A Tiny Solution for Today’s Big Problems
The palate of pseudomonas aeruginosa is discriminating without being fussy, robust without being ravenous, and curious without being intrusive. This is clearly a microbe with panache.
“They seem to be a very flexible bacteria,” says Bio-Care Chairman Bob Larvie, whose young Campbell, Calif.-based company packages and sells them to restaurants at $20 a pop to help manage garbage disposal. “They eat most of the biological, animal and oleaginous waste materials of any kind: detergents, shampoos. . . . Grease is a feast for these guys, a four-star meal.” You can buy these Agriculture Department-approved microcritters for your septic tank too.
Similarly, Exxon and the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that there’s nothing like a dash of Inipol--a French-made fertilizer--to stimulate the growth and appetites of hydrocarbon-munching microorganisms on the oil-stained beaches around Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the inlet where the Exxon Valdez tanker dumped its crude. “There were much more dramatic surface results than anyone had predicted,” enthuses the University of Louisville’s Ronald M. Atlas, a biologist who has been a pioneer in bacterial bioremediation for more than 20 years.
We’ve built microprocessors to process data; we can now build microorganisms to process waste. “Everyone’s back yard is filled with billions of bacteria that are capable of degrading pollutants,” says Louisville’s Atlas. The trick is to identify, cultivate and nurture the right ones. The beauty of this approach is that, in most cases, we can work with naturally occurring bacteria--bacteria that have already been tested by the rigors of evolution.
“It’s the back-to-nature pollution cure,” says Atlas. “Bioremediation is taking advantage of natural processes and stimulating them to help them along.” But at the same time, the clever design of microbial intervention could be used as much to limit pollution as clean it up. What we have in bioremediation is the opportunity to craft macroecologies of microorganisms--self-regulating environments that strike a new and better balance between society’s ability to generate waste and nature’s ability to accommodate it.
Smokestacks belching pollution? Install membranes of sulfur-hungry microcritters to leech out the noxious gases. Landfills about to burst? Seed the sites with microbial cocktails that will accelerate the processes of natural decay. Toxic waste sites? Don’t dig up the soil and incinerate. Douse it with the microorganisms capable of cracking its compounds into substances less harsh and more easily manageable.
Ground-water problems? The right bacteria in the right doses could solve them. Cost-effective? Heck, yes! This product replenishes itself with waste.
Picture how chemical refineries, semiconductor plants and materials processing sites would be redesigned as--at various points--living, dynamic microbial screens. The screens could be used to strain out and metabolize the guck and grunge that would otherwise end up as potentially toxic pollutants, which would have to be either burned or buried.
Obviously, not all substances are vulnerable to microbiological assault. Plastics and PCBs may need super-microorganisms endowed with special powers granted only by skilled genetic engineers. One could build in “suicide genes” that would kill them off once their work was done. “Actually,” says Atlas, who serves on the National Institutes of Health’s Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, “the need for genetically engineered organisms to manage waste is limited.”
However, it would be neat to design a microcritter that could live in the hostile environment of an automobile exhaust system and help cleanse the smoke, because automobiles are a major source of air pollution. Or maybe some bacteria that can live in the gas tank and help rid the fuel of potentially noxious impurities.
The point is obvious: We’re at the beginning of an explosion of what might prove to be an exceptionally powerful and pervasive technology. There’s not yet a regulatory framework; the EPA, NIH, USDA and Office of Management and Budget can’t decide who’s responsible (or not responsible) for what. Atlas estimates that there are literally a thousand companies out there--each organized around its own microbe du jour . “I must have been contacted by venture capitalists at least a hundred times last year,” he shrugs. There’s a lot of ignorance and uncertainty.
“People ask, ‘What happens when you create teen-age mutant ninja bugs? Will they come out of the sewer and eat me?’ ” notes Bio-Care’s Larvie.
Obviously, the environmental impact of densely concentrated colonies of microbes is not a trivial matter, although Atlas stresses that “the presence of that pollutant creates an ecology of its own, too.” The questions become even more clouded when you begin to intermix multiple ecologies of microbes--genetically enhanced or not--into supra-ecologies. The ability to make meaningful predictions about bacteria growth and mutation rates decays. It’s clear that even seemingly “natural” solutions to waste pose stubborn challenges.
But it’s equally clear that, with billions of kinds of bacteria out there, there are bound to be a couple of hundred that can deliver a lot of spic and span for comparatively little risk. I think the prospects of bioremediation become a fascinating challenge to the environmental movement too: Is this a technique that it can embrace as ecologically sound because it attempts to augment and enhance what nature does anyway? Or is it too “technological” and “artificial” to win the Green Earthkeeping Seal of Approval?
Given the astonishing rate at which our knowledge of molecular biology expands and our ability to understand the inner mechanisms of microorganisms grows, there’s no question that we will be able to explore a wide array of cost-effective bioremediation approaches within the next three to five years. What I find most exciting is that if this nascent technique can work well in even one domain--smokestacks, ground water, landfills, toxic waste sites--the global impact will be extraordinary.
But as the English critic and cynic Cyril Connolly once remarked, “Those whom the critics wish to destroy, they first call promising.” The ingredients for success seem right: The technological infrastructure is there, the problems are there, the economics are tilting in the right direction. Yet, potential isn’t achievement. However, when Bio-Care’s Larvie says, “If this isn’t a business for the ‘90s, I don’t know what is,” I can’t help agreeing.
