Question

how can growth rate calaculations be applied in either a biotechnological context or biomedical context

Answer 1

I can tell you for the biotechnological part. often, when you are interested in an organism to produce something, you have to modify this organism's genome, so that it starts producing what you're interested in, if it didn't produce it before, or it produces more of that substance. when you modify an organism, the growth rate becomes smaller because its metabolism is concentrated on the production, which requires a lot of energy. now, to get the substance, you have to put this organism in a fermentator with all the organism needs for the production of the substance. often, you can't open the fermentator and just have a look to what's happening because "wild" organisms would enter the fermentator. they would reproduce faster because they're not modified. so they would take over the organism you're feeding, which would die or suffer from loss of nutrients, stolen by wild organisms. thus, you will have little product. so, if you want to produce a quantity x of a substance and you know that your modified organism produces it with a rate of y, you will easily know when to open the fermentator if take into account how rapidly they reproduce. that is just an example.