Containment of unit processes

Industrial biotechnology processes have been considered to pose little or no hazard to workers on the environment unlike, say, the chemical and nuclear industries.1. This view would seem to be justified in that the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries do have good safety records based on experience and procedures developed over many years. The increased industrial application of recombinant DNA (r-DNA) technology has served to focus attention on the safety of the biotechnology process industry; attention manifest in the burgeoning regulations and guidelines appearing nationally and internationally (see chapters 1–4). Although there is really little to suggest that the new biotechnology processes are inherently any more or less safe than the established ones2. the current regulations stress the need to minimise or prevent releases that might contaminate personnel or the environment. This requires that risk assessments be carried out on all stages of biotechnology processes and that the principles of biosafety be applied to reduce or eliminate the potential for generating biological hazards.