Lesson
8
Biotechnology
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Lesson 8
Biology SBI3U-C
Introduction
The demand for insulin in the treatment of diabetes is soaring. According to …show more content…
A Canadian company, SemBioSys, has an innovative solution to this insulin shortage. They claim they have genetically engineered a safflower plant to produce insulin. This insulin can be mass-produced, isolated, and injected into diabetic patients at a fraction of the cost of other sources of insulin. This is just one example of how new methods in biotechnology, especially the transfer of genes between organisms, are changing medicine and agriculture. As you will see later in this lesson, biotechnology is also raising challenging ethical and moral issues.
In this lesson, you will learn about some techniques in modern biotechnology and how they differ from traditional approaches used for thousands of years. You will learn how modern biotechnology is being applied in agriculture and medicine, including some reproductive technologies that increase the genetic diversity of species by inserting new genes. You will also explore some of the potential drawbacks of these revolutionary techniques.
Planning Your Study
You may find this time grid helpful in planning when and how you will work through this lesson.
Suggested Timing for This Lesson (hours)
Techniques in Modern …show more content…
These foods are produced by biotechnology, a field of biology that encompasses various techniques using living organisms to make products or provide services.
Early examples of biotechnology include artificial breeding in agriculture to create breeds of domesticated animals and plants with the desired characteristics. Plants, for example, may have been selectively bred by pollinating them by hand and covering the plants so no other plants could fertilize them. Biotechnology was also used in food production. Yogurt and cheese were made with bacteria and fungi, while bread and beer were made with yeast, using techniques that have not changed much in thousands of years.
In the following sections, you will learn about the different techniques of modern biotechnology and their uses in society.
Genetic Engineering
Genetic engineering is a technique used by molecular biologists to artificially combine genes in a cell. The DNA from the cell of one organism is combined with the DNA of another organism