Introduction to genetic engineering

As one of the future key technologies with high rates of growth throughout the world, genetic engineering is penetrating ever further into sensitive areas of application such as food production, health, and environmental policy and thus affecting everyone's daily lives..

Low levels of public acceptance and insufficient experience with losses make this subject a high priority among the insurance industry's projects for the future. In forming its Centre of Competence for Biosciences, Munich Re has responded to innovations and changing circumstances rapidly and with foresight. The application of genetic engineering offers the opportunity of enormous improvement and advances in the fields of medicine, agriculture and process technology.

Genetic engineering is not an entirely new, modern-day development, but should rather be viewed as a logical progression from traditional methods for recombining the hereditary material of micro-organisms, plants and animals.

Genetic engineering is generally considered a modern branch of biotechnology, the latter being a discipline that encompasses all innovative methods, techniques, processes and products using living organisms or their cellular and subcellular constituents. The multidisciplinary nature of biotechnology allows it to draw on scientific research findings in the following fields: biochemistry, molecular biology, immunology, virology, microbiology, cell biology, environmental technology and process engineering.