Green Options

In an interview, this author asked Dr. Wang, about the foreseeable impacts/uses of this technique. “Ultimately,” said Wang, ” this is a new way of accelerating the evolution of the whole organism in a very directed fashion (i.e., controlled by scientist). This is going to be important in new cell based therapies, new cell based production of drugs, or, say, biofuels.”

Scientific American reports that like so many elements in the world, it’s all in the use and volume for whether that something, say poison or E. coli, is a friend or foe: “Escherichia coli (E. coli) can give you a severe case of food poisoning or, with a little genetic engineering, a useful plastic.”

San Diego-based scientists at Genomatica have developed the ability to manipulate bacteria into being useful to feed our societal lust for plastics, by producing “butanediol (BDO), a chemical compound used to make everything from spandex to car bumpers, thereby providing a more energy-efficient way of making it without oil or natural gas,” the article says.