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Biotech has applications in four main areas: health care, agriculture and crop production, the production of biofules and oils from corps and environmental uses. The environmental uses of biotech include recycling materials, treating various waste products and clearing sites that have become polluted by industrial activities (known as bioremediation). Medical uses of biotech can include engineering and
utilising organisms that can produce antibiotics or genetic manipulation of
genes to artificially cure certain diseases. Technologies applied to medical
applications are known as ‘red biotechnology’. Geneticists argue that this is a more
environmentally friendly approach than solutions from traditional farming
practices (although this is aggressively contested). The final application is in marine or
aquatic applications (known as blue technology), however examples of use of
biotechnology in this field are comparatively rare. Within medicine, biotechnology can be utilised for drug production or gene therapy. Traditionally the pharmaceutical industry develop new medications predominantly through trial and error. There are more and more anti aging breakthroughs being reported almost on a daily basis while some treatments such as hgh supplements are proving to be quite controversial. The modern biotech approach is to use proteins to target the underlying pathways of the illness. For example, microorganisms such as E. Coli or yeast can be used to produce insulin, treating the underlying cause of diabetes, or can be used to produce antibiotics. Another advantage is that the use of modern biotechnological techniques allows for drugs to be produced more quickly, efficiently and cheaply. For example, before biological organisms were utilised to directly
produce insulin, it had to be extracted from sheep or pigs, which was a very
expensive, and time consuming procedure that also often resulted in unwanted
allergic reactions in the patients. Using genetically altered bacterium
allows for the production of huge quantities of human insulin at a very low
cost. With the use of germline therapy, the genetic makeup of individuals’ descendants can be changed permanently; therefore any error in the procedure will have impacts upon several future generations of the family. Bioethicists have also raised the ethical integrity of technologies that could be used to produce designer babies. |