Bio-tech to Help Human Remove Six Dilemmas: Chinese AcademiciansBio-tech will help human step out of the dilemmas of population, food, health, environment, resource and energy that the whole world has confronted in the new century, Chinese experts pointed out Sunday.Hou Yundem, academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) and Xie Lianhui, academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences made the remarks at the on-going International Medicine Bi-tech Symposium held in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian Province. The industrial revolution and the first green revolution represented by the cultivation of short-stalk but high-yield crops have produced unprecedented windfalls for the whole of human and basically resolved the famine of the third world. However, the revolutions have also made human trapped in the problems like overuse of resources, energy and the deterioration of environment, as well as provided opportunities for diseases to bail the animals, plants and even the human itself, Xie said. Bio-tech especially DNA regrouping has loomed as the means to get rid of the six dilemmas by relying on the life science and the strategy of sustainable development centered as biological industry. Hou Yunde agreed with Xie and he said that bio-tech, as key technology concerning economic development and the nation's fate in the new century, will unavoidably have a great impact on human life in the solution to disease prevention, swelling population, food shortage, energy exhaust and environmental pollution. In the next two decades, the number of new medicine produced by the technology of gene regrouping will amount to 3000 and most agricultural products will be genetically modified with the revenue of bio-tech products worldwide to surpass 15 trillion US dollars, the two experts predicted. The year of 2003 will witness the success of the Human Genome Plan and the basic interpretation of about the sequencing of 30 thousand human genes. So far, the number of bio-tech produced medicines around the world have neared 100 and the total revenue of bio-tech products has reached 60 billion US dollars since the birth of human insulin in 1982 By PD Online Staff Li Heng |
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