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Biotechnology is a field that is expanding at an alarming rate, from sequencing the human genome, and now scores or other animal and plant genomes, to using stem cells to generate new tissues for therapeutic cloning, it has the potential to really change our lives. The concept of therapeutic cloning is an interesting one, a patient with liver disease for example, instead of having to wait for transplantation, could simply extract a stem cell from their own body, and grow a new liver in a bioreactor. There would be no chance of tissue rejection because the cell originates from the patient. With degradation of organ tissues responsible for much elderly mortality, the concept of simply being able to grow new organs would certainly extend our life expectancy dramatically. These technologies are still a way off, but the pace of advances in stem cell technologies is fast. These days we can utilise viral systems to generate proteins for medical and research applications, baculovirus protein expression is widespread throughout biotechnology, the production of human insulin for the treatment of diabetes is an example. As well as medicine, biotechnology uses living organisms for applications in engineering, technology and other fields requiring bioproducts.