Professor Matthew Cobb looks at how genetic engineering became big business - from the first biotech company that produced human insulin in modified bacteria in the late 1970s to the companies like Monsanto which developed and then commercialised the first GM crops in the 1990s. Were the hopes and fears about these products of genetic engineering realised?

Thanks to The State of Things from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC for the interview with Mary-Dell Chilton.

(Picture: DNA molecule, Credit: KTSDesign/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)