When you receive the Seal you will begin to care both about your health and about the environment. A new technology promises that a lot of animal testing can be eliminated and at the same time make it much cheaper for new drugs to come to market.

The new technology involves biochips, the MetaChip and the DataChip. These biochips act just like the body act when it takes a drug. They will be able to show whether there are any toxic side-effects of taking the drug.

As high as 70 percent of new drugs being developed have to be scrapped because they are toxic to the body. But this is not discovered until after each drug cost hundreds of millions of dollars in research money.

These biochips promise to eliminate all that wasted cost in drug development. And they promise to eliminate much of the unethical experimenting currently done on animals.

The European Union has banned all such testing on animals and that is set to begin in 2009. At that time there will be quite a market opened up for the biochips.

The biochips are glass slides dotted with tiny droplets of enzymes from the human body. The MetaChip has liver enzymes. It can show whether a drug is toxic to the liver.

The DataChip contains enzymes from the bladder or kidney as well as the liver. Those can also be tested for toxicity. And if there is any toxicity it will be found much earlier in the drug trial process, saving huge amounts of money.

Animal testing is not just unethical. Its accuracy is also dubious. There is always a question of whether humans will have the same reaction animals have. It can give a general idea, but nothing specific enough.

The biochips show how humans will react. And yet what is being developed now is still not specific enough of testing. The researchers have big dreams for biochips, including "personalized" testing.

In the future, every sick person can have his or her own biochips made from enzymes from his or her body. That way drugs can be tested for their reaction with that individual person, not for all people in general.

This heralds and important development in medicine--the "personalization" of medical treatment. In the future drugs can be chosen and even developed for individuals or smaller, more specific groups of people. Drugs currently are developed for everyone and anyone.

And that is not good. People vary widely in their genetics and predispositions to disease. Their chemical make-ups are different. So why not treat them differently, since they are different?

That is what this new technology promises, although we are not there yet. This is only the beginning. Another dream researchers have is the dream of including more organs in the biochips.

In the future all the organs can be tested, including the heart, the brain, and the skin. This will give a more holistic picture of the reaction of the body of a person to a particular drug.

When you are sealed you will begin to notice your health and the environment too. God will show you how to both extend your life and take care so you do not destroy the earth when you receive the Seal.