Biotechnology Centennial

101 years ago, in 1919, the Hungarian engineer Karl Ereky was the first to use the term and hereafter it is used to define this multidisciplinary area that uses biology, chemistry, and various processes for use in agriculture, forestry, and science. food, pharmacy, industrial process, medicine and the environment.

This scientific discipline essentially comprises basic and applied research, integrating different views or perspectives derived from technology and biological sciences, such as molecular biology, bioinformatics, applied marine microbiology and cell biology.

Biotechnology is the result of the union of the words biology and technology, and it is precisely that: biological technology. Internationally, when we speak of Biotechnology, we refer to "any technological application that uses biological systems and living organisms or their derivatives for the creation or modification of products or processes for specific uses."

We are biological machinery

All living things are capable of processing compounds to transform them into energy, biomass and other by-products. What makes us special is that the raw materials we use and the final products we generate do not produce pollutants, integrating into natural cycles in which their waste is reused.

Going a little deeper we can discover that living beings can be considered biological machinery, because we use biological technology in the form of molecules to move, feed and obtain energy from what we eat, also to breathe, think and create.

Biotechnology consists of using this biological machinery from other living beings for the benefit of the human being. Through this discipline, scientists seek to take advantage of the biological technology of living things to generate healthier food products, more effective medicines, less polluting and resistant products or materials, clean energy, systems to improve the natural environment and, above all, obtain more crops. productive.

In the agriculture

As agriculture is practically the first human activity, it can be thought that it does not have much to do with science, technology and less with Biotechnology, which is a big mistake.

From its beginnings, more than 10 years ago in the East, when man stopped being nomadic and became sedentary, man began to domesticate animal and vegetable species in order to improve them and obtain more and better food and service products. for their survival. And already in the XNUMXth century, when the biotechnological revolution reached agricultural crops, the use of technological advances occurred in a massive or industrial way, such as fertilizer enriched by chemical processes, which allowed to increase the productivity of crops throughout the world. planet.

In food

In the field of food, humanity has never had a food supply as varied, as safe and of such quality as it is today. This reality is largely due to the development of food biotechnology.

The Sumerians were the first humans to use Food Biotechnology 7.000 years ago, producing fermented foods, such as beer, wine, bread, yogurt and cheese, using bacteria and yeasts to process milk, transforming it into yogurt and cheese, or by processing the grapes and barley for wine or beer.

Almost everything we eat, be it animals, vegetables or fermented foods, has a biological origin, which is why Food Biotechnology is clearly the oldest of all biotechnologies. What has changed is that the world's consumers demand that what we eat not only maintain its energetic qualities and also satisfy the sensory appetites for taste and appearance, but also be beneficial for health. In this framework, probiotics or nutraceuticals arise.

Environmental tool and contribution to the responsible industry

In the 90th century, with the Industrial Revolution, the modern history of man evolved violently from an agrarian and artisan economy to a gigantic one dominated by industry and in which there was an exponential increase in the world population. This new reality brings with it the urgent demand for an increase in the use of natural resources, and with it quantities of polluting and environmentally damaging wastes. Today, in the XNUMXst century, citizens demand the preservation of the environment as a universal right, which originated the development of environmental biotechnology in the XNUMXs.

This variant is not only positive as a responsible scientific discipline, but essential to protect renewable and non-renewable natural resources, helping to reduce, control and resolve environmental catastrophes produced by the inadequate action of human activity, through prevention and remediation strategies. .

Among other activities and areas of development, environmental biotechnology is responsible, through the use of micro-organisms, for the treatment of sewage or wastewater and waste and rubbish. It also works in cleaning up natural disasters, such as fossil fuel spills in the ocean, or in recovering soils burned by fires.

Looking towards responsible industrial development, compounds are synthesized and manufactured through biological reactions for which enzymes and microorganisms are used instead of chemical reactions. Using renewable raw materials, which are inexhaustible, progress has been made in the development of biofuels to replace fuels from fossil sources, and biomaterials to eliminate the use of the highly harmful plastic. From bioprocesses with microorganisms and enzymes, agricultural, forestry or industrial residues are used to produce enriched fertilizers or protein extracts for the elaboration of animal feed products.

With the development of Biotechnology applied in all of these aspects, greater respect for the environment is produced, generating less toxic waste, consuming less energy and emitting less greenhouse gases in industrial production and improving the economic performance of products.

It has been 101 years of a great contribution to human life.

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