“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”.
This Greek proverb tells us that people have to constantly think and innovate for future generations and not just think about our present situation in order to succeed as a society. As with the biobusiness industry, specifically the medical and healthcare industry, we have to constantly come up with methods of preventing diseases instead or solely focusing on finding cures in order to prevent future generations from contracting them.
Now for some numbers. The BioBusiness industry accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s GDP and employs about 40% of the world’s labour force. This shows that a lot of focus and emphasis is placed on the BioBusiness industry and this includes the biomedical, agri-veterinary, environmental and industrial industries. This lesson focused on the biomedical and healthcare industry, which is unsurprising as it makes up the majority of the BioBusiness industry. However, an interesting statistic to note is that the USA spends a higher proportion on healthcare compared to agriculture or the food sector, while the Asian countries spend a relatively lower proportion on healthcare, whereby agriculture makes up the majority.
We also looked at the trends of the global leading cause of death. In the past (around 1990), lower respiratory infections was the leading cause of death. Presently, heart diseases are now leading, with the percentage of deaths caused by respiratory infections falling. This is a sign that the biomedical industry has successfully discovered sufficient cures and preventions over the past decade. The increase in cases of heart diseases is also reflective that people are beginning to become more obese and not watching their diets. There is a very simple prevention for this which is self control, but the convenience and availability of junk foods are slowly turning societies into fast food nations. Another interesting point to note is that deaths caused by road traffic accidents and war have been on the rise in the past decade. These are hardly causes that can be prevented by the bio business industry so it’s also a sign that either the biomedical industry has been successful in coming up with cures for other diseases, or that there have been more wars and drivers have become more reckless in the past decade.
The issue of immortality was again brought up in one of the individual presentations. The question of whether should ‘eternal youth’ be available to a small proportion of society, if we would want to have it. Personally, I feel that I would like to live longer, but not forever. There’s only so much we can do in life, and once we have done everything on our bucket list, it would be pretty pointless to go on living with no purpose. Someone suggested that we could redo everything, but I feel I would get bored quite quickly.
Gene testing was also brought up. It is the process whereby we would be able to predict the exact probability of contracting some form of disease, or our exact time of death. I don’t think I would want to know when exactly I would die, as the stress I would have is likely to make me die earlier than expected. However on the other hand, it may give me an opportunity to plan what I want to do. Say for example, if I knew I was going to die in exactly 2 weeks time, I would be able to plan the things I want to do before I died. I would be able to die happy and without any regrets. So this thing about gene testing has both it’s pros and cons, and if it were to become a reality, I feel people should have the choice to choose whether they want to be aware of the results.
Overall, this was a pretty interesting lesson and I would rate it a 7/10.
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