7th Lesson

For this week's lesson, we had a Japanese guest who sat in with us during lecture. I want to highlight a point she mentioned about her commendable work in Unicef, which is reversing people's mentality of prevention to promotion. Instead of always focusing on preventive measures, perhaps a better way is to inculcate good values and methods. 

"When we are able to grow the resources we need, we will finally be on the road to sustainability.", as quoted from Gurinder Shahi. In my opinion, I think this is relevant in today's world. All this time, we have been using so much resources and often, the amount we consumed is alot more than what we actually need. Therefore, I think the world needs to address this issue and uncover more viable solutions to be self-reliant than being so overly-dependable on the available resources. 

As we have read in one of the required readings, the world's population is expected to hit 9.2billion by 2050. With such a huge population, we need to find ways to sustain the fragile ecosystem because we may not have sufficient resources to support everyone. 

On a side note, the following is what different colours of biotechnology meant.

Blue- Marine 

Green- Agriculture

Red- Medical

White- Industrial

And this lesson was more on green biotechnology! I also learned about Norman Borlaug, who created the basis for agri-biotechnology and won the Nobel Prize in 1970. In a way, he also started the Green Revolution by extracting specific traits and forming new strains to allow the grains to adapt and grow in different environments. We also looked at Monsanto, the company who is often viewed as the bully for monopolizing the agricultural biotech industry. 

The most frequently brought up point would be on whether GM (Genetically-modified) food should be labelled. Honestly, when I am purchasing my foods, the labeling does not affect my decision making. However, this does not mean that there is no need to label these foods because I feel that consumers should be given the right to know about their foods. 

8/10 for this lesson! The presentations were really interesting! I loved the one about lab-grown meat and the point mentioned by one of my classmates of whether the meat would be considered as halal, since it uses pig cells.