Over the past century, our bodies have increasingly become exposed to the pharmaceutical action of incorporated biological substances. Some of these have become so ubiquitous that we have even stopped thinking about them as ‘biologics’. We swallow our daily vitamin pills; we rely on vaccines and antibiotics when microbes proliferate; we account for the adverse effects of cortisone; we live a more-or-less normal life thanks to regular injections of insulin or an organ transplant; and we place our faith in monoclonal antibodies when a tumour has been diagnosed. One recent textbook definition of biologics provides us with still more examples:

This recent definition does not include vitamins, hormones, antibiotics or vaccines, although they have been and sometimes still are categorized as ‘biologics’ or ‘biologicals’.

The term ‘biologics’ first emerged in connection with national health-care legislation and the control of vaccine production in the US more than a hundred years ago.