Hello all; first post.

I know that most of the entries here are from actual dreams, but I saw a few that were from actual news stories.  Well I have one that sounds like it came straight out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel (something like Cat’s Cradle)!  But this comes from a nonfiction book by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel called From Naked Ape to Super Species.

A chilling example of just how risky things are getting ecologically happened just a few years ago, when a German biotech company engineered a bacterium to get rid of rotting crop wastes on farms. The bacterium was a common soil microorganism called Klebsiella planticula , and it brought an unexpected bonus.  The engineered bacterium produced a by-product — ethanol — that can be used as a fuel that is far less polluting than gasoline.  It seemed like a win-win creation — it would eliminate rotting wastes and decrease greenhouse-gas when ethanol was used instead of gas.The company applied to field test the bacterium in the United States, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assigned the research to a small University, Oregon State.  Labs routinely test organisms in sterile soil so the variables are under rigid control, but Michael Holmes, the doctoral student assigned to do the experiments, thought that testing in sterile soils didn’t make much sense.  He decided to carry out the tests in different kinds of “living soils”, that is, ones with naturally occurring soil organisms in them.  To his amazement, he found that every plant that was put into the soil  with the engineered Klebsiella died.

Why did they die? Well most plants get their nourishment with the help of organisms called mycorrhysal fungi. The fungi live just below the surface of the soil and help make nutrients available to plant roots. When the genetically engineered Klebsiella was introduced into living soils, it interfered with with this process in a variety of ways, sometimes simply killing the fungi outright. And without mycorrhysal fungi in soils, no plants of any kind can survive. As Beth Burrows, the founder of the Edmonds Institute, and environmental think-tank near Seattle, Washington, says, “Without plants, you don’t get animals. And without animals, there are none of us either…. So if we add something into a soil that kills [mycorrhysae], we’re essentially cutting our own throats. And if we test in sterile soils, we’ll never know. Because there’s no mycorrhysal fungi in a sterile soil.”

It’s easy to forget that the living world is far more complex than we know. As Burrows says, “A funny thing happens on farmers’ fields. Those microorganisms move around. Birds land on soil, and they pick up all kinds of things from the surface. And they get up and they fly off, and they take what they touched with them. As do tractors. As do the feet of farmers. As do cars. As do particles, just dirt particles that fly into the air. You can’t contain it…. So if I decide I’m going to have Klebsiella in my fields, I’ve made a decision for my neighbour as well. And I might have made a decision for the guy in the next county. And if we get really good birds, I might have made a decision for all America.”

The genetically engineered Klebsiella could have ended all plant life on this continent. The implications of this single case are nothing short of terrifying. And there are literally thousands of independent biotech labs around the world, industriously developing new living creatures for commercial exploitation without adequate testing.

I was going to comment on this at the end, but I realized hey, what else can I say? It speaks for itself. In the back of the book, there are several references that Suzuki provides for further reading if anyones interested.

Author: Riao

August 14th, 2008 at 10:10 am in Background - Literature, Nature and Science, Our Fault

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