Week 7: the biobusiness revolution 2: agriculture and the environment: past, present, future

HI. IT'S WEEK 7. OMG

firstly i would like to apologize for the lack of participation in class today. The past week has been tough and i didnt manage to get alot of rest. so alot of enerygy was spent trying to keep myself awake in class. =x

but despite that,  i would still say that the class was still quite interesting (thankfully) and the presentations were all well presented.

So as usual, the class started out with a video which illustrated humans to be a disease that our Mother Earth contracted.

truthfully, i do agree with the video that humans are harming the Earth at an exponential rate. even though there are groups which are trying to save the Earth. Despite that, people still do not understand the importance of being environmental friendly or going green. Even Obama views economic values more then going green. the better conditions we live in, the worse our Earth would become.  =(

Another interesting topic which we talk about in class would be with regards to spider silk and spider textile. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk

I heard about something like this before, but i never knew it came from spiders. It is really fascinating to know that the strength of such silks can be comparable to high-grade steel. It is quite hard to image a spider can be able to produce such powerful and strong silk, looking at the size of the spider.

In class, Prof mentioned about the conversation he had with his friend. “if you have all the resources in the world, what would u invest it in?”

The first thing that came to my mind was environment. If we were to neglect the environment or harm the environment further, nothing can save our Earth anymore. But when the prof mention about his friend’s answer, which was to educate women, I could not help but agree too. A woman is the center of the family. They are the ones that hold the family together and they are the ones that educate their kids.

We then went on to talk about the different kinds of biotechnology, namely blue, red, green, white biotech. I found this relatively interesting as how the different biotechs are classified by colors.

Red biotech -> medical purpose

White biotech -> industrial application

Blue biotech -> aquatic uses

Green biotech -> agriculture and environmental uses

http://www.umbi.umd.edu/about/what-is-biotechnology.php

Moving on to the presentations for the day, personally I like sheryl’s presentation on lab grown meat and Terrance’s GMO presentation.

With regards to lab grown meat, there were different views with regards to whether we can accept lab-grown meat or not. On a personal note,  I can accept lab-grown meat. As mentioned by Huiying with regards to the experiment, it is hard to differentiate between lab grown meat and normal meat (without them knowing which is the lab grown and which is the normal). Thus this shows that it is actually a psychology barrier for people to accept lab grown meat. So one solution to this would be advertisement. If got marketing is done to market lab grown meat, emphasizing on the benefits of lab grown meat as compared to normal meat, I believe that people will be able to accept lab grown meat in the future.

Another interesting presentation for the day is leonard’s presentation on vertical farming. Like what he mentioned, Singapore is also starting to apply this technique. I feel that such technology would be extremely beneficial to a small country like Singapore as we have a growing population but not a growing landscape.  (p.s singapore’s population is now 5.18mil)

Overall I find the class quite interesting (though im not a big fan of agriculture). I feel that it would be even more enriching if there were more variety in the presentation topics. I would rate the class 7/10 and I look forward to recess week! YAY!

Till next time!