Biotechnology and its Applications

Biotechnology has changed farming by creating crops with new and useful traits. Plants whose genes have been changed by genetic engineering are called genetically modified (GM) crops or transgenic plants. They carry a foreign gene that gives them a desirable property.

Important benefits of GM crops:

• Pest resistance — the most famous example is Bt cotton. A gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is put into the cotton plant; the plant then makes a protein that is toxic to certain insect pests (like the bollworm) but harmless to humans and other animals. This greatly reduces the need for chemical pesticides. Bt brinjal is another example.
• Pest/disease and stress resistance — crops can be made resistant to insects, diseases, drought, cold or salty soil.
• Better nutrition — Golden Rice is genetically engineered to contain more vitamin A (beta-carotene), helping fight vitamin-A deficiency.
• Longer shelf life and reduced post-harvest losses.

GM crops can raise yields and reduce chemical use, which helps food security. However, they also raise concerns — about safety, the environment, and the cost of seeds — so they are carefully regulated. Closely related is tissue culture, in which whole plants are grown from small pieces of plant tissue in the lab; this is used to mass-produce identical, healthy plants (micropropagation) and disease-free crops.

Some of the greatest benefits of biotechnology are in medicine — making medicines, diagnosing diseases and even treating genetic disorders.

• Genetically engineered insulin — people with diabetes need insulin. Earlier it was taken from animals, which could cause allergies. Now the human insulin gene is put into bacteria, which produce safe human insulin (called "humulin") in large amounts — a landmark of biotechnology.
• Other protein medicines — growth hormone, clotting factors for haemophilia, and interferons are also made this way.
• Vaccines — modern recombinant vaccines (such as the hepatitis-B vaccine) are made by genetic engineering and are safer because they contain only a part of the germ, not the whole germ.
• Gene therapy — a technique to treat a genetic disease by inserting a correct (healthy) gene into the patient's cells to make up for the faulty one. It has been tried for some inherited disorders.
• Molecular diagnosis — techniques like PCR and DNA probes can detect a disease (or a pathogen like HIV) very early, even before symptoms appear, by detecting its genes.

Together, these applications have made many treatments safer, more effective and more affordable, and have opened new ways to fight diseases that were once untreatable.

Two further medical advances are stem cell technology and transgenic animals. Stem cells are special unspecialised cells that can develop into many different cell types; they offer hope for repairing damaged tissues and treating diseases (regenerative medicine). Transgenic animals are animals that have had a foreign gene introduced into them — for example, transgenic cows or other animals engineered to produce useful proteins (like medicines) in their milk, or used to study human diseases and test vaccines.

Powerful as it is, biotechnology raises important ethical, safety and social questions that society must handle responsibly.

• Biosafety — the concern that GMOs might harm human health or the environment (for example, a GM crop affecting other organisms or spreading its genes to wild plants). To address this, countries set up regulatory bodies. In India, the GEAC (Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee) examines and approves GM research and products before they can be released, to ensure they are safe.
• Bioethics — moral questions about how far we should go in altering life, such as cloning, genetically modifying humans, or patenting living things. Society must weigh benefits against risks and respect for life.
• Biopiracy — this is when companies or organisations from rich countries use the biological resources or traditional knowledge of a country (often a developing one) without proper permission or fair payment. Examples discussed in India include attempts to patent products based on neem, turmeric and basmati rice, whose uses Indians had known for centuries. Such patents were challenged.

To prevent biopiracy and protect its resources, India passed the Biological Diversity Act, and nations also use patent and rights systems to ensure that benefits are shared fairly with the communities who first developed the knowledge. The lesson is that biotechnology must be used wisely — with proper regulation, honesty and fairness — so that its great benefits reach everyone without harm.