ВУЗ:
Составители:
Рубрика:
For instance, diabetes and heart disease – two of the biggest killers today – are caused by complex interactions of multiple genes,
along with environmental factors such as smoking, exercise and diet. Trying to do such "multigenic" testing with any semblance of
reliability – and then balancing the complex effects caused by external factors – is, to say the least, a truly daunting task.
Expecting personal-genome services like 23andMe and Navigenics to be licensed is not unreasonable. Whether individuals
should need a referral from their family doctor to have their DNA scanned would seem unnecessary.
Whichever way, health authorities need to tread carefully. Genomic scanning is an infant industry that promises great things.
Some believe it could even lengthen the human lifespan, by a decade or more–and make old age more active and enjoyable.
It is also the key to personalised medicine. If we are to have medicines tailored to our own versions of specific diseases, rather
than the one-size-fits-all type of potions and pills with which we're treated today, then each of us will need a genome scan in our
medical files.
Right now, your correspondent wouldn’t waste his money on one. Common sense, coupled with knowledge of his family’s
medical history, remains his personal guide. But the inexorability of Moore’s Law means that genomic scanning will be a fact of life –
and a profoundly useful one – within a decade or less.
T a s k O n e. Make up questions covering the subject matter of the article.
T a s k T w o. Write a review on the article.
A R T I C L E 7. Better living through chemurgy.
Jun. 26
th
2008 / NEW YORK
From
The Economist
print edition
Efforts to replace oil-based chemicals with renewable alternatives are taking off
Illustration by David
FORTY years ago Dustin Hoffman’s character in "The Graduate" was given a famous piece of career advice: "Just one word …
plastics." It was appropriate at the time, given that the 1960s were a golden age of petrochemical innovation. Oil was cheap and
seemed limitless. Since then, scientists have kept on coming up with wondrous new products made from petroleum that helped to
ensure, in the words of one corporate slogan, better living through chemistry. Even so, someone offering advice to today’s promising
graduates might invoke a different, uglier word: chemurgy.
This term, coined in the 1930s, refers to a branch of applied chemistry that turns agricultural feedstocks into industrial and
consumer products.
It had several successes early in the 20
th
century. Cellulose was used to make everything from paint brushes to the film on which
motion pictures were captured. George Washington Carver, an American scientist, developed hundreds of ways to convert peanuts,
sweet potatoes and other crops into glue, soaps, paints, dyes and other industrial products. In the 1930s Henry Ford started using parts
made from agricultural materials, and even built an all-soy car. But the outbreak of the second world war and the shift to wartime
production halted his experiment. After the war, low oil prices and breakthroughs in petrochemical technologies ensured the
dominance of petroleum-based plastics and chemicals.
But now chemurgy is back with a vengeance, in the shape of modern industrial biotechnology. Advances in bioengineering,
environmental worries, high oil prices and new ways to improve the performance of oil-based products using biotechnology have led
to a revival of interest in using agricultural feedstocks to make plastics, paints, textile fibres and other industrial products that now
come from oil.
This form of biotechnology has not attracted as much attention as biotech drugs, genetically modified organisms or biofuels, but
it has been quietly growing for years. BASF, a German chemical giant, estimates that bio-based products account for some €300 m
($470 m) of sales in such things as "chiral intermediates" (which give the kick to its pesticides). The sale of industrial enzymes by
Novozymes, a Danish firm, brings in over €950 m a year, about a third of it from enzymes for improving laundry detergents. Jens
Riese of McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons industrial biotech’s global sales will soar to $100 billion by 2011 – by which time sales of
biofuels will have reached only $72 billion.
Will this boom really prove to be more sustainable than the first, ill-fated blossoming of chemurgy? One potential problem is
that oil-based polymers are very good at what they do. Early bioplastics melted too easily, or proved unable to keep soft drinks fizzy
when they were made into bottles. Pat Gruber, a green-chemistry guru who helped start NatureWorks (a pioneering biopolymers firm)
says customers are sometimes too risk-averse to retrain staff or modify equipment to accept a new biopolymer – even if it is cheaper
or better.
It seems likely that oil-based products will be around for a long time in some applications. But the big advances in oil-based
polymers happened decades ago, whereas the number of patents granted for industrial biotechnology now exceeds 20,000 per year.
Such is the pace of innovation, says Tjerk de Ruiter, chief executive of Genencor, a industrial-biotech firm that is now a division of
Denmark’s Danisco, that processes that once took five years now take just one. And Steen Riisgaard, the boss of Novozymes, insists
that new technologies can indeed push old ones out of the way, provided they are clearly superior (and not just greener). Brewers
raced to adopt Novozymes’ novel enzymes, for example, in order to cash in on the Atkins Diet craze with "low carb" beers.
A second potential obstacle is that incumbent companies will quash the fledgling new technologies. But concern about oil’s
reliability as a feedstock means that even oil-dependent incumbents are interested in alternatives. Oil companies such as Royal Dutch
Shell and BP see novel bioproducts not as threats but as useful tools for blending into, and possibly extending, remaining oil reserves.
And chemicals giants such as Dow and DuPont are also big fans of novel industrial biotechnologies. Chad Holliday, DuPont’s boss, is
Страницы
- « первая
- ‹ предыдущая
- …
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- …
- следующая ›
- последняя »
