that a special form of technology, an “enabling technology”, that involves the use of living organisms, has always existed in human history. Today, this enabling technology is better known as biotechnology. It has come to include more advanced processes that produce bio-products that range from simple structural copies of living organisms, e.g. Velcro, to more advanced processes that include genetic engineering.