Science and Society
The Latest Developments in Science and Technology
Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
RECENT POSTS
MONTHLY ARCHIVES
« Google Earth Shows More Chinese Submarines | Main | James Watson, DNA Decoder, on Race and Intelligence »
The Poplar Field
October 16, 2007 5:13 PM
Prof. Sharon Doty, an environmental scientist at the University of Washington, leads a team that has created a sort of super tree. They take poplar trees, insert a gene from rabbits--and the result is a plant that soaks up and neutralizes a dozen different kinds of pollutants, many of them cancer-causing.
They published their findings in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the abstract of the paper is HERE.
It's quite a list: trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride, carbon tetrachloride, benzene, and chloroform, stuff you sometimes find in brownfields or superfund sites. Planting some trees, and letting their roots do the cleanup work, is far better than digging up soil and trying to figure out what to do with it.
On the other hand, what do you get when you cross a rabbit and a tree? Maybe just an otherwise-normal tree that neutralizes pollutants, or maybe--well, maybe something with some hidden property that people won't like when they find it.
Lisa Stiffler of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has written a piece about this, which you can find HERE. She quotes Prof. Andrew Light, who works in environmental philosophy at the University: "it's really a question of trading some of the unknown risks of planting genetically modified trees with the positive environmental benefits," says Light. "This is a real dilemma for the environmental community."
Most of us would probably favor the known benefit (pollution-eating) over the unknowable risk (some kind of B-movie mutation)--but that's easy to say because there have been studies suggesting we're predisposed to favor the known over the unknown. Let's leave that part aside for now. Thoughts welcome, as always.
October 16, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (14)
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/433071/22503280
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The Poplar Field:
Well, if the trees start eating bloomin carrots we'll know there's a problem.
Posted by: Michele | Oct 16, 2007 5:55:27 PM
Sure would be strange to see a tree hopping across a field.
Posted by: BTL musings | Oct 16, 2007 6:11:18 PM
One gene makes one protein. One protein does not make a carrot or a tree to hop.
Posted by: JT | Oct 16, 2007 8:50:14 PM
It's just flat unnatural.
Posted by: Like It Is | Oct 16, 2007 11:33:03 PM
This is amazingly cool, but I would be worried about the effects this would have in the food chain. Most people either forget, or just plain ignore than everything is linked to everything else in some way.
SOMETHING, either bacteria, an animal or other vegetation will eat the foliage or refuse from these trees, which could cause an unknown mutation in the ingester. This mutation in turn, could travel up the food chain to humans, causing unknown effects.
The frontier of science can be dangerous indeed. It's still quite cool though though, a tree that doubles as a chemical trash compactor of sorts.
Posted by: RobertJB | Oct 16, 2007 11:46:08 PM
We're get our answers when these trees start walking and kill us all...
Posted by: Semaj | Oct 17, 2007 1:28:20 AM
Wow, people should stop watching bad sci-fi movies and learn basic biology.
Posted by: JT | Oct 17, 2007 2:12:38 AM
Viruses swap their genes with us all the time. Just a thought!
Posted by: JT | Oct 17, 2007 2:13:58 AM
Consider the bacteriophage virus. It injects its RNA into a bacteria to reproduce itself. Creepy, but natural.
Posted by: Scratch | Oct 17, 2007 7:36:57 AM
Wow, the "frankenfood" folks have gotten to a lot of you.
I'd be more worried about the poor bunnies who inadvertently practice a deranged form of cannibalism when they eat fallen leaves from these trees.
Seriously though, while there is no way for the tree it "infect" the food chain as described by a previous post (that's just not how it works), there would be the possibility that these trees could take the place of other native species if their reproductive systems have been altered in a very specific way. That's about the only "danger" here. It's also something that happens naturally when new species are introduced to an area they previously didn't exist in. Do a search on introduced species, like the cane toad in Australia.
Posted by: JB | Oct 17, 2007 9:41:33 AM
I can't help but wonder what happens to all those stored toxins when the trees die.
Posted by: Andy | Oct 17, 2007 10:51:00 AM
The article states "...soaks up and nutralizes a dozen different kinds of pollutants..."
If we assume the author didn't misuse the word "neutralizes" then the toxins are rendered innert/no longer toxic.
Posted by: JB | Oct 17, 2007 11:09:44 AM
Thanks, JB. One of these days, I've *got* to learn to read. I understand it can come in handy.
Posted by: Andy | Oct 17, 2007 12:06:36 PM
It's not nice to fool mother nature i.e. Unci Maka
Posted by: Like It Is | Oct 26, 2007 4:49:29 PM
Post a comment
