Biotechnology: Applications, Benefits, and Risks
Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially used in agriculture, pharmacy, food science, the environment, and medicine. It develops into a multidisciplinary approach involving various disciplines and sciences such as biology, biochemistry, genetics, virology, agronomy, engineering, physics, chemistry, medicine, veterinary medicine, and others. It has a great impact on pharmacy, medicine, microbiology, food science, mining, and agriculture, among other fields. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992, biotechnology is defined as “any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms or derivatives thereof to make or modify products or processes for specific use.” The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Biotechnology of the Convention on Biological Diversity defines modern biotechnology as the application of “in vitro techniques of nucleic acid, including deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and direct injection of nucleic acid into cells or organelles, or cell-fusion beyond the taxonomic family that overcome natural physiological barriers to reproduction or recombination and are not techniques used in traditional breeding and selection.”
History of Biotechnology
What today is known as genetic engineering or recombinant DNA was part of the discovery made in 1970 by Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans of the enzyme (restrictase) that can recognize and cut DNA at specific sequences. Biotechnology has its roots in molecular biology, a field of study that evolved rapidly in the 1970s, giving rise to the first biotechnology company, Genentech, in 1976.
Applications of Biotechnology
Biotechnology has applications in key industrial areas such as healthcare, with the development of new approaches for treating diseases; agriculture, with the development and improvement of food crops; non-food uses of crops, such as biodegradable plastics, vegetable oils, and biofuels; and environmental care through bioremediation, such as recycling, waste treatment, and cleanup of sites contaminated by industrial activities. It also applies genetics to modify certain organisms.
Types of Biotechnology
- Red Biotechnology: Applies to the use of biotechnology in medical processes. Examples include the design of organisms to produce antibiotics, the development of vaccines, and the development of genetic engineering to cure diseases through genetic manipulation.
- White Biotechnology: Also known as industrial biotechnology, is that applied to industrial processes. One example is the design of organisms to produce a chemical or the use of enzymes as industrial catalysts to either produce valuable chemicals or destroy hazardous chemical contaminants (e.g., using oxidoreductases).
- Green Biotechnology: Biotechnology is applied to agricultural processes. One example is the design of transgenic plants that can grow in adverse environmental conditions or plants resistant to pests and diseases.
- Blue Biotechnology: Also called marine biotechnology, is a term used to describe the applications of biotechnology in marine and aquatic environments. Even at an early stage of development, there are promising applications for aquaculture, healthcare, cosmetics, and food products.
Bioremediation and Biodegradation
Bioremediation is the process by which microorganisms are used to clean up a contaminated site. Biological processes play an important role in removing pollutants, and biotechnology uses the catabolic versatility of microorganisms to degrade and convert these compounds. In the field of environmental microbiology, studies based on the genome open new areas of research in silico, expanding the panorama of metabolic networks and their regulation, as well as clues about the molecular pathways of degradation and adaptation strategies to changing environmental conditions. The approaches of functional genomics and metagenomics increase understanding of different regulatory pathways and networks of carbon flow in non-standard and special compounds, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of technologies.
Biotransformation and bioremediation processes. Maritime environments are especially vulnerable since oil spills in coastal and open seas are difficult to contain, and mitigating damage is difficult. In addition to pollution through human activities, millions of tons of oil enter the marine environment through natural seepage. Despite its toxicity, a considerable fraction of the oil entering marine systems is eliminated by the hydrocarbon degradation activity carried out by microbial communities, in particular by so-called hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria.
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that addresses biological problems using computational techniques and makes possible the rapid organization and analysis of biological data. Bioinformatics plays a key role in diverse fields such as functional genomics, structural genomics, and molecules.
Bioengineering
Biological engineering or bioengineering is a branch of engineering that focuses on biotechnology and life sciences. It includes different disciplines such as biochemical engineering, biomedical engineering, biological process engineering, biosystems engineering, etc. It is an integrated approach to the fundamentals of biological sciences and traditional principles of engineering.
Benefits and Risks of Biotechnology
Benefits
- Superior performance: Through GMOs, crop yield increases, giving more food for fewer resources, reducing crops lost to disease or pests as well as by environmental factors.
- Reduction of pesticides: Each time a GMO is modified to resist a particular pest, it helps to reduce pesticide use associated with it, which often causes widespread environmental damage and health issues.
- Improvement in the development of new materials.
Environmental Hazards
The environmental risks include the possibility of cross-pollination, through which the pollen of genetically modified (GM) plants is disseminated to non-GM crops in nearby fields, so it can spread certain characteristics such as herbicide resistance of GM plants to those that are not GM. Other environmental risks arise from the heavy use of genetically modified crops with genes that produce insecticidal toxins, such as the Bacillus thuringiensis gene. This can cause the development of a resistance gene in insect populations exposed to GM crops. There may also be risks to species that are not the target, such as birds and butterflies, from plants with genes for insecticides. Biodiversity may also be lost.
Health Risks
There is a risk that modified viruses and bacteria could escape high-security laboratories and infect the human or animal population. Biological agents are classified according to the risk of infection into four groups:
- Biological agent of group 1: One that is unlikely to cause disease in man.
- Biological agent of group 2: One that can cause disease in humans and may pose a hazard to workers, but is unlikely to spread to the community, and there is usually effective prophylaxis or treatment.
- Biological agent of group 3: One that can cause severe human disease and presents a serious hazard to workers, with a risk of spreading to the community, and there is usually effective prophylaxis or treatment.
- Biological agent of group 4: One that causes severe disease in humans, is a serious hazard to workers, with a high probability of spreading to the community, and there is usually no effective prophylaxis or effective treatment.
Ethical and Social Concerns
- Human-assisted reproduction.
- Ethical status of the embryo and fetus.
- Individual right to procreate.
- Surveys and their potential uses for genetic discrimination: rights to privacy and not to know genetic predispositions to incurable diseases.
- Modification of the human genome to “improve” human nature.