"BioBusiness may well be our best hope for sustainable development."
According to prof, biobusiness will change our lifes in ways such as healthcare, food, clothes, energy sources etc. As mentioned, biobusiness accounted for up to 33% of the global GDP. When I first heard that, I found it astonishing. However, after looking at the break down of figures, I realized that it is actually rather expected. Unknowingly, the world had entered into an era of biobusiness as we developed.
This ties in with reading 1. As the rest of the world continued to develop, the developing countries are left behind. In the reading, we read about how there is a need to deal with underdevelopment the challenge of poverty. People living in rural areas still lack access to sanitation and clean drinking water. As we can see, there is such a vast disparity! Biobusiness makes up 33% of the global GDP, and yet, there are still so many people living in such conditions! Hence, I support the article as it gave a solution to the problem. We need to have innovation and strategic investment in biobusiness that can help improve the conditions of the rural areas.
One major problem that governments are facing which prevents them from helping improve the conditions of such areas is the problem of patents. The developed countries are making use of the developing countries for testing! This links up with reading 2. Reading 2 argued that these intellectual property rights are mainly just for companies to maximize their profits and monopolize based on their property rights. It also mentioned that in the process of coming up with the patents, so much testing had been done on the third world countries that it damages their ecology and yet, no credit had been given to them.
Through patenting, it has become more expensive for the government to try solve these problems as if they will want to use a certain biotechnology to solve a problem, for example drinking water, they will have to buy the rights to use the technology patented by a certain company before using it. I find this ridiculous. Yes, patent may help protect property rights and hence inspire more people to innovate. However, appropriate credit should be given and appropriate corporate social responsibility should be shown to the people who were tested on and who needs all the help they can get.
The second quote on the white board made me think a lot more. I recently gave a presentation on sustainable development in class and the second quote came as an enlightenment. Why haven’t I thought of that when I did my presentation? Indeed, biobusiness can play a major role in helping us move towards sustainable development. Through biobusiness, we improve the way we do business through the introduction of biotechnology. With biotechnology, we can create biodegradable materials, or we can create new forms of greener energy. Most countries in the world today are focusing on investing in biotechnology.
Very often, we assume that biotechnology is all about making health care instruments and concentrates mainly on the health care sector. Today, I realized that biotechnology actually covers so much more than that. It covers all the way from making beer, to creating greener forms of energy. Biotechnology has enabled people to come up with ways to make things easier, and to improve the way certain things are carried out, especially in the health care sector.
In reading 4, we read about how innovations are being disrupted due to health care companies fearing that they will lose profits and lose their business model. I find this unacceptable. Sometimes, in order to keep their profits, companies refuse to adopt innovations that might bring the cost down and help their consumers save more money, hence affecting their profits. To bring things back to home, we can also see how doctors are sometimes doing the same thing. Some doctors give all sorts of advice just to persuade their patients choose a certain procedure or purchase unnecessary medicine just so that they can earn more from their patients. Sometimes all the patient need is a simple low cost procedure. To a certain degree, I find this despicable and low-handed. As a doctor, his/her job is to help the patient recover in the best and most cost effective way, not to make the patients go through unnecessary procedures just to make more money out of them.
We then had individual presentations. What I found interesting was about medical tourism. We were asked if medical tourism was actually causing more harm to the poor. Medical tourism mainly consists the private sector, not the public sector. And the poor do not use the private the sector. Hence, I see no reason why it is harmful to them. Maybe just the fact that the private sector will act as a brain drain and attract all the talents from the public sector due to better pay. However, the pros do outweigh the cons as there will be a spillover effect and the revenue gained from medical tourism can be used to improve the current public health care system for the poor and also the public health care system can learn a lot from the private health care systems.
On the whole, I found today’s lesson very focused on the healthcare systems and how biobusiness and biotechnology links to healthcare. I feel that there is still a lot of scope in biobusiness and biotechnology that has yet to be expanded on. I hope the next lesson will tell us more about the other areas of biobusiness rather than just focusing mainly on healthcare.
I rate today’s lesson an 8/10. See you guys next week!
-Thong Yong Sen (Matthew)-
0 comments:
Post a Comment