Aaaaaaaand we have now come to hell week. A week filled with mid-term exams and quizzes and projects and presentations and just basically so much work to do, we need 48 hours a day. So it was quite a relief TWC didn't have mid-term papers :)
BioBusiness Revolution: Agribiology, Environmental Life Sciences and Industrial Biotechnology
For this week's lesson, we dealt with three big topics under the BioBusiness revolution, namely agribiology, environmental life sciences and industrial biotechnology.
Some time during the lesson, Prof Shahi asked the class a hypothetical question, "If you had all the resources in the world, where would you put them?". For me, the answer that immediately popped up in my head was to distribute the resources equally amongst every single human being in the world so that there will be peace and harmony. Pretty immature, isn't it? I thought about my answer for awhile, and decided that it wasn't the best answer. Mainly because if everyone in the world was allowed equal resources, there will be little progress in the world because there is little incentive to fight for anything. There will not be any competition since everyone is entitled to the same amount of resources. Prof went on to shared with us the answer his friend gave, which was to spend all the resources on educating all the women in the world. I was shocked by the answer at first but was later really enlightened after the explanation. So basically it has been proven that in most households, the children learn more from their mothers than from their fathers. In simple terms, 'Educate a man and you've educated a man. Educate a woman and you've educated the entire household.' Thinking about this quote, I find that it does hold true. Many a times, fathers are the sole bread winners of the household. They slog their butts out from dusk to dawn to bring back the bacon for the family and therefore are seldom at home. But when I thought about it, maybe society is undergoing a shift. Nowadays, we are witnessing more and more househusbands emerging, and mothers are the ones bringing home the bacon. Of course, this is only the minority, but we cannot ignore the fact that this is in existence. Nonetheless, I still agree with that quote.
A major component that was discussed during class was the topic of Genetically-Modified food (GM food). The world's population is growing significantly faster than the amount of food our farmers can produce, and that has raised concerns for the possibility of a global food shortage in the near future. As such, people are exploring the feasibility of having GM food and are testing the responsiveness of the public to this new technology. Today, it is not difficult to find GM food in our local supermarkets, especially since most of these GM food have been labelled. However, there are countries, like the USA, who have not allowed producers to label their GM products. This has sparked ethical debates. Of course, the idea of GM food sounds all too ideal. If successful, it can solve the world's hunger problems. Simply because with GM technology, food can be produced much faster and in greater quantity, some even with increased nutritional values. GM food will help to solve some problems such as famine and malnutrition, mostly in less developed countries. As a result, these countries will have the potential and opportunity to develop themselves.
In terms of the revolution of industrial biotechnology, one of the more interesting industrial innovation brought up during class was the spiderweb silk. It is basically a super strong revolutionary material that could possibly change the structure of how our daily products are manufactured. To give an idea about its strength, a pencil thick strand of spiderweb silk is able to stop a Boeing 747 in flight. In fact, spiders can easily recycle the silk by eating it and reproducing them again. Pretty environmental-friendly, huh?
Another interesting concept brought up in class was vertical farming. To capitalise on the limited land space we have, vertical farming is adopted to increase production yield. It is both ecologically and environmentally friendly. I believe this concept is feasible in developed countries and especially in Singapore, since we have very very limited land space. Although agriculture does not constitute a large part of our GDP, it is still useful to be able to locally grow our fruits and vegetables and rely less on our neighbouring countries. Besides, vertical farming is meant to be implicated in overcrowded cities with a significant number of skyscrapers framing the city landscape. In this way, not only are we able to locally grow our own agricultural products, we are able to achieve a cleaner and greener city landscape in the process. We are able to kill two birds with one stone!
Lesson Rating: 7/10
Thorough discussions about agricultural innovations but industrial biotechnology had limited airtime. Would have been better if industrial innovations such as the spiderweb silk was talked about in greater depth.
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