Greg Beato on Replacing Street Lights With Glowing Trees
How many do-it-yourself bioengineering enthusiasts does it take to change a light bulb? Apparently 8,433. That's how many individuals backed the Glowing Plant Project on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter earlier this year. Of course, writes Greg Beato, this high-profile effort to democratize bioengineering has not sat well with environmental advocacy organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, which tried to get Kickstarter to remove the Glowing Plant Project from its site and publicly lambasted "the widespread and unregulated distribution of over half a million extreme-bioengineered seeds" to "6,000 random locations across the USA."