#7

27 September 2011

Lesson 7

Its agonizing midterms week yey

This week's session was BioBusiness Part 2. We discussed about blue (marine), green (agricultural), red (medical) and white (industrial) biotechnology.

"When we are able to grow the resources we need, we will finally be on the road to sustainability" -Gurinder Shahi

This thought shared by Prof was agreed by most of us in class, and I too hold the same sentiments. Human beings have always been reliant on the available resources that Earth provides, like fossil fuels, and the problem with these resources are that the supply is not able to meet the ever-increasing demand. Especially with the growth in human population, demand will most likely continue spiraling upwards. One day, when all the available resources have finally be drained up, we will find ourselves in a precarious where we have nothing to depend on but ourselves. Thus, what prof said is indeed true; to ensure sustainability, we have to be able to grow the resources we need and that is to be self-dependent. It is heartening to find out through the presentations that day, that many organizations have already embarked on this learning journey to ensure sustainability. For example, gm food, lab grown meat and corn that can replace plastic. GM food has already been part of our lives for some time already, though many of us do not realize this (though we did find out that day during class!). With regards to the debate about whether GM food should be labelled or not, while I think that it really makes not much of a difference because ultimately consumers care more about the price in reality, it might be good to label so as to give people the right to decide and know what they are consuming.

We had a sit-in guest from Unicef for this session and one thing she mentioned about her work was that they focused on developing human resources, for example putting money into educating women as they are central to the family unit and thus more likely to spread the learning to their children. I believe that developing human resources is also very essential. We discussed about food security in class, and it was mentioned that the availability of arable land is shrinking over time, and there may be a threat to food security as one has to decide whether to grow food or biofuels. One solution to this mentioned in the a presentation would be Hydroponics, which have been employed by Singapore. And like our guest mentioned, the empowerment of women also helps in achieving food security for themselves and their families as they gain economic, sociopolitical and physiological access.

On the Facebook group, one of our friends from a different session posted the link to the McDonald's game which was part of her presentation. Basically the game allows you to run you own chain of McDonald's enterprise, which involves making decisions from the beginning of the process like using GM crops or not, how much soy crops or cattle to grow and whether to feed the cows with growth serum so that they become fatter, to the end-stage decisions like how to market the products so that people will consume them and whether to bribe respective people so as to stay out of bad publicity. It was a really fun game and at the same time really insightful to the workings of a corporation like McDonald's. It really made me wonder how much I know about what goes into my very very delicious McSpicy and McNuggets. Yikes!

A 7/10 for this session because I thought that the session could be improved by having more varied presentations that may further broaden our knowledge on this topic!