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New Research to Find Environment-Cleansing Bugs

Posted by timothy on from the just-what-we-need dept.

Hop-Frog writes: "Here is a report on work going toward engineering bugs to cleanse the environment. There are bugs to eat carbon, toxic waste and more. This should please many people of a variety of political persuations."

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Can't please all the people all of the time by undeg+chwech · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This should please many people of a variety of political persuations

    Yeah ... it will please everyone who doesn't mind genetically engineered super-bacteria roaming the planet.

    1. Re:Can't please all the people all of the time by junk95 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      First of all, the article mentions explicitely "genetically engineered bugs".

      Now, when you go around engineering bugs, you are forgeting a couple o' things which might just turn back on you (preferably in a scarier and hungrier version).

      For instance:
      "These organisms are like nanomachines. We know their genetic code, hence the isntructions required to produce them bla bla bla" says the MIT guru. Yeah. The only problem is that microorganisms are not machines. Unlike machines, microorganisms have this annoying tendency of replicating. Plus, they mutate all the time. What if some little bugger genetically engineered to perpetrate cities and stuff develops taste for human flesh?

      Furthermore, the ecosystem is more chaotic than most corporate executives believe. Maybe if you release some bug that say, eats toxic waste, this bug also render other bugs extinct. Maybe the bug is a carier for bacteria that kill me, you, and the other bug whose crap cures cancer and hasn't been discovered yet.

      There is a solution to environmental pollution. Stop polluting the bloody environment that much! Use smaller cars, don't use CFC, find alternatives to oil, recycle. But these things do not immediately translate into money, so we get stupidities of all kinds instead. Money-making stupidities in fact...

  2. Don't eat me by SoftwareTechie · · Score: 5, Funny

    News headline:

    All life on Earth mysteriously disappears.
    In other news, health officials are worried about the increased incidence of obesity in carbon-eating bacteria.

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    Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
  3. It'd be cool if.... by Snafoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some big, suspicious corporation with many millions of dollars of PCB-filled waste containers slowly and secretly rusting in the Boston harbour could genetically engineer a microbe to take those PCBs and rip off the chlorine molecule so as to reduce the stuff to harmless saltwater.

    But wait, this all sounds familiar...

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    - undoware.ca