What is Biotechnology?

(This answer is taken from my book ‘Innovate the Next: Success Frameworks to Innovating Products in Any Revolution’). Biotechnology is a broad area that involves the use of living organisms and systems to produce a variety of uses and products in various fields, even outside of biology.

How penicillin was discovered and synthetically reproduced for fast mass production is a form of biotechnology in the works. They synthetically imitated a living thing for a specific purpose.

The study of biology (living things) to produce drugs that kill bad cells and rejuvenate living cells is biotechnology in the works.

This practice dates back a long time.

Dog breeding is biotechnology, i.e. purposefully mating selected dog breeds to produce a dog that meets a specific need; e.g. hunting.

Biogas is biotechnology, as is the creation of vaccines; i.e. Vaccines may carry certain mild viruses that, when in your system, hurt you less than the actual virus (were it to infect you), but they also activate your body to create antibodies against similar but more severe viruses.

Paternity testing is possible because of biotechnology. The sensors are encoded with ways to analyse DNA and match patterns in it. DNA encoding is the study of living cells, organisms and systems in order to then program them. The matching occurs when the subject DNA code matches another tested against it.

You can see that it also exapts and merges technology.

Biotechnology is not that farfetched from our everyday experiences and uses.

Stem cells are cells that reproduce other cells in organisms. Stem cell replacement is taking stem cells from elsewhere; (e.g. the placenta after giving birth), and inserting them into those who need it, i.e. people with weakened stem cells.

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Click here for the explanations of the other components of the 4IR (5G, Quantum Computing, Biotechnology, Autonomous Vehicles, 3D Printing, Decentralised Consensus, Iot, Nanotechnology, AI And Robotics).

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‘Innovate the Next’ is available on Amazon, on Takealot.com and in all South African bookstores.