A Kickstarter campaign for The Glowing Plant project has stirred the debate over genetically modified organisms. Scientists are planning to use lab techniques to insert DNA that codes for glowing proteins from fireflies and bacteria into plants
, so they glow.
These glowing plants have been made before — the first glowing tobacco plant was created in the 1986 — but this public campaign is causing a ruckus because they are planning to send the seeds out and they could potentially grow in the wild and spread.
To stop that from happening, the team is engineering the plants to need a specific supplement to survive and will conduct studies to ensure there are no legal, ethical or environmental issues before shipping the seeds.
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