What Part Is Taken by Biotechnology in Human Life?
More details on this website.
More details on this website.
Biotechnology is the use of living systems, cells, organisms for the practical needs of humans. That is, the use of modern science to manipulate living objects in order to gain some benefit and improve human life as Trust Pharmacy does, a well-known pharmaceutical company that distributes medcines all over the world.
Biotechnology is customer-oriented science. For example, it is not in vain that people travel north and study geysers. Scientists understand that they can carry out digs for 10 years and find nothing. But they do it anyway, because sooner or later they will find some kind of bacteria that will make cheap biofuels using one gene of this bacterium. One way or another, every person, when engaged in science, hopes to apply it.
They say that all discoveries occur at the intersection of different specialties: mathematics, biology – bioinformatics; biology, chemistry – biochemistry; medicine, informatics, biology – biomedical informatics. These are all separate blocks that different people are involved in. Biotechnology today, perhaps, pays most attention to the creation of drugs of various types. In addition to the pharmaceutical direction of biotechnology, agriculture (improving the properties of food), ecology, energy (obtaining biofuel) and others are interesting. And, of course, in the future, you can think about human correction.
People have different perceptions of innovations in biotechnology. There are negative and positive examples of perception.
The negative ones are, for example, the opinion that the introduction of a new one will lead to the emergence of viruses that will spread throughout the world and for which there is no vaccine or treatment. Periodic epidemics are associated with this.
The positive ones – for example, you can create a virus that temporarily changes the color of the eyes. Gradually, they turn their color, and with drops of antibiotics, you can turn them blue again. It has little to do with healthcare in the usual sense, but it’s still great. In theory, such manipulations can be done, and society treats such technologies positively. However, in general, people are afraid of the introduction of new technologies. And in order to introduce something new, it is necessary to discuss at the highest level the ethical issues of a particular effect of the drug. And this usually takes a long time.
The US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is trying to implement the achievements of science in order to increase the country’s defense capability – accelerated regeneration, universal donors, weapons, and so on.
Perhaps, in the next 5-10 years, thanks to the interconnection of cybernetics and biotechnology, smart drugs will indeed be created. For example, the creation of very small chips: a capsule or a robot with particles of a drug circulating in the blood, from which, depending on the state of the person, the desired substance will be injected into the blood. There are already successful examples: depending on the glucose level, insulin is injected into the body, which minimizes the degree of invasiveness of the treatment procedure. A person once inserted a chip, injected, and for a very long time forgot to take the medicine.
Nanorobots are a new form of drugs, because in terms of the substances that make up drugs, people have already done everything. We cannot offer anything more – there are few types of chemical compounds that can be used for therapy. These are either proteins, or small molecules, or nucleic acids, which are now also used.
You can make an unlimited number of variants, but they have a limited potential for application, since they work according to general chemical principles. It is no longer possible to influence the cell in any other way.
Most people just want to take a pill, but not all medicinal substances can be added into it. A simpler option is a capsule. More effective – injection and suppositories. And if there was some universal method of treatment, for example, to inject a chip with a concentrate of a drug under the skin, but once a year, they will do it.