Whether you live in San Diego, Orange County, the agricultural areas of the Coachella Valley and central California, or high-tech areas like La Jolla and Irvine, biotechnology and patent law are vital to business.
I’ve been asked, “What is biotechnology really about and does it mean the end of civilization as we know it?”
It is often referred to as genetic engineering, which will make the average person sweat in fear that they have eaten some genetically altered food for breakfast.
But biotechnology is much more and, in this writer’s opinion, it is the hope of humanity if it is developed with a permanent respect for nature and a medical creed to ensure that no harm is done.
Today, biotechnology is divided into four main areas: red biotechnology applies to the medical field, green biotechnology applies to agriculture, white biotechnology applies to the industrial field, and blue refers to the aquatic field.
In the medical field, biotechnology helps develop new drugs, new therapies, and can be used to use normal genes to target or replace faulty genes or boost immunity.
In agriculture, biotechnology can be used to increase crop yields, reduce the vulnerability of crops to disease or weather, and increase the nutritional values of foods. It can even be used to improve the flavor or texture of food. One benefit of biotechnology in agricultural applications is to reduce the need for pesticides or other harmful chemicals on crops that enter the nation’s water supply.
A new area in which biotechnology is developing rapidly is biological engineering, such as in the development of bioprocesses from the laboratory to manufacturing or industrial scale.
Biotechnology is not without its critics and poses moral dilemmas. What biotechnology can fix sometimes produces unwanted results such as residues and super resistant foods that can contaminate other non-GMO crops. Cloning has also sparked a lot of controversy whenever it’s in the news.
But biotechnology in the future may also lead to new ways to clean up polluted environments and the pollutants and waste that humanity produces. And as the world damages its environment, much must also be done to reverse these effects before it is too late.