We are getting closer and closer to an environmental marvel:
[Efforts to engineering a glowing tree] has been going on since the mid-1980s, when researchers first successfully transplanted a gene present in fireflies into tobacco plants [seen above]. By now you’d expect to see phosphorescent Marlboros casting an eerie glow in what few dive bars still allow smoking, but progress has been slow.
Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory’s suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a “biological app store,” might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a “renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable street-lamp”—in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.
Evans and Amirav-Drory launched a wildly successful Kickstarter, but it’s attracted some controversy:
Eventually, around 6,000 of those backers, each of whom pledged at least $40 toward the project, will receive 50 to 100 genetically engineered seeds they can use to grow their own glowing plants. Another 210 backers, who pledged at least $250 apiece, will receive instructions and ingredients that will allow them to conduct further experiments and “transform [their] own plant at home, in [their] lab or at school.” This high-profile effort to democratize bioengineering has not sat well with environmental advocacy organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, which tried to get Kickstarter to remove the Glowing Plant Project from its site and publicly lambasted “the widespread and unregulated distribution of over half a million extreme-bioengineered seeds” to “6,000 random locations across the USA.”
But Evans, at least, appears to maintain a fairly centrist perspective on the prospects of regulating this sector. “Agrobacteria is a plant pest,” he said of the pathogen biologists often use in genetic engineering work, noting that it can transfer DNA between itself and other organisms. “If you were to release your plants and they still had bacterium on them, you could contaminate other people’s plants. That would be a bad thing. That is something that should be regulated. But if we don’t use that agrobacterium, then there’s a much lower risk of causing damage to agriculture.”
Rather, he and his team are attempting to transfer DNA into the seeds via a “gene gun,” a process that “doesn’t constitute a threat of any sort,” according to the Department of Agriculture.
The Dish 