"Sometimes people ask me what field I'd be in if not computers. I think I'd be working in biotechnology. I expect to see breathtaking advances in medicine over the next two decades, and biotechnology researchers and companies will be at the center of that progress"
- Bill Gates, New York Times, June 18, 1996.

That is Bill Gates for you stating the enormous potentials of the brave new world of Biotechnology in the near future. Coming as it does from one of the world's sharpest business minds, his statement saves me a lot of laborious and sermonizing arguments to convince you that biotech age has indeed stealthily but surely arrived.

But, if you think Bill Gates is a congenital liar-capitalist and self serving manipulator of technological trend, then let me do my bit of hardsell.

According to the Ernst and Young, the highly reliable international professional service firm, the global biotechnology industry is estimated to rake in $US50 billion in the next eight years. In its annual report on biotechnology industry entitled "Beyond Borders", India also figures prominently among countries poised to make it to the gene-bandwagon in style. Worth $3 billion in 1997, the total biotech product market (medical, agricultural, functional food/ nutritional, research products and services) in India is expected to rise to $9 billion by 2005.

The Report also identifies the low cost of innovation, low-cost manufacturing base, government support, R&D infrastructure, established pharmaceutical industry and venture capital as the factors fuelling the growth of the biotech industry in India. Operational costs-the usual suspect- in India are one-seventh to one-tenth of those in developed markets and among the lowest in the world.

All this is fine, but what exactly is biotechnology?
Many people including me (before I wrote this piece) can't differentiate between genes and jeans or might think stems cell are a line of new products from Eveready torchlight cells makers. Unless you are a Life Sciences graduate or a bright prodigy in the making, it is bound to split your grey cells. After all, it's all in our genes not to know something until we learn about it. So, don't blame yourself.

In layman's language, biotechnology is a general term describing the directed modification of biological processes. This may be accomplished by introducing new genes into organisms, breeding organisms to form new variants, or treating organisms with specific compounds. Modern biotechnology has leapt to highly advanced gene technology and beyond, and is an interdisciplinary subject covering biomedical research, microbiology, physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. The core applications of biotechnology lie in health care, agriculture and animal husbandry and industry.

One controversial but widely known issue that is the fallout of advances in biotechnology is the Cloning. Criticized as unethical and irresponsible, cloning has become a Pandora 's Box ever since the first animal clone, Dolly, the sheep was successfully created at Roslin Institute, Edinburgh in 1997.

Ethical questions and abuse of cloning-especially of humans- have become the most talked about topic in the scientific world. Proponents of cloning emphatically says that cloning is the key to curing deadly diseases like Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer, etc., grow tissues to replace diseased or paralyzed human organs and help infertile couples have children.

Detractors of cloning, however, recommend caution and claims that cloning is a process doomed to fail. From a scientific point of view, human reproductive cloning is unsafe and unacceptable," says Jaenisch, an MIT biology professor, a founding member of the Cambridge, MA-based Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and one of the world's top researchers in the science of cloning. Reproductive cloning, he argues, shortcuts basic biological processes, making normal offspring impossible to produce. And unlike the early days of in vitro fertilization (IVF), he says, this is not a technical hurdle that can be overcome with more advances-it's a fundamental biological problem.

Still unperturbed by these warnings, maverick biotechnologists like Severino Antinori and Panos Zavos, an American researcher and Avi Ben Abraham, an Israeli biotechnologist are already in their mid-way to producing the first baby produced with cloning technology.

While time only can tell if cloning will be a reliable and safe technology and prove to be a boon as a tool in curing fatal diseases, fruits of biotechnology are already being harvested in agriculture and husbandry. High yielding bio engineered crops are already seen in the shelves of super markets and becoming a popular choice of consumers, albeit some opposition. Some of the drugs we use today are the results of discovery through arduous analysis of the human genomic data.

Talking of human genomic data, biologists are increasingly becoming dependant on it for research into the causes and cures of certain hitherto inexplicable diseases. By studying the 30,000 genes that make up the human body, scientists, as already pointed out, are breaking new grounds as far as drug discovery is concerned by altering the functions of the DNA. In a way, human genomic data is to the biotechnologist what Periodic Table is to the chemists.

The importance of analyzing the human genomic data has spawned a whole branch of biotechnology called bioinformatics ( Read Article )
"The marriage of IT and biotechnology is loosely called bio-informatics,'' explains Richard N Perham, professor of structural biochemistry at Cambridge University. Bioinformaticians work with data generated by the experimental biology community and by a growing number of "data factory" projects (e.g., genome sequencing projects). Mining this data to develop new hypotheses, new models of how biological systems function, and even rules and patterns (which can be used to screen new data sets), is the work of bioinformatics.

As professional data analysts in a specialized field, bioinformaticist not only requires to possess high proficiency in using existing software, but also be equally adept at developing new algorithm to suit to unique computational needs.

The key skills that are essential in the bioinformatics field are:

• Understanding of the scientific method: how experiments are designed and carried out to test hypotheses, and standards for reporting scientific research.
• Understanding the foundations of molecular biology: how genomic information is transmitted and used in living cells.
• Facility with computers: everything from the ability to learn to use new software quickly to the ability to work comfortably in a command-line (Unix) environment.
• Knowledge of a programming language such as C or C++ and a scripting language, such as Perl or Python.

• MSc/MVSc in Vetrinary Biotechnology is a 2 years course at the Indian Veterinary Research institute, Izatnagar (UP)
• Medical Biotechnology (PG course) is offered at All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi and University of Delhi (PG/MPhil?PhD).(Dr. B.R.Ambedkad Centre of Biomedical Research)
• Marine Biotechnology (M.Sc.) can be studied at Goa University
• MTech in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology is available at Jadavpur University. IIT Delhi and Kharagpur, Anna University, Madras.
• IIT Bombay ------ www.iitb.ernet.in
• IIT Roorkee ----- www.iitr.ernet.in
• Cochin University