Lesson 7

In today's lesson, we touched on the other areas of BioBusiness in the world, such as the agricultural and environmental aspects. Some issues that were focused on were achieving a sustainable environment, bio-materials, GM foods and the injection of hormones into animals.

We watch the 'Humans Disease' video which Prof has actually posted on the Facebook page earlier on. I watched it both times and I constantly felt that there were element of truth in this video. We are becoming the bane to our own existence, by ruining the planet that we live on. Some people blame it on ignorance, but I believe there are more people who know about the situation but are yet not doing anything about it than people who have no knowledge about it or do not have the resources to do anything to help. Honestly, I am guilty of the former. I am aware of the seriousness of the global warming situation, the pollution in our atmosphere, and I know that that I can help by small actions like recycling plastic bottles and not letting the tap or shower run when not using the water and saving electricity when not needed. However, I feel passive towards the cause and the most I do is reuse my plastic bags and recycle cans when I'm at home. I'm sure there are many others like me and this is why I agree with the video that we, humans, are becoming our own disease.

During the lecture, I was surprised when Prof mentioned that spider silk is actually 5 times stronger than steel!! And if you unwind the silk spun, it is long enough to go around the world. Sometimes, nature provides us with so much more than we expect and humans, without exploring these natural ways, choose to destroy our environment through activities like deforestation, mining, pollution by the industrial areas and depleting the already limited natural resources.


I particularly enjoyed Lin Yi's presentation on the injection of growth hormones into animals, especially cows. Firstly, I feel that it is extreme cruelty to inject such hormones into animals' bodies just to boost the profits that can be made out of them. In the first place, killing them for food is bad enough, now people are even manipulating their growth so that more money can be made out of the poor animals??? This makes me feel really disgusted by mankind. Is money really so important that we can bear to inflict more suffering on another living thing? Imagine the situation and roles were reversed and hormones are injected into us to make us grow faster just so that they can eat us? How would we feel? I'm sure many others feel the same way about me but this problem cannot be solved unless everyone has the ability to boycott the produce by such practice, and this requires a big effort to be made. I hope that in future when I am in the working industry and have more financial independence, I will be able to generate a cause to stop this cruel act. No matter how small the effects are, at least it will be a start to put a stop to it!

Overall, I rate this lesson 8/10 as it was interesting and comfortable to follow the pace.