Question: hello,i am phoebe from the science chat i would like to ask you how biotechnology can change the medicine for the better and help lives.

Hi phoebe,

In many different ways, also because ‘biotechnology’ can mean so many different things. I’ll give you a few examples of how biotechnology can improve people’s health — not only through medicine.

1. Some diseases are caused by “mistakes” in people’s genomes (DNA). If you can detect the mistake by looking at someone’s genome before the disease starts getting really bad, you can treat the disease or even prevent it.

2. There’s a hot new area called “personalized medicine”. The idea is to use the information in someone’s genome, even if there isn’t a “mistake” as such, to design medical treatment that suits them best.
A simple example is this: suppose a person has a disease that can be treated using either drug A or drug B. Both drugs work, but in some people drug A is more effective and in other people drug B is more effective. At the moment, it’s a guess which to use. But often it actually depends on whether a person has Gene 1 or Gene 2, so if you can find that out first, you can give the patient the drug that suits them better.

3. Biotechnology can help make factories cleaner, or even clean up pollution. Less pollution means healthier people.

4. Biotechnology is beginning to allow us to make healthier foods. And I don’t mean making it healthier by fiddling with it after it leaves the farm, I mean designing the plant (or dairy cow) so that it already contains more vitamins (or whatever else) from the beginning. (See, for example, this news item: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/17/2658048.htm)

Hope that helps!