Lesson 7 - 26 Sep 11

Biobusiness part 2.

I saw one part about Bioremediation and I thought it was very fascinating. So i went on to google and here is what i found.

1) Bioremediation involves the use of bacteria
2) The bacteria can de-contaminate the area by digesting nuclear radioactive waste
3) Mycofiltration involves using fungi to disassemble contaminants, to become CO2 and H20, which are much less harmful.
4) It is amendable, meaning that you can ionize it, to suit different type of situations.

I think one very practical use is for Japan's Nuclear situation, one potential use is to decontaminate the water at the reactors which is said to have leaked radioactive wastes that contaminated the sea.

Another practical use is on the superfund sites, where the lakes and seas in those identified areas have been polluted via industrialisation. This would void the need to use expensive machinery, chemicals and employment of extra manpower to clean up the sites.

We finally have an answer to these pollution and bioremediation does not require much machinery and manpower to operate. This has much cost savings and the money could be used in further research&development for better techniques to remove pollution.



I am going to talk about Genetically Modified Food (GM Food), it may sound very cliche by now because everyone is talking about it, but I really do not understand why there are so much objections against this? Is it because they are modified to beyond the purpose of providing more food?

Why in my opinion GM Food is good.

1) Increases yield.
GM crops are modified in such a way that they can withstand conditions that naturally it can't, and also to resist pests. This is very useful for our well-being, as well as for the farmers because a bad yield means wasted effort resources invested for the crop. With that, we can increase the quantity sold to the market and for consumption. In economics terms, with an increase in supply, keep demand constant, the seller would be able to sell more at a lower price, with an overall profit, and the overall benefit to both the consumer and the supplier in the market will increase too.


2) It alleviates food shortage
Let's face it. Lets look at the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and we see how far our target is. And if we look at our world's current problem, i do not think that attention will be given to those poverty as stated in the MDG. We had the Japan Earthquake recently, then Greece and USA's economical problem, with recession looming in the world, i am certainly not very optimistic about the climate of the situation, in the short-run(1-3years), unless we really come out with something useful.

GM food can help. If GM food can retain the same or if not, more nutrition with better yield, that will really help people in the poorer countries, to obtain more food, for survival.



I wished we could talk more about bioremediation, i thought it was quite interesting to see that there are other friendly bacterias, than we see at yakult and vitagen.
Overall : 8/10!