Monday, January 26, 2009

Some practical views into the future of biotechnology.

I will come back to the future of biotechnology.

The economical figures of traditional industries seem to be awful. We will see, what is the condition of such branches like paper, automobile and communication enterprises in 2010.

The optimistic view into biotechnology, presented by Osmo Kuusi in 1991, should be reviewed soon.

Another positive attitude has been presented by Tom Abate in "The Biotech Investor", published in 2003 and found by me under a layer of dust in the library of Jyväskylä University (Tom Abate 2003. The Biotech Investor: how to profit from the coming boom in biotechnology. Owl Books, New York).

Tom Abate tells about sectors of biotechnology like the previous authors, discovering this area. He calls them "The Genomics Wave", "The Proteomics Wave" , "The Biotech Toolmakers", "Green Genes", "The New Factories", "Brave New Worlds" and "The Biotech Clusters".

What these titles include, I'll try to explain whenever I have red this interesting book.

Before that, I have good news:

The leading newspaper in Central Finland, Keskisuomalainen, tells about the manufacturers of small-scale waste water treatment plants. Finnish legislations says that all small houses shall update their ww treatment systems before the end of 2013.

The count of these households is est. 300 000 in Finland!

Not to name the individual enterprises, there are a couple of small companies manufacturing/importing batch-type activated sludge systems in a small scale in our country. Two larger companies, having Finnish background, also exists.

Novel ideas to control the effluents of these mini-plants already exist, but the questions of evaluation, standardization etc. will have a sever effect on the application of these methods.

I think that it is now time for the Finnish government to accept these analytical methods to be applied by small-scale treatment plant producers.

Colony counts, developed in the beginning of 20th century, are valuable. But what we are needing today are the rapid methods for the control of both activated sludge itself and the effluents of these equipments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Juha,

How are you doing these days? I retired from Nalco at the end of 2006 and started my consulting company. Have been fairly busy in the US and Canada. Much of my work is outside the paper industry.

My website is www.lrobertsonmicro.com

Linda Robertson