Today's topic is a continuation from last week, BioBusiness Revolution but this week we focus on Agribiology, Environmental Life Sciences and Industrial Biotechnology.
We started off today with a very short video showing "extreme" scenario of us, human population, are destroying the Earth. Some people may think that the video is a bit too harsh or extreme. However, I think that is the ugly truth of us. The slaughtering of poultry, the cutting down of trees, polluting the environment and corruption of the Earth are hard truth and the video actually shows how we go around doing it. For example, many of us eat poultry everyday. However how many of us actually seen a chicken getting slaughtered or feathers being plucked out of the chicken while the chicken is still alive? What we do is simply buy readily available meat from the supermarket or in wet markets. The point is, the slaughtering is there - just that we don't see it. The same holds true for other phenomenons.
One interesting point we talked about is that our growth rate, albeit increasing rapidly for the past decade, is now slowing down. It is estimated that our population will peak at 9.5-10billion people. It is fascinating to know that if our population is meat eaters, we have enough food to feed 10billion people but if all of us are vegetarians, our world can accommodate 30billion people. It is estimated that about 0.5 hectare of land is used per person for a meat eater but only about 0.15 hectare of land is used for each vegetarian.
We went on to talk about the key bio-business opportunity areas covering agri-veterinary and food bio-business. The most important component is agriculture where there is a depletion of food. For e.g. fishes in the ocean has always been thought to be abundance but evidences show that fishes are actually depleting. If nothing is done, we could be in trouble. Many people in our world is actually dependent on fishes either on staple food or for a living. A depletion in fishes would have a significant impact on our world as fishes are one of our basic food.
Another interesting point learnt today is that there are actually a few colors assigned to different type of biotechnology. For example, blue is for marine, white is for industrial or environmental, green is for agricultural and red is for human.
We went on to talk about the readings. I find reading 4 interesting, written by Norman Borlaug (1970 nobel prize winner).
From reading 4, Ending World Hunger: The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry, the article talked about Biotechnology particularly in the agriculture sector. For example, using genes from cotton, maize and potatoes to control the number of serious pest.
One interesting point in the article is that “The world has or will soon have the agricultural technology available to feed the 8.3 billion people anticipated in the next quarter of a century. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use that technology.”
This is a highly controversial problem whether we should allow genetically modified food or not. My personal stand is we should allow genetically modified food because starvation is one of the substantial problems our world is facing. We should not deprive these people of food when GM food has not been proven to be harmful to the human body. I believe we should allow the provision of GM food and leave the choice to people as to whether they want or not to consume this type of food. A good analogy is fast food. Fast food is unhealthy and bad for the human body. However, we still provide it as a choice for people. Hence, the higher authorities should not dictate the people what food they can or cannot eat like some countries that banned GM food.
At the end of the lesson, an important point brought across is that we are actually working in a world where there is incomplete information. We do not know the exact effects of the implementation of a new technology hence there is always a fear - fear of the unknown. When new technology comes out in the past, there was no telling what effect it could have on our world. Like the introduction of cars or cranes or anything, it is beneficial to us but no one could foresee what the effect they could have in the future. For example, cars can lead to accidents. What we can do is to solve the problems then. At least, in my opinion, this is better than keep waiting and deter the technology from coming.
Overall, I rate this class 8/10 as today's topic was interesting for me and I've learnt quite a lot today.
Cheers! :)
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