Biotechnology — Tissue Culture, Bt Cotton, Dolly and DNA Fingerprinting

Biotechnology is simply the use of living cells or organisms to make something useful. By that definition it is ancient — curd, bread and alcohol are all biotechnology. What is new is that we can now move a single gene from one organism into another on purpose.

That shift produced four cases that general science papers return to again and again: thousands of identical banana plants raised from a few cells, cotton given a bacterial gene so it kills its own pest, a sheep cloned from an adult cell, and a test that can name a person from one drop of blood.

Each case is a name, a year and a technique. Learn them as cases rather than as definitions and the questions become recall rather than reasoning — which is exactly how they are set.

1. Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, was a:

2. Which is the only genetically modified crop approved for commercial cultivation in India?

3. The gene inserted into cotton to make it resistant to bollworm is obtained from:

4. Golden Rice was genetically engineered mainly to address a deficiency of:

5. The ability of a single plant cell to develop into a complete plant is called:

6. Restriction enzymes are called 'molecular scissors' because they:

7. The technique of DNA fingerprinting was developed in 1984 by:

8. The first human hormone produced by recombinant DNA technology and sold as a medicine was: