The Biotechnical Division was a scientific research group of the early Imperium of Man that was formed on Terra before or during the ancient Unification Wars of the late 29th and 30th Millennia by the Emperor of Mankind. Many of its laboratories were located deep beneath what later became the Imperial Palace complex in the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains.
The skilled scientists and engineers of the Biotechnical Division were tasked by the Emperor with carrying out both the Primarch Project and the creation of the Space Marine Legions.
The first director of the Biotechnical Division was the famed Terran geneticist Amar Astarte, who gave her name in High Gothic to the Legiones Astartes but who betrayed the Imperium late in the Unification Wars when she participated in the Imperial Palace Coup in the misguided belief that with the loss of the primarchs to the Warp, the Space Marine Legions created from their gene-lines would prove to ultimately be too unstable to achieve the goals the Emperor and she had wanted for them.
By the time of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium, Astarte had been replaced as director after her death by the even more skilled Terran scientist Ezekiel Sedayne. A portion of Sedayne's personality and memories would later be digitally copied and incorporated into the psyche of Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl through the use of his "soul-merging" technology and would help to provide the archmagos with his unparalleled skill at genetic engineering and the ability to create the Primaris Space Marines by improving upon the original work of the Emperor, Astarte and Sedayne.
Sources[]
- Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work (Novel) by Guy Haley, Ch. 19