[DIYbio] Re: Ethics of Guerrilla planting Transgenic plants

I don't think you can be a steward of the Earth in a guerilla fashion. The only way to have an impact is to control a process to a conclusion. For instance, many crucifers are great at pulling things like cadmium from the soil. But you aren't getting rid of it until you take the crop. Now you have a more concentrated pollutant. Then what? 

Plants can be modified to uptake stuff they wouldn't normally accumulate. But those genes probably don't lend themselves to selection so they will probably be shed.

Now to knock-on effects. You bomb a polluted space with transgenetic crops and now have toxic plants. Starting at the low end of the food chain, slugs, worms, and especially leafcutting caterpillars or other defoliating flies and insects eat this material. Where does this extra (cadmium, lead) go? It goes to those that feed on such creatures. For example, many songbirds who are strict nut-eaters turn out to be primary feeders on defoliators only when they are juveniles. So the rapidly growing cohort of these species get a bigger dose of the toxins. Then they fly about, poop toxins everywhere, and it goes into surface and groundwater. Their dead carcasses land in random places and are then scavenged by other creatures. Etc. 

I think the best hope for bioremediation, as mentioned, are organisms that are going to catalyze reactions that are going to neutralize, immobilize, or contain specific toxins. But the ultimate way is to stop financing the creation of such wastes, supporting political and regulatory action to stop their proliferation, and voting Republitards out of office, such as Mr. Mitt "I'm going to dismantle the EPA" Romney, and other magical fairy-dust snorting industrial greed PIGGS that are destroying the world. 

I think using plants to sequester some toxins might be a great way to prove criminal pollution cases, or alert communities to contamination sites. In this case you'd use a technique for quantifying a toxic load in a particular area by growing a control in a non-polluted area and a test case in a polluted one, then, to a heavy metals analysis using GC-MS or similar approach at a certified lab, and come up with some bio-accumulative load figures (in addition to some direct soil analysis). Then, find a lawyer and sue the hell out the perpetrators.

Using uptake transgenes to grab the toxins might be useful within the context of such an experiment but it would have to be more tightly controlled. Transgenes could be useful in tagging your plants to round out the experiment by making sure you are collecting the same plants you put in. But if plants already exist which uptake toxins, you'd maybe rather focus on genes which will make them hardy enough to grow in non-normal conditions you're likely to be bombing (which will probably be poorly draining, acidified, or compacted soil or substrate).

It all begs the question of why not do direct soil sampling, legal action against polluters- or just illegal action (trespass and sampling) and social media shaming. Force the courts and the perpetrators to shell out the funds for physical removal and treatment at a hazardous waste facility. I think the strongest argument against might be that you are just not going to remove a meaningful amount of contamination with covert or marginal action. The capacity of plants for this purpose is simply not that great. For most instances, what is really required is wholesale removal- and financial punishment- publicly broadcast. 

On Friday, November 21, 2014 7:49:34 PM UTC-8, Nico B. wrote:

A few of the projects that are being done at the maker space I go to for synbio classes are directed towards bioremediation through transgenic guerrilla gardening. We've been discussing the need for heavy monitoring to prevent propagation for the potential of ecosystem/food web disruption, but I'd like to hear more reasons for why and why not guerrilla garden transgenic species of grasses/shrubs for biodegradation of pollutants, sequestration of heavy metals in urban soils, ground water filtration, etc.

Thanks