Ten years is not a long time in the life of an industry like biotech, where drug development or commercialization of a crop can take decades. But today's research landscape is almost unrecognizable from that in 1996, when Nature Biotechnology was relaunched from its predecessor Bio/technology. Publication of the human genome sequence still lay five years off, cDNA arrays had just been described, photolithographically synthesized oligonucleotide chips were under investigation at an obscure company on the West Coast of the United States, the term 'proteomics' had just been coined two years earlier by an Australian researcher at a conference in Siena, Italy, and the first transgenic crops had just been approved for commercial use.

In the following article, Nature Biotechnology interviews several of the authors who contributed some of the most highly cited papers from the past ten years. The papers cover a diverse range of research areas—from array technology, proteomics, molecular beacons, fluorescent proteins, quantum dots, embryonic stem cells and gene delivery to agbiotech. The selection of research presented here is not intended to be an exhaustive representation of the most important advances in biotech from the past decade; it is simply a snapshot of the past decade's most highly cited papers in this journal according to the Institute for Scientific Information (Philadelphia, PA, USA). Clearly, research areas not included in this article, such as modeling and systems biology, chemical biology, antibody and protein engineering, biosensors, expression systems, biochemical engineering and environmental biotechnology, will continue to make important contributions to the biotech endeavor in coming years.

The interviews below provide a record of the rather remarkable progress that has been made over the past ten years.

Dawn of the gene expression array

Proteomics goes global

The tabula rasa of cells

Beacons of light

More bright ideas

Quantum leaps

The delivery problem

Silence is golden

Golden harvests