What would men born before the first industrial revolution have made of scenes like this?
Work that would once have been done by a thousand men can now be done by a handful.
But there is a trade-off. The machines that help them cost millions of dollars,
and the fuel they burn a king's ransom. Smelting the ore
disgorged from thousands of giant tinker toys like this is a cause of acid rain.
It's the story of modern industry in miniature.
A story that billions of new workers are about to rewrite.
According to the evidence of fossils, bacteria were the first inhabitants of Earth.
They are everywhere, deep in the ocean, high in the atmosphere, in frozen wastes and boiling springs.
We never see bacteria, though there are more of them on each of us, than there are people on the planet.
A few cause disease, but most are good to us, using their digestive juices,
enzymes to break down the world's garbage like a natural waste recycler.
This is the chemistry biotechnology is learning to exploit.
Bacteria don't stop at eating organic matter.
In the New Mexico mine, water is sprinkled through huge dumps of ore containing worthless
iron pyrite and valuable copper. Bacteria attack the pyrite and produce oxidized iron
and sulfuric acid. These dissolve the copper, producing a lagoon of copper sulfate blue
at the base of the leach dump.
Because of its taste for iron pyrite, better known as fool's gold,
Theo Bacillus' ferro-oxidans is coining real profits for the copper miners.
The next step is to remove unwanted metals from the solution.
Finally, the purified solution flows into an enormous bath. Electricity is passed through
the liquid and the copper is deposited on plates.
Finally, the purified solution flows into an enormous bath. Electricity is passed through
the liquid and the copper is deposited on plates.
It's really a very nice tool for a mining property like ours to have available to it.
It takes a very long time to recover copper out of a leach dump. That's one of the disadvantages.
The traditional mining and milling methods and smelting methods are very quick turnaround
on the copper, very quick recoveries. Leaching isn't quite as quick. However, we can make
copper for about half the cost that the conventional method does.
As well as saving money, mining microbes save the environment.
No smelting means no acid rain. Biotechnology promises to produce a cleaner tomorrow,
but it may have ways to mop past mistakes as well.
The beauty and the power of Niagara Falls have captivated visitors for years,
but the power it could generate has also lured industry to it.
William Love started it off. The canal he began to dig in 1894, intending to found a
metropolis on hydroelectricity, was abandoned after a mile. In 1978,
this long forgotten trench, which then had a school built over it, achieved a notoriety
it will not live down. In the 40s, chemical waste had been buried in the canal in metal drums.
In 1978, rotting drums rose up in a bizarre parody of a resurrection.
The panic that followed revealed alarming levels of cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects
in local residents who have since been evacuated.
Now, Love Canal is a far cry from the pleasant suburb Luella Kenney moved to with her young family.
It was just idyllic, truly with the oak trees in the backyards and the wandering down to the creek
and just putting a fishing pole in there and just exploring for frogs and pollywogs and
things that young boys would enjoy. The Kenney family were not to know that the creek was polluted.
Even after her youngest son John had a spell in hospital with a mystery disease,
Luella did not suspect that chemical wastes from the Love Canal dump were poisoning his favorite
playground. He continued to play in the backyard and towards the creek and then we found out later
that the creek had 32 parts per billion of dioxin in the spot where he played. We even had an
occasion where a bird went into the creek at that spot, drank the water, and dropped dead in front of
the state officials and the state officials were just trying to tell us what was going on in the
state officials and the state officials were just trying to tell us stories like the bird
was died of parasitic worm infestation. This was John's room. Our Tinker toy is still here.
All through the summer of 78 John Kenney became more and more sick, but in or out of hospital he never
lost his sense of humor. Still as sick as he was because you could see he could hardly walk his
feet were swollen his you know his whole eyes and everything and he wanted to tease his grandmother
that he didn't come home you know he was hiding and I can remember him answering the phone and
her asking him how are you John and he said I'm fine he says not he called his grandmother nanny
he says I'm fine nanny he says don't you worry about me because your blood pressure will go up
and then you're going to get sick but anyway as turned out then he just started um having
difficulty breathing and we took him back to the hospital again after two days and then he he just
died there will be other love canals you may live near one of them
hiding places for the industrial nightmares that are left over from yesterday's consumers dreams
the all-electric homes of the 20s and 30s made great demands on the electricity supply industry
as well as more power better distribution was needed
new equipment that wouldn't catch fire when surges occurred
it the answer was a wonder of its day a stabilizing fluid that kept its cool no matter what
and stayed and stayed and stayed that stability which was carefully worked into the material was
also what made it so difficult to dispose of once it was no longer used or needed in the equipment
but the pcbs as they've come to be known in the last few years have
the kind of a structure that is very difficult for most organisms to attack
just how hazardous pcbs are is still a subject for debate but no one's taking any chances
these dumps contain a witch's brew of suspect compounds
dust to dust ashes to ashes most things decompose but 20th century technology has granted pcbs the
gift of eternal life or almost you can destroy them with great heat but many countries don't
have the facilities which is why the biotech approach is causing such excitement
pcbs have been around for 60 years was that long enough for nature to respond
were there any bacteria that could dent the chemicals armor that is what scientists from
general electric set out to find on a contaminated site in new york and indeed almost every place we
looked we did find bacteria that could grow this flask contains bacteria that have grown on the
parent compound of pcbs we then took that culture and added some pcbs to it to assess the flask
to assess the competence of each of these different cultures for their ability to degrade pcbs
at the same time we also purified the bacteria from this mixed culture into the individual
components to ask the question which ones had the pcb degradative competence and which were the best
when we did that we found over two dozen pure strains each of which had a different ability
to degrade pcbs several of which were outstanding and is those that we are now continuing our studies
with in the lab they have singled out a number of genes which produce the enzymes that actually
do the work of breaking down pcbs when bacteria containing one or more of these genes were sprayed
on a test site a quarter of the pcbs were destroyed but it took four months
genetic engineering could improve this a thousand times the scientists believe
although whether these gene spliced bugs will ever be allowed outside the lab is another matter
when tankers started to go down a young scientist thought there must be a better way to clean up
after them the storms that wrecked the tankers also wrecked the contraptions designed to prevent
pollution it was back to buckets and spades until the invention of the oil-eating bug
and then get rid of the chloroform ether again ananda shakrabarti was the man who made the bug
but it took five years to establish his right to patent what was in fact the first living invention
shakrabarti has been challenged every step of the way by people who think that what he does is
dangerous and wrong he does not use conventional gene splicing to create his cleanup bugs
but all the same you won't find them in nature
besides their main chromosome many bacteria have extra ring-shaped molecules of different
DNA called plasmids
each plasmid is composed of several genes
when bacteria mate one can donate a copy of a plasmid to the other
this is what shakrabarti exploits
to create a strain of bugs that can break down a complex chemical
he starts with one containing a suitable gene to begin the process
other bugs are introduced
with genes that will continue the job
their surroundings and food supply are manipulated until the shuffling of plasmids produces a new strain
a strain in which all the useful genes are combined
the enzyme produced by oil eating bugs is used to clean out pipes and tanks in the oil business
but the bugs themselves have never gone into action against pollution
in the lab there are bugs that break down some of the nastiest chemicals known to man
but scientists are reluctant to let them out
so so in general we like to
field test any new microorganism or product under supervision of the environmental protection agency
the career of another banned bug began here on the ski slopes
when nature lets us down snowfalls can be manufactured thanks to bacteria called
pseudomonas syringi also known as ice plus
everybody knows that water freezes at zero but not always
when all the ice plus are removed it remains liquid at minus six
add some ice plus and there's a snap freeze
just one or two degrees of frost is enough to cost fruit growers millions of dollars a year
that's why a california company decided to wage war on these ice making bacteria
they did it by creating another bug in every way identical to ice plus except
they'd taken out the freezing gene
they called it ice minus
strawberries sprayed with it survived exposure to frost or at least the fridges in the lab
legal battles raged to decide whether it was safe to test ice minus in the field
in the end the inventors won the day
but the protesters saw its significance
the first permitted release of gene spliced organisms genetically engineered organisms are very
analogous to the introduction of exotic non-native organisms into our ecosystems from all over the
world most of them have fit in some of them have died out but a few of them have become tremendous
pests causing billions of dollars a year in damage kudzu vine in the south dutch elm disease in the
north chestnut blight starlings gypsy moth these are organisms from other parts of the world that
found a habitat proliferated and became pests we can't get rid of them now imagine the scale here
with genetic engineered organisms imagine introducing scores then hundreds and then into the
next century thousands of genetically engineered viruses and bacteria plant strains and animal
breeds and massive commercial volume all over the world sheer statistics suggest that if only a small
fraction of these organisms turn out to be pests the damage could exceed in magnitude the damage we
face with chemical pollutants because these organisms they're alive they reproduce and you can't
get rid of them once they're in the environment in the case of gypsy moth you're talking about
something that is a natural component in and of itself the ecosystem apparently the predators
and parasites that are necessary to keep populations of gypsy moth down are not present in sufficient
numbers in the case of ice minus all of the normal competitors predators parasites are in place
because its enemies are the same as the enemies of the original strains so it's not at all the
same as introducing some kind of foreign organism into an ecosystem that's not prepared to deal
with it at public hearings the inventors explained that their ice minus bugs work by simply
occupying a few spaces that ice plus would have taken others claim they are sowing the seeds
of disaster you see this particular bacteria is found all over the temperate regions of the world
pseudomonas syringae according to the researchers and it's speculative they think it blows into the
upper atmosphere triggering rain it's an ice nucleating bacteria AGS eliminated the genetic
instructions that make the ice that could have long-term effects on lack of rainfall or stopping
rainfall patterns is it worth a few temperature degrees of benefit to frost retardation if we
have a long-term impact on rainfall patterns again it's only a small probability risk but if this
risk materializes the problem could be irreversible the amount of risk assessment studies that AGS
was required to do before they were issued a permit to do this test is unprecedented in the
history of the development of microbial pesticides or in the history of the use of microbes in the
environment and this was because there was a lot of concern not only public concern but also
concern within the regulatory agencies but also because those of us at AGS who are involved in
this thing are environmentally concerned and there were a number of tests that we would have done
regardless of whether or not they were required because we want to make sure that this that the
field test would be safe and we are in a rather cop guest situation here there is no risk
assessment science to judge the risk of any of these introductions there is no database on how
genes transfer in nature how organisms compete how they survive so we're in a situation of the
government saying it's regulating a technology knowing there's no predictive ecology or risk
assessment science by which to regulate it the arguments basically have been that somehow if a
microorganism is genetically manipulated it becomes somehow dangerous now that's a very weak and
untenable argument because you know researchers in the universities have been doing genetic
manipulation for years and as a routine procedure we always isolate new type of microorganisms from
nature we change them genetically and then we actually release them in the environment by
dumping the whole thing in the laboratory sink so and there has absolutely been no incidence of
any kind of hazard to the environment the debate continues Californian strawberries are as prone to
frosting as ever the PCBs and dioxin in Luella Kenny's backyard may prevent her grandchildren
playing there Ananda Chakrabarti says it's a storm in a teacup he is simply revving up evolution if
we didn't do it now nature would have done it over a period of 50 years and what we are saying is
that can we afford to wait for another 50 years for microorganisms to develop that would clean up
the dioxins and the PCBs and the agent orange
you
you