This document discusses biotechnology and its various applications. It defines biotechnology as the development and use of living organisms to produce useful products. It describes traditional biotechnology as involving organisms like algae, bacteria and yeast to make foods, and modern biotechnology using genetic engineering techniques like recombinant DNA. Some key applications of biotechnology mentioned are using microbes to produce insulin, vaccines, monoclonal antibodies for diagnosis and therapy, gene therapy, tissue culture, stem cell techniques, DNA technologies, organotransplantation, bioremediation, the Human Genome Project, and bioinformatics.