They were trying to insert six genes found in naturally bioluminescent ocean bacteria into an Arabidopsis plant’s genome. “It took many months for the reality of how hard this was going to be to settle in.” “Right after the Kickstarter there was a lot of optimism and excitement,” Evans says. “Replace your lights with these genetically engineered glow-plants” a 2013 Popular Science headline read. To the team’s surprise, the crowdfunding campaign got 8,433 orders and raised almost half a million dollars. For $40 backers would receive glowing plant seeds the very next year. Together they started tinkering with a plant from the mustard family known as Arabidopsis.Įmboldened by their first attempts to design DNA they believed would make a plant glow, they turned to Kickstarter. Small plants that could act as indoor night lights felt like a real first step.Įvans started hanging out at the biohacking space Biocurious just east of NASA Research Park, where he met and pitched the idea to Kyle Taylor, a Stanford biology graduate student. Roads could be lit with glowing trees instead of street lamps. Evans’ thoughts raced ahead, and he imagined replacing electricity with hacked plants. If the technology was already three decades old, surely there was a way to mass-produce and commercialize light-emitting plants. As early as 1986, scientists at the University of California-San Diego had demonstrated a plant that emitted light - a tobacco plant with a firefly gene inserted. Amirav-Drory suggested setting up a Kickstarter to fund a glowing plant. “As soon as you recognize the only truly sustainable technology is biology, it’s obvious that synthetic biology, which is the technology that allows us to harness biology for our own good, is a thing we need to embrace,” Evans says.Īt a Singularity alumni event, he met biochemist and entrepreneur Omri Amirav-Drory, who had founded a synthetic-biology software company called Genome Compiler. ![]() He became hooked on the idea of the sun as the foundation of a circular economy, by virtue of the physical matter it allows you to grow. Evans learned aboutthe concept of a circular economy-a society that meets all its needs from sustainable sources. Singularity University preaches the potential of exponential technologies: areas where performance is increasing rapidly alongside steep drops in price. In 2011 he’d moved to Silicon Valley and attended the graduate studies program at Singularity University, a tech think tank at NASA Research Park, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. He had no prior biology experience, but plenty of vision. He was stoic but direct with his answers to my questions as he led me down flights of stairs to the basement grow tent.Įvans got the idea for his glowing plant project while searching for a way to cut his teeth in the field of synthetic biology. Every surface was covered with books and scientific equipment. I met Evans at Taxa’s home base, a chaotic mix of office and lab in a coworking space that the company shares with a few other startups. Instead, he ended up killing off the four-year-old dream that he’d shared and nurtured with his thousands of supporters. He’d show the world just how amazing bioengineering could be.Įxcept…he didn’t. Evans had summoned me to his lab to help him tell his redemption story. At last he could start planning for a product launch, and he picked the week of March 27, 2017. By mid-2016, the company had grown patchouli moss that Evans considered ready for consumers. ![]() So he changed tack, setting aside the glowing plants and throwing his energies behind scented moss instead. ![]() ![]() What had seemed scientifically straightforward had turned into a lonely, multi-year slog. Taxa Biotechnologies was running out of money. He could barely get his plants to glow at all. But as 2014, 2015, and 2016 ticked by, Evans faced a different reality.
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