Don't know where I first heard about this.. Hope I'm not stepping on someone else's thread here.. Think I heard it from my fav magazine below..
Got mixed feelings about this.. Great use of technology.. But enviro consequences are great. Probably confuse the heck out of bugs like fireflys.. And although the group assures everyone -- the tree cannot crossbreed in the open ---- we've all seen how Jurassic Park turns out..
Replacing Street Lights With Glowing Trees - Reason.com
Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology. You no longer have to be Monsanto to hack Mother Nature
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are 26.5 million street lights in the United States. There’s an additional 26.1 million highway fixtures. Small cities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the electricity their street lights consume; big cities spend millions.
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.
They asked for $65,000. They got $484,013, from 8,433 backers. 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.”
Got mixed feelings about this.. Great use of technology.. But enviro consequences are great. Probably confuse the heck out of bugs like fireflys.. And although the group assures everyone -- the tree cannot crossbreed in the open ---- we've all seen how Jurassic Park turns out..
Last edited: