In the short term, as a result of modern biotechnology, there will almost certainly be some winners in the area of health. Medical biotechnology has made enormous advances in the last 10 to 15 years in understanding and treating the genetic and biochemical components of acute and chronic diseases. Furthermore, certain conditions are undoubtedly congenital and can be treated most directly and effectively through biotechnology. They include phenylketonuria, Parkinsonism, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and some types of diabetes. One of medical biotechnology's outstanding achievements is the production of human insulin for the treatment of diabetes, through cell lines of Escherichia coli bacteria.
Modern medicine tends to be a field of urgency.
We cannot be expected to wait for a drug slowly to be refined, as we would wait for a wine to age, as a disease ravages society or our bodies. For example, the chemistry of specific genes, such as the production of a certain hormone, are studied, in order to reproduce them in the laboratory. Reductionism taken to extremes, regards every active gene as causing a specific effect, just as it regards every human body as responding to treatment in exactly the same way. We can begin with failures and the money spent on them. Part of the dive in the biotechnology stock market in 1991 was attributed to the failure of genetically engineered drugs.