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6 Biotechnology improvement was made to techniques involving sterility maintenance, aeration methods, product isolationandpurification.WorldWarIIwasthecatalyst which led to the invention of the modern fermenter (vessels used for fermentation), also called bioreactor for mass production of antibiotic penicillin. Today, many chemicals such as antibiotics, amino acids, hormones, pigments and even enzymes are produced with extreme precision in controlled environments of industrial bioreactors. The foundation of modern biotechnology were laid down with the advancements in science and technology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus with the advent of the first compound microscope, made by Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen in 1590, which could magnify about 3×-9×, enabled humans to ‘see’ things that were not perceived by naked eye. In 1665, Robert Hooke, a physicist, examined thinly sliced cork and drew rectangular components, which he called cellulae (Latin for ‘small chambers’). In 1676, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch shopkeeper, saw living organisms in pond water and called them ‘animalcules’. During the eighteenth century, the cell theory was developed by German biologists, Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, who determined that all plant and animal tissues were composed of cells. In 1858, Rudolf Virchow, a German pathologist, concluded that ‘all cells arise from pre-existing cells’ and that cell is the basic unit of life. Between 1850 and 1880, Pasteur developed the process of pasteurisation. By 1860, he also concluded that spontaneous generation of organisms did not occur, proving that ‘all cells arise from pre-existing cells’. In 1896 Eduard Buchner converted sugar to ethyl alcohol using yeast extracts, showing that biochemical transformations can occur without the use of cells. By 1920s and 1930s, the biochemical reactions of many important metabolic pathways were established. Genetics and Principles of Heredity was developed by an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel, beginning in 1857, when he cross-pollinated pea plants to examine traits such as petal color, seed color, and seed texture. In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Reprint 2026-27