The science of environmental biotechnology has been going through rapid changes in recent times. No longer are waste water treatments, clean energy, remediation of toxic dump sites or oil spill, municipal or industrial sewage or effluent treatments, are the major areas of concern or study. Attention is now being paid not only to our macro environment but also to micro environments such as how the human body copes with certain drugs or environmental insults such as auto emissions, tobacco smoke, sun's UV rays, and the like. Major issues such as how to sequester and remove green house gases from the atmosphere and store them as solids in geologic formations or ocean bed or how to generate clean fuels such as H2 in a form that can be safely sorted and transported are being addressed by the government agencies and scientific communities. The human genome sequence project allows the determination of various single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in individual human genomes that will certainly allow us to determine individual's predisposition to environmental pollutants, infectious diseases and the like. Such ability as well as other issues in turn raises important social, ethical and legal questions regarding the access of the medical and genetic records of individuals to their employers or their insurance agents, the safety of the genetically-altered foods, the release of genetically-engineered microbes, animals or plants to the open environment, and host of similar issues, including the wisdom of patenting genetically-engineered higher forms of life. ISEB-2004-Chicago is designed to address such scientific, technological, legal and ethical issues by gathering together scientists, engineers, lawyers, judges, members of the legislative bodies and interested communities for discussing and finding acceptable solution of our current and emerging environmental problems. This sort of broad-based conference is extremely rare and ISEB-2004-Chicago is possibly the first of its kind to bring to focus such diverse issues.
