SOFT AND SANE

Man cannot lift billions of tons of water and let them rain down again into hydroelectric dams, because he is too puny; and he cannot accumulate the energy concentrated in fossil fuels because he and his civilizations do not live long enough. In strength and longevity, he will presumably never be the master of nature.

But is he smarter than nature? Only occasionally. He is not smart enough to turn grass into milk, a trick known to every cow; and he is not smart enough to take the nitrogen out of the air and the hydrogen out of the water to combine them into ammonia for fertilizer, a trick known to any bacterium with nif (nitrogen fixation) genes. But this time there is hope he may yet grow smart enough. And when he learns how to do it, or how to engineer the genes of plants and bacteria to do it for him, he will be able to save vast quantities of energy the energy in the oil and gas that now go as feedstocks into petrochemical plants in the manufacture of fertilizer.

The details of this idea were described in our August 1977 issue; but now a far more valuable prize has been proposed - not merely the energy saved in making fertilizer, but vast quantities of actual energy (gaseous or liquid fuels) produced directly, by plants and bacteria, if man succeeds in engineering their genes properly. As before, the energy that nature collects is solar: and it is man who hopes to tap what nature has collected by manipulating the nif genes, transferring them from a bacterium to a plant.

Before we go on to the new proposal, we quote two items from our August 1977 issue:

"There are two kinds of difficulties: One is smuggling the nif genes into the plant cells, the other is making them work. There is, for example, a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae, which has nif genes, but it does not infect plants. It's nif genes have been incorporated into another bug called Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which does transfer its genes into plant cells; but as its name implies, it gives the plants tumors.

So back to engineering a bug with nif genes. Perhaps the simplest way is to improve the Rhizobium infecting soybeans. It may be smarter than man, but it is not very smart it wastes at least 30% of the energy supplied by the plant in producing hydrogen in addition to ammonia. A team of investigators from Oregon State University) estimates that the rhizobial species associated with the US soybean crop produces an annual volume of 300 cubic teet of natural gas!"

* Why Soft Technology will not be America's Energy Salvation; Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306; $2 ($1.50 for current AtE subscnbers).