Career development in Green Biotechnology in B&H: roadblocks and prospects

Biotechnology industry worldwide is an enormous industry, and in 2005 only in the US 1400 biotechnology companies with trades worth $419 billion was registered. Green biotechnology involves, among others, processes such as development of pest resistant plants, new plant derived drugs and new nutritive plants. Research in this area offers possibilities for the development of new food products and mechanisms for the control of pathogenic agents in foods. In Bosnia and Herzegovina green biotechnology is slowly developing branch of biotechnology. If we consider last two years, green biotechnology in Bosnia and Herzegovina produced less than 10 research papers, in the same time period neighbouring countries have developed research laboratories for green biotechnology and are successfully applying for HORIZON 2020 grants (example of Sinisa Stanković Institute – FP7 - Plant Terpenoids for Human Health: a chemical and genomic approach to identify and produce bioactive compounds). Why is this the case? First of all the average laboratory for plant in vitro culture oriented for evaluation of gene expression and metabolic engineering costs around 1 million euros. The field is constantly evolving and the costs of making the laboratory productive rises even more. Governmental supported projects in B&H are usually around 10 000 euros and it is impossible to establish such laboratory without international projects. HORIZON 2020 usually seen as a golden goose by the researchers, offers large projects but for a scientist, dealing with green biotechnology, from Bosnia and Herzegovina (speaking from my own experience, after 8 years working in green biotechnology field) to apply for such founds is a borderline science fiction. We are enclosed in vicious circle of different roadblocks in the process of making green biotechnology interesting for the researchers and students in Bosnia and Herzegovina. First of all funding of the green biotechnology projects is usually considered to be less important than biomedical engineering. We are forgetting that in pursuit for new medicines in this era of the emergence of antibiotic resistance we must return our focus to green biotechnology and plant metabolic engineering. By stimulating students to pursue career in green biotechnology we are investing in our future, in new medicines, in new food products and crop resistant to pests. For this reason, by developing better plants we are stopping the consequences before they emerge, like the effects of pesticides.