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Biotechnology, like digital technology, forces us to reconsider fundamental questions about the nature of life, human agency, and relations between the biological and social worlds. A complete research agenda for biotechnology’s impact on and implications for information, communication, and culture would also include the changing nature of individual and social identity, changes in organizational form and financial instruments, reconsideration of human communication processes as a result of what has been learned about cellular and biochemical communications, and legal and cultural implications of the merging of the digital and organic worlds. Biotechnology is not a single technology, but a suite of techniques for processing genetic information derived from a number of disciplines, including biochemistry, molecular genetics, microbiology, and zymotechnology (fermentation). In its current form, biotechnology refers to processing technologies that apply microorganisms, cell cultures, or parts of either for human (industrial) purposes. It includes the design and use of microorganisms for direct use in food or other purposes (what economists refer to as a primary, or final, good) and genetic manipulation of microorganisms to improve their efficiency in converting materials that serve as inputs into other processes (a secondary good). The chapters of this book approach this complex history and the issues it raises from a number of directions. The opening chapter examines the shared features and spaces of biotechnology and digital information technologies as meta-technologies, qualitatively distinct from both the tools first used in the premodern era and the industrial technologies that characterized modernity. The next three chapters explore what is useful and what is not in treating the types of information processed by the two metatechnologies through a shared conceptual lens, each from a different perspective: Ritchie (chap. 2) takes a philosophical approach to the implications of the relationship between the tangible and intangible as suggested by references to the gene as information, Wildman (chap. 3) uses concepts from economics to look at the effects of conditional expectation in both genetically driven and human communication, and the chapter (chap. 4) on facticity is an exercise in narrative analysis. The next two chapters look at issues raised by the ownership of genetic and digital information, again from quite different perspectives: May (chap. 5) approaches the question as a legal problem, and Lievrouw (chap. 6) does so as a trend in the sociology of knowledge. The final three chapters are concerned with relationships between information and power, again from diverse positions: Priest and Ten Eyck (chap. 7) try to understand shifts in public opinion regarding genetically modified foods, Best and Kellner (chap. 8) look at the implications of debates over biotechnology for the emergence of postnormal science, and Murdock (chap. 9) analyzes the role of images in the struggle over genetically modified (GM) foods as they interact with cultural trends in response to digital information technologies to reach some conclusions regarding the relationships between postnormal science and the exercise of power.