The Biotechnology Revolution

Biotechnology is not new and can be tracked back to the rudimentary tools needed to control nature. Nonetheless, developments in the second half of the twentieth century qualitatively changed biotechnology’s impact on law. From the discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953, genetics increasingly plays a decisive role in society. Once deployed in courts and law, it continues to alter the domain of evidence, impacting nearly every legal field from criminal law to immigration law. Uses of genomics in the design and production of food and medicine also affect the domain of regulation—raising questions of ownership, control, and sovereignty in a globalizing world. By explaining (1) law’s capacity to subsume biotechnological changes in existing doctrines, paradigms, and processes and (2) biotechnology’s open and undetermined challenge to existing legal forms, this chapter describes biotechnology’s implications within the domains of evidence and regulation, providing the setting for Part II of the book.