Building a Workforce for the Information Economy (2001) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Appendix A: Biotechnology
Appendix A: Biotechnology
Pages 315-330
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 315... ...
Appendixes
|
From page 316... ...
Mr. Saflund has completed doctoral coursework in Community College Leadership at Oregon State University.
|
From page 317... ...
The first major scientific underpinning of biotechnology emerged in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick published their paper describing the double helix structure of DNA. In the 1970s and 1980s, biotechnology focused primarily on the production of therapeutic proteins using recombinant DNA technology.
|
From page 318... ...
A.2 BIOTECHNOLOGY TODAY AND TOMORROW Modern techniques of cell and molecular biology, combined with capital investment from government, venture capital funds, and the pharmaceutical industry, have helped to create an important new industrial sector, biotechnology. Biotechnology has close ties with academia, which contributes important fundamental research in the underlying science and engineering and also educates a skilled biotechnology workforce.
|
From page 319... ...
Genomics is generating large quantitites of new, high-quality information about complex biological organisms. In addition, computational biology, which uses simulation and computational techniques to define and analyze biological events at the level of the whole organism and, increasingly, at the molecular level, is becoming a central part of biomedical science.
|
From page 320... ...
Data mining can automate the identification, extraction, and normalization of information from unstructured text such as technical papers or genetic sequence datasets. One application of data extraction the automatic population of a database of protein structure and function that is generated by an automated search of the scientific literature has been technically validated at the National Library of Medicine using the NLM's text processing capabilities (Metamap)
|
From page 321... ...
Biotechnology companies produced revenues of $20 billion, and companies supplying inputs or selling goods and services to biotechnology employees produced revenues of $27 billion. · $11 billion in R&D spending.
|
From page 322... ...
By contrast, Merck a large, mature pharmaceutical company had 53,800 employees in 1998, total revenues of $24 billion, and a net income of $4.6 billion (see Table Aid. A.4.3 Relationship to the Pharmaceutical Industry The biotechnology industry has strong connections to the much larger pharmaceutical industry, which provides capital in return for access to new drug technologies, thus playing a role similar to that of venture capitalists in the IT industry.
|
From page 323... ...
mates suggest that the number of biotechnology employees within the pharmaceutical industry has more than doubled over the past 5 years. While the pharmaceutical industry has provided much of the financial underpinning for biotechnology companies, venture capital, government grants, and financing from the public markets have also been major factors in the success of the biotechnology industry.
|
From page 324... ...
position paper on key figures of the European biotechnology industry, available online at |
From page 325... ...
At least half of biotechnology industry employees hold scientific and technical positions and are involved in R&D or production. Of these, a typical categorization might be as follows: 19 percent have a Ph.D., 17 percent have an M.S., 50 percent have a B.S., and 14 percent are prebaccalaureate or community college educated.
|
From page 327... ...
Of the 25,000 employees who work in San Diego area biotechnology and biopharmaceutical companies, approximately 6.4 percent are H-1B visa holders. (One research-intensive biotechnology company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, reported that 17 percent of its workforce is composed of foreign nonimmigrant workers and that about 3 percent of its staff are permanent residents whom Millennium has sponsored to achieve residency status.)
|
From page 328... ...
In the newer fields of computational biology, genomics, and bioinformatics, several distinct challenges confront the biotechnology workforce. First, users of genetic sequence data and databases, image repositories, and laboratory cell data are generally not highly trained informaticians.
|
From page 329... ...
Compared to IT product development, product development in biotechnology is more risky, more costly, and generally more time consuming. Unlike the IT industry, the biotechnology industry is highly regulated: for example, the FDA regulates drugs, foods, cosmetics, diagnostics, medical devices, and animal and human food additives, and the USDA regulates animal vaccines, plant pests and derivatives, and transgenic plants and animals.
|
From page 330... ...
IBM has announced that its Gene Blue project the company aims to build a computer 500 times more powerful than the fastest computers used today will attempt to solve the complex problem of protein folding, a key challenge in understanding protein function. Also, in response to the needs of the biotechnology industry, several new companies are using the Internet to create new markets for bioinformatics and are offering easy-to-use versions of complex software to life scientists rather than to bioinformaticians per se.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.