Biotechnology awareness urged

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia needs to establish a strong biotechnology base to enable it to face international competition in the field, according to a leading molecular biologist.

Sangkot Marzuki, in a speech marking his professorship at the University of Indonesia's School of Medicine yesterday, reminded the audience of mostly health experts of the scientific and technological muscle of developed countries.

Those countries, he said, had plenty of human and financial resources as well as sophisticated equipment to develop innovative medical treatment through molecular biology.

Sangkot is particularly interested in revolutions affecting medical developments in the 21st century, especially with regard to the biological Human Genome Project in the United States which is seeking genetic information about the human body.

He cited Indonesia's untapped natural resources, dubbed "green oil" by foreign experts, in which one in 10,000 to 100,000 "lead compounds" had the potential to become powerful drugs for the national pharmaceutical industry.

Sangkot, aged 52, has been a professor of medicine at Monash University for 20 years and adjunct professor of molecular and cellular biology at University of Queensland, Brisbane in Australia. Since 1992 he has been head of the University of Indonesia's Eijkman Institute for molecular cell biology.

The Eijkman Institute was established in 1888 by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Eijkman who discovered the correlation between vitamin B deficiency and a disease known as beriberi. He won a Nobel Prize in 1929 for this finding.

The 109-year-old institute, later named after him, was shut down in 1965 from inactivity. State Minister of Research and Technology B.J. Habibie re-established it in 1992 but changed its function to molecular biology research.

Sangkot, winner of an ASEAN biology achievement award, praised the government's efforts to develop biotechnology and molecular biology, despite shortages in human resources, funding and equipment.

A lack of role models and low appreciation for science among Indonesian youths were other leading problems, he said.

"Figures like Einstein and Newton are too remote for them; they need someone closer to home to look up to" he said. (01)