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If you work in any of the high tech or university medical research areas of Southern California, or are involved in agriculture, you may know that biotechnology and patent law are becoming more and more important to your business.

For many individuals, however, biotechnology is a mystery they only hear bad things about on the news.

I’ve been asked, “What is biotechnology really about and does it mean the end of civilization as we know it.

It is often referred to as genetic engineering, which will cause the average person to go into a sweat fearing that he may have just eaten some genetically altered food for breakfast.

But biotechnology is so much more, and in this writer’s opinion, it is the hope of mankind if it is developed with an abiding respect for nature and a doctor’s creed of ensuring no harm is done.

Today, biotechnology is broken down into four main areas: red biotechnology is applied to the medical field, green biotechnology is applied to agriculture, white biotechnology is in the industrial field and blue refers to the aquatic field.

In the medical field, biotechnology helps develop new medicines, new therapies, and can be used to use normal genes to target or replace defective genes or boost immunity.

In agriculture, biotechnology can be used to boost the yield from crops, reduce the vulnerability of crops to disease or weather, and to increase the nutritional values of foods. It can even be used to improve the taste or texture of foods. A benefit of biotechnology in agricultural applications is to reduce the need for pesticides or other harmful chemicals on crops that go into the nation’s water supply.

A new area in which biotechnology is developing rapidly is in biological engineering such as in the development of bio processes from the laboratory to the manufacturing or industrial scale.

Biotechnology is not without criticisms and raises moral dilemmas. What biotechnology can solve sometimes produces unwanted results such as residues and super resistant foods that may contaminate other non-genetically modified crops. Cloning has also stirred much controversy each time it is in the news.

But biotechnology in the future may also lead to new ways to clean up contaminated environments and the pollutants and wastes mankind produces. And as the world does harm to its environment, much must also be done to reverse these effects before it is too late. With the population of the world needing more and cleaner air, water and food, biotechnology can hopefully provide some of the answers.