What can genetic engineering do for energy?.
We have already met engineered bacteria that can eat up oil spills [AtE Nov 75, Aug 80], and Rhizobium [AtE Aug 77] which fixes atmospheric nitrogen in the roots of legumes, in effect providing it with fertilizer. In the US soybean crop, it annually saves the energy equivalent of 300 billion cu. ft. of natural gas. It is about to be genetically engineered into a strain that is less sloppy and saves more energy.
A bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae lives on plants and produces a protein that iniates the formation of ice crystals when the temperature drops, causing frost damage to the plant.
Now water vapor does not turn into ice at 0 degrees C unless it finds nuclei on which to form crystals, such as the protein produced by that bacterium.
But now one can engineer the genes of (some) bacteria.
Bacteria enhancing the formation of ice are now being used under the trade name "Snomax" in ski resorts to make artificial snow; and closer to energy production, they are (experimentally) producing floating ice islands for use as platforms for drilling rigs in the Beaufort Sea.
More important, Pseudomonas can be engineered into a strain that inhibits its crystal-forming protein, so that it becomes a preventor of frost damage. In greenhouse tests, plants carrying "Ice Minus"
¾the trade name for this strain¾resisted frost damage down to 23 degrees F. In the US, frost damage exceeds $1 billion a year.Enter Jeremy Rifkin, the lovable creature to whom you owe your health: you don't have smallpox, diabetes and polio because he was born too late. For three years he has tied up Ice Minus in the courts
¾what if, how do we know that, etc.Heres how we know: genetic engineering, the intentional breeding of plant and animal strains to serve man's needs, has been practiced for the last 10,000 years. A hen is a genetically engineered and utterly unnatural bird; wheat is a human perversion of grass; and most vaccines are strains of what originally were disease carriers. Is there any difference between this and contemporary genetic engineering?
You bet there is: the boar-to-pig and grass-to-wheat type of breeding was crude and random, with hundreds of unpredictable changes at a time, and with very much less guarantee that the result would not be a pest; if there were any such danger it would have materialized then, and not now when single, specific and purposeful changes are made at the DNA-chain level.
In the case of Ice Minus there is an added insult. According to the ACHS newsletter, Rifkin has hypothesized that "Ice Minus bacteria might change the weather by getting into clouds and preventing the normal crystallization of moisture." Clearly Jeremy thinks 1) that bacteria are significant as ice nuclei in the troposphere, 2) that if Ice Minus does by some unknown mechanism get into the neighborhood of the real nuclei (dust particles) on which moisture crystallizes, it can stop a process of which it is not a part. (Does it eat the nuclei? Or just ask them politely to stop the crystallization?)
Where are the checks and balances of justice if a twerp who thinks the atmosphere is run by Rube Goldberg can go to court on a scientific matter? Where are they if a judge, instead of charging him with barratry, can sit on the "case" for three years?
And worse: if the nuclear experience and its radiation trials are any guide, there will be a third ignoramus in the courtroom
¾counsel for the defense, who will know all about the law, and nothing about the scientific substance.
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Vol. 13, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 13, No. 6 Date: November 29, 2004 03:59 PM Title: Review of a review
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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