6/11/2023 0 Comments Luminous plants![]() In the four years since Glowing Plant began, synthetic biology has caught the eye of investors. ![]() The project had been providing regular, detailed updates on the difficulty of engineering the plants. Despite a few angry backers asking for a refund, most of the comments under the Kickstarter update so far have been supportive. “I’m really afraid of disappointing that 16-year-old who saw this and imagined a bright wonderful future, of jading and disappointing people,” he says. That’s when Evans realized that glowing plants weren’t happening. Without the moss, there was no way to keep funding the company. They got the scented moss growing, but the last bunch was contaminated and could not be shipped to customers. That’s why TAXA, the company that Evans set up to work on glowing plants, eventually pivoted to creating genetically modified moss that smells like patchouli to subsidize continuing glowing-plant research. (The photo above of the glowing plant is a long exposure, making it appear much brighter than it actually is.) Evans says that he realizes now trying to insert six genes into a complex organism like a plant-rather than single-celled bacteria or yeast-was premature. But they never could get all six in at once. ![]() To get the plant to glow well, the research team had to insert six genes. (Plenty of scientists at the time were skeptical of the project’s timeline, though.) Evans is an MBA with a background in mobile apps, though his two original cofounders, who have both since left the project, had backgrounds in synthetic biology. ![]() “We did not anticipate some of the unknown technical challenges that we would get into,” Evans told me. The team also encountered the hard realities of engineering even a small plant that glows. (As the Kickstarter campaign grew, though, environmental groups raised questions and the crowdfunding site later banned giving away genetically modified organisms.) The glowing plants were one of the first synthetic biology projects to really capture the public’s imagination.Īt a time when “genetically modified organism,” or GMO, is such a poisoned phrase, the project’s crowdfunding success seemed to suggest that a pervasive if vague distrust of genetic modification might be countered by the sense of wonder for a glowing plant. I think this one is maybe more disappointing for myself and others for what it seems to have represented,” says Todd Kuiken, a research scholar at North Carolina State University’s Genetic Engineering & Society Center, who also chipped into the project’s Kickstarter campaign. I think this one is maybe more disappointing for myself and others for what it seems to have represented.” But backing the project was a small way to buy into a much grander vision. The Kickstarter campaign only promised a small, potted glowing plant to it backers, and I doubt many backers actually harbored illusions about trees lighting up the night sky soon. In this case, synthetic biology became a possible solution to one of the world’s most pressing energy problems: electricity generation. This romantic vision so perfectly encapsulated the promises of synthetic biology, a field that treats the natural world as another system to be designed and engineered. “What if,” Evans asked over swelling music in the pitch video, “we use trees to light our streets instead of street lamps?” What if you could get lighting without electricity? What if the natural world glowed like in Avatar? The vision it presented was such potent fantasy. The quest to genetically engineer a glow-in-the-dark plant was no more.įour years ago, the Glowing Plant project raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter, easily blowing past its initial ask of $65,000. This “transition point” was more of an endpoint: The project had run out of money. “We’re sorry to say that we have reached a significant transition point,” wrote the Glowing Plant project’s creator, Antony Evans. The latest update came quietly on Tuesday night.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |