## Modern technologies in agriculture, industry, and medicine

As the technological progress of human society accelerated over time, the original biotechnologies were improved or replaced by their more accessible and cheaper variants. Mechanisation and automation became more intensive in agriculture (the wheelbarrow was invented in China around the year 230) and the medical industry also developed rapidly. Especially, the advances in medicine were closely linked to biology and biotechnologies. Breakthrough discoveries in this field include the establishment of vaccines and vaccination (in 1798, Edward Jenner was the first to use the smallpox vaccine) along with the later discovery of antibiotics (in 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin). As the mankind constantly expanded and the demands for the quantity and quality of food, medicine and other commodities continued to rise, more effective biotechnologies were developed, making use of crucial discoveries from the field of genetics. In the second half of the 20th century it was definitively confirmed that DNA is the carrier of genetic information, its function and the mechanism by which it is realised were described, the genetic code was deciphered (see chapter 3, meet DNA), and in the 1970s the techniques of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering emerged (Chapter 10). Knowledge and scientific progress in this area, combined with the improvement of modern technologies in all branches of human activity subsequently led to the creation of new forms of biotechnologies. One of the most significant, and at the same time the most controversial, of them is Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).