Copyright 1997, the National Academy Press. Keywords, machine extracted. Top 50 words repeated twice, next 100 once, plus phrases. Over the past year or so, when I've told people I'm work- ing on a book about biotechnology, the usual response has been a cautious silence. At this point, it's my turn for a thoughtful pause.
Biotechnology is a difficult subject to get one's head around.
It isn't easy to explain what biotechnology is, and what it is not, in only a few sentences. Then, too, biotechnology involves manipulations of living things that can seem bizarre, almost unbelievable, to the uninitiated. To tell of scientists transplanting genes from one species to another still sounds uncomfortably like either a horror story or the start of a bad joke. Had r realized just how much material has been published on the subject, T might not have been so keen. The flood of new research is almost overwhelming.