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Earth Day 2007
Public Symposium on
"Managing Global Climate
Change
Through Bioscience"
9 am, 21st April 2007
Raffles Junior College
To commemorate Earth Day
2007, the Society of Bioscience & Technology (www.socbioscience.org), a
Not-For-Profit Organisation that promotes the development and growth of
the biosciences in Singapore is organizing a Public Symposium Managing
Global Climate Change through Bioscience. This is to create awareness
among Singaporeans regarding the serious and irreversible effects of
Global Climate Change that impact on all aspects of daily living and on
natures resources.
Click
HERE for more information.
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Why is
Biotechnology important in this millennium?
Like most technologies that are fundamentally developed to provide essential
tools to enable mankind to better cope and manage the affairs of daily
living (ADL), biotechnology is no exception. It can be essentially described
as a technology originating from collective advances associated with various
biological sciences like biochemistry, microbiology, cell and molecular
biology that involve the concomitant study and application of proteomics,
genetics and bioinformatics.
Typical applications of biotechnology are employed in the processed food and
biopharmaceutical industries. The latter is capable of producing large
quantities of mass-produced synthetic vaccines by manipulating cells and
proteins via recombinant DNA technology. A key and major applicant of
biotechnology is the medical discipline. |
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Breakthrough developments in genetic engineering are used to develop novel
approaches and medicines in disease treatment (such as the clinical use of
interferon in treating cancer through regulated DNA alteration).
Additionally, synthetically-produced therapeutics such as the Human Growth
Hormone (HGH) and insulin are among others that benefit from recent
biotechnological advances. New high-yield and cost-effective production
routes are also being researched to produce monoclonal antibodies (mAb) that
have demonstrated an efficacious potential in a number of clinical
treatments. Other applications of manipulating genetic
materials that employ
genetic engineering include present attempts to develop niche or novel
clinical methods to treat and correct inherited disorders as well as to
understand the etiology, treatment and prevention of new diseases such as
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Avian Flu among other
futuristic bacterial and viral threats that mankind has yet to confront in
time to come.
While much health and
biomedical benefits can be derived from the advanced use of manipulating the
genetic traits/constitution of our species at genomic levels, there is yet
an overshadowing prospect of abuse arising from extensive human intervention
that predisposes society at large to social and ethical controversies. As
such, global societies need to be cognizant, to address and continue to be
challenged by significant and prevalent issues as the growth and advancement
of Biotechnology proceeds.
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