This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. 

The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that’s raw, or unpasteurized, can actually infect mice that drink it, and a few dairy workers have already caught the bug. 

The FDA says that commercial milk is safe because it is pasteurized, killing the germs. Even so, it’s enough to make a person ponder a life beyond milk—say, taking your coffee black or maybe drinking oat milk.

But for those of us who can’t do without the real thing, it turns out some genetic engineers are working on ways to keep the milk and get rid of the cows instead. They’re doing it by engineering yeasts and plants with bovine genes so they make the key proteins responsible for milk’s color, satisfying taste, and nutritional punch.

The proteins they’re copying are casein, a floppy polymer that’s the most abundant protein in milk and is what makes pizza cheese stretch, and whey, a nutritious combo of essential amino acids that’s often used in energy powders.

It’s part of a larger trend of replacing animals with ingredients grown in labs, steel vessels, or plant crops. Think of the Impossible burger, the veggie patty made mouthwatering with the addition of heme, a component of blood that’s produced in the roots of genetically modified soybeans.

One of the milk innovators is Remilk, an Israeli startup founded in 2019, which has engineered yeast so it will produce beta-lactoglobulin (the main component of whey). Company cofounder Ori Cohavi says a single biotech factory of bubbling yeast vats feeding on sugar could in theory “replace 50,000 to 100,000 cows.” 

Remilk has been making trial batches and is testing ways to formulate the protein with plant oils and sugar to make spreadable cheese, ice cream, and milk drinks. So yes, we’re talking “processed” food—one partner is a local Coca-Cola bottler, and advising the company are former executives of Nestlé, Danone, and PepsiCo.

But regular milk isn’t exactly so natural either. At milking time, animals stand inside elaborate robots, and it looks for all the world as if they’re being abducted by aliens. “The notion of a cow standing in some nice green scenery is very far from how we get our milk,” says Cohavi. And there are environmental effects: cattle burp methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and a lactating cow needs to drink around 40 gallons of water a day. 

“There are hundreds of millions of dairy cows on the planet producing greenhouse waste, using a lot of water and land,” says Cohavi. “It can’t be the best way to produce food.”  

For biotech ventures trying to displace milk, the big challenge will be keeping their own costs of production low enough to compete with cows. Dairies get government protections and subsidies, and they don’t only make milk. Dairy cows are eventually turned into gelatin, McDonald’s burgers, and the leather seats of your Range Rover. Not much goes to waste.

At Alpine Bio, a biotech company in San Francisco (also known as Nobell Foods), researchers have engineered soybeans to produce casein. While not yet cleared for sale, the beans are already being grown on USDA-sanctioned test plots in the Midwest, says Alpine’s CEO, Magi Richani. 

Richani chose soybeans because they’re already a major commodity and the cheapest source of protein around. “We are working with farmers who are already growing soybeans for animal feed,” she says. “And we are saying, ‘Hey, you can grow this to feed humans.’ If you want to compete with a commodity system, you have to have a commodity crop.”

Alpine intends to crush the beans, extract the protein, and—much like Remilk—sell the ingredient to larger food companies.

Everyone agrees that cow’s milk will be difficult to displace. It holds a special place in the human psyche, and we owe civilization itself, in part, to domesticated animals. In fact, they’ve  left their mark in our genes, with many of us carrying DNA mutations that make cow’s milk easier to digest.  

But that’s why it might be time for the next technological step, says Richani. “We raise 60 billion animals for food every year, and that is insane. We took it too far, and we need options,” she says. “We need options that are better for the environment, that overcome the use of antibiotics, and that overcome the disease risk.”

It’s not clear yet whether the bird flu outbreak on dairy farms is a big danger to humans. But making milk without cows would definitely cut the risk that an animal virus will cause a new pandemic. As Richani says: “Soybeans don’t transmit diseases to humans.”

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Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive

Hungry for more from the frontiers of fromage? In the Build issue of our print magazine, Andrew Rosenblum tasted a yummy brie made only from plants. Harder to swallow was the claim by developer Climax Foods that its cheese was designed using artificial intelligence.

The idea of using yeast to create food ingredients, chemicals, and even fuel via fermentation is one of the dreams of synthetic biology. But it’s not easy. In 2021, we raised questions about high-flying startup Ginkgo Bioworks. This week its stock hit an all-time low of $0.49 per share as the company struggles to make … well, anything.

This spring, I traveled to Florida to watch attempts to create life in a totally new way: using a synthetic embryo made in a lab. The action involved cattle at the animal science department of the University of Florida, Gainesville.

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From around the web

How many human bird flu cases are there? No one knows, because there’s barely any testing. Scientists warn we’re flying blind as US dairy farms struggle with an outbreak. (NBC)  

Moderna, one of the companies behind the covid-19 shots, is seeing early success with a cancer vaccine. It uses the same basic technology: gene messages packed into nanoparticles. (Nature)

It’s the covid-19 theory that won’t go away. This week the New York Times published an op-ed arguing that the virus was the result of a lab accident. We previously profiled the author, Alina Chan, who is a scientist with the Broad Institute. (NYTimes)

Sales of potent weight loss drugs, like Ozempic, are booming. But it’s not just humans who are overweight. Now the pet care industry is dreaming of treating chubby cats and dogs, too. (Bloomberg)

An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young, healthy body. 

This is BrainBridge, the animated video claims—“the world’s first revolutionary concept for a head transplant machine, which uses state-of-the-art robotics and artificial intelligence to conduct complete head and face transplantation.”

First posted on Tuesday, the video has millions of views, more than 24,000 comments on Facebook, and a content warning on TikTok for its grisly depictions of severed heads. A slick BrainBridge website has several job postings, including one for a “neuroscience team leader” and another for a “government relations adviser.” It is all convincing enough for the New York Post to announce that BrainBridge is “a biomedical engineering startup” and that “the company” plans a surgery within eight years. 

We can report that BrainBridge is not a real company—it’s not incorporated anywhere. The video was made by Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemeni science communicator and film director who in 2022 made a viral video called “EctoLife,” about artificial wombs, that also left journalists scrambling to determine if it was real or not.

Yet BrainBridge is not merely a provocative work of art. This video is better understood as a public billboard for a hugely controversial scheme to defeat death that’s recently been gaining attention among some life-extension proponents and entrepreneurs. 

“It’s about recruiting newcomers to join the project,” says Al-Ghaili.

This morning, Al-Ghaili, who lives in Dubai, was up at 5 a.m., tracking the video as its viewership ballooned around social media. “I am monitoring its progress,” he says, but he insists he didn’t make the film for clicks: “Being viral is not the goal. I can be viral anytime. It’s pushing boundaries and testing feasibility.”

The video project was bankrolled in part by Alex Zhavoronkov, the founder of Insilico Medicine, a large AI drug discovery company, who is also a prominent figure in anti-aging research. After Zhavoronkov posted the video on his LinkedIn account, commenters noticed that it is his face on the two bodies shown in the video.

“I can confirm I helped design and fund a few things,” Zhavoronkov told MIT Technology Review in a WhatsApp message, in which he also claimed that “some important and famous people are supporting [it] financially.”

Zhavoronkov declined to name these individuals. He also didn’t respond when asked if the job ads—whose cookie-cutter descriptions of qualifications and responsibilities appear to have been written by an AI—are real roles or make-believe positions.

Aging bypass

What is certain is that head transplantation—or body transplant, as some prefer to call it—is a subject of growing, if speculative, interest in longevity circles, the kind inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who form the most dedicated cadre of extreme life-extensionists.

Many proponents of longer life spans will admit things don’t look good. Anti-aging medicine so far hasn’t achieved any breakthroughs. In fact, as research advances into the molecular details, the problem of death only looks more and more complicated. As we age, our billions of cells gradually succumb to the irreversible effects of entropy. Fixing that may never be possible.

By comparison, putting your head on a young body looks comparatively easy—a way to bypass aging in a single stroke, at least as long as your brain holds out. The idea was strongly endorsed in a technical road map put forward this year by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, a group espousing radical life extension, which rated “body replacement” as the cheapest, fastest pathway to “solve aging.”  

Will head transplants work? In a crude way, they already have. In the early 1970s, the American neurosurgeon Robert White performed a “cephalic exchange,” cutting off the head of a monkey, placing it on the body of another, and sewing together their circulatory systems. Reports suggest the head remained conscious, and able to see, for a few days before it died.

Most likely, a human head transplant would also be fatal. But even if you lived, you’d be a mind atop a paralyzed body, since exchanging heads means severing the spinal cord. 

Yet head-swapping proponents can point to plausible solutions for that, too—a number of which appear in the BrainBridge video. In Europe, for instance, some paralyzed people have walked again after doctors bridged their spinal injuries with electronics. Other scientists in China are studying growth factors to regrow nerves.

Joined at the neck

As shocking as the video is, BrainBridge is in some ways overly conventional in its thinking. If you want to keep your brain going, why must it be on a human body? You might instead keep the head alive on a heart-lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the internet, for as long as it lives. Or consider how doctors hoping to solve the organ shortage have started putting hearts and kidneys from genetically engineered pigs into patients. If you don’t mind having a tail and four legs, maybe your head could be placed onto a pig’s body.

Let’s take it a step further. Why does the body “donor” have to be dead at all? Anatomically, it’s possible to have two heads. There are conjoined twins who share one body. If your spouse were diagnosed with a fatal cancer, you would surely welcome his or her head next to yours, if it allowed their mind to live on. After all, the concept of a “living donor” is widely accepted in transplant medicine already, and married couples are often said to be joined at the hip. Why not at the neck, too?

If the video is an attempt to take the public’s temperature and gauge reactions, it’s been successful. Since it was posted, thousands of commenters have explored the moral dilemmas posed by the procedure. For instance, if someone is left brain dead—say, in a motorcycle accident—surgeons can use their heart, liver, and kidneys to save multiple other people. Would it be ethical to use a body to help only one person?

“The most common question is ‘Where do you get the bodies from?’” says Al-Ghaili. The BrainBridge website answers this question by stating it will source “ethically grown” unconscious bodies from EctoLife, the artificial womb company that is Al-Ghaili’s previous fiction. He also suggests that people undergoing euthanasia because of chronic pain, or even psychiatric problems, could provide an additional supply. 

For the most part, the public seems to hate the idea. On Facebook, a pastor, Matthew. W. Tucker, called the concept “disgusting, immoral, unnecessary, pagan, demonic and outright idiotic,” adding that “they have no idea what they are doing.” A poster from the Middle East apologized for the video, joking that its creator “is one of our psychiatric patients who escaped last night.” “We urge the public to go about [their] business as everything is under control,” this person said.

Al-Ghaili is monitoring the feedback with interest and some concern. “The negativity is huge, to be honest,” he says. “But behind that are the ones who are sending emails. These are people who want to invest, or who are expressing their personal health challenges. These are the ones who matter.”

He says if suitable job applicants appear, the backers of BrainBridge are prepared to fund a small technical feasibility study to see if their idea has legs.

It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held a squirt bottle of water.

Seven other animals stood nearby behind a railing; it would be their turn next to get their uterus flushed out. As soon as the contents of #307’s womb spilled into a bucket, a worker rushed it to a small laboratory set up under the barn’s corrugated gables.

“It’s something!” said a postdoc named Hao Ming, dressed in blue overalls and muck boots, corralling a pink wisp of tissue under the lens of a microscope. But then he stepped back, not as sure. “It’s hard to tell.”

The experiment, at the University of Florida, is an attempt to create a large animal starting only from stem cells—no egg, no sperm, and no conception. A week earlier, “synthetic embryos,” artificial structures created in a lab, had been transferred to the uteruses of all eight cows. Now it was time to see what had grown.

About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try to make an embryo. These structures, sometimes called “embryo models” or embryoids, have gradually become increasingly realistic. In 2022, a lab in Israel grew the mouse version in a jar until cranial folds and a beating heart appeared.

At the Florida center, researchers are now attempting to go all the way. They want to make a live animal. If they do, it wouldn’t just be a totally new way to breed cattle. It could shake our notion of what life even is. “There has never been a birth without an egg,” says Zongliang “Carl” Jiang, the reproductive biologist heading the project. “Everyone says it is so cool, so important, but show me more data—show me it can go into a pregnancy. So that is our goal.”

For now, success isn’t certain, mostly because lab-made embryos generated from stem cells still aren’t exactly like the real thing. They’re more like an embryo seen through a fun-house mirror; the right parts, but in the wrong proportions. That’s why these are being flushed out after just a week—so the researchers can check how far they’ve grown and to learn how to make better ones.

“The stem cells are so smart they know what their fate is,” says Jiang. “But they also need help.”

So far, most research on synthetic embryos has involved mouse or human cells, and it’s stayed in the lab. But last year Jiang, along with researchers in Texas, published a recipe for making a bovine version, which they called “cattle blastoids” for their resemblance to blastocysts, the stage of the embryo suitable for IVF procedures.  

Some researchers think that stem-cell animals could be as big a deal as Dolly the sheep, whose birth in 1996 brought cloning technology to barnyards. Cloning, in which an adult cell is placed in an egg, has allowed scientists to copy mice, cattle, pet dogs, and even polo ponies. The players on one Argentine team all ride clones of the same champion mare, named Dolfina.

Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands. And that’s what could revolutionize cattle breeding. Imagine that each year’s calves were all copies of the most muscled steer in the world, perfectly designed to turn grass into steak.

“I would love to see this become cloning 2.0,” says Carlos Pinzón-Arteaga, the veterinarian who spearheaded the laboratory work in Texas. “It’s like Star Wars with cows.”

Endangered species

Industry has started to circle around. A company called Genus PLC, which specializes in assisted reproduction of “genetically superior” pigs and cattle, has begun buying patents on synthetic embryos. This year it started funding Jiang’s lab to support his effort, locking up a commercial option to any discoveries he might make.

Zoos are interested too. With many endangered animals, assisted reproduction is difficult. And with recently extinct ones, it’s impossible. All that remains is some tissue in a freezer. But this technology could, theoretically, blow life back into these specimens—turning them into embryos, which could be brought to term in a surrogate of a sister species.

But there’s an even bigger—and stranger—reason to pay attention to Jiang’s effort to make a calf: several labs are creating super-realistic synthetic human embryos as well. It’s an ethically charged arena, particularly given recent changes in US abortion laws. Although these human embryoids are considered nonviable—mere “models” that are fair-game for research—all that could all change quickly if the Florida project succeeds. 

“If it can work in an animal, it can work in a human,” says Pinzón-Arteaga, who is now working at Harvard Medical School. “And that’s the Black Mirror episode.”

Industrial embryos

Three weeks before cow #307 stood in the dock, she and seven other heifers had been given stimulating hormones, to trick their bodies into thinking they were pregnant. After that, Jiang’s students had loaded blastoids into a straw they used like a popgun to shoot them towards each animal’s oviducts.

Many researchers think that if a stem-cell animal is born, the first one is likely to be a mouse. Mice are cheap to work with and reproduce fast. And one team has already grown a synthetic mouse embryo for eight days in an artificial womb—a big step, since a mouse pregnancy lasts only three weeks.

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef and dairy cattle are artificially inseminated with semen from top-rated bulls. “Cattle is harder,” says Jiang. “But we have all the technology.”

The thing that came out of cow #307 turned out to be damaged, just a fragment. But later that day, in Jiang’s main laboratory, students were speed-walking across the linoleum holding something in a petri dish. They’d retrieved intact embryonic structures from some of the other cows. These looked long and stringy, like worms, or the skin shed by a miniature snake.

That’s precisely what a two-week-old cattle embryo should look like. But the outer appearance is deceiving, Jiang says. After staining chemicals are added, the specimens are put under a microscope. Then the disorder inside them is apparent. These “elongated structures,” as Jiang calls them, have the right parts—cells of the embryonic disc and placenta—but nothing is in quite the right place.

“I wouldn’t call them embryos yet, because we still can’t say if they are healthy or not,” he says. “Those lineages are there, but they are disorganized.”

Cloning 2.0

Jiang demonstrated how the blastoids are grown in a plastic plate in his lab. First, his students deposit stem cells into narrow tubes. In confinement, the cells begin communicating and very quickly start trying to form a blastoid. “We can generate hundreds of thousands of blastoids. So it’s an industrial process,” he says. “It’s really simple.”

That scalability is what could make blastoids a powerful replacement for cloning technology. Cattle cloning is still a tricky process, which only skilled technicians can manage, and it requires eggs, too, which come from slaughterhouses. But unlike blastoids, cloning is well established and actually works, says Cody Kime, R&D director at Trans Ova Genetics, in Sioux Center, Iowa. Each year, his company clones thousands of pigs as well as hundreds of prize-winning cattle.

“A lot of people would like to see a way to amplify the very best animals as easily as you can,” Kime says. “But blastoids aren’t functional yet. The gene expression is aberrant to the point of total failure. The embryos look blurry, like someone sculpted them out of oatmeal or Play-Doh. It’s not the beautiful thing that you expect. The finer details are missing.”

This spring, Jiang learned that the US Department of Agriculture shared that skepticism, when they rejected his application for $650,000 in funding.  “I got criticism: ‘Oh, this is not going to work.’ That this is high risk and low efficiency,” he says. “But to me, this would change the entire breeding program.”

One problem may be the starting cells. Jiang uses bovine embryonic stem cells—taken from cattle embryos. But these stem cells aren’t as quite as versatile as they need to be. For instance, to make the first cattle blastoids, the team in Texas had to add a second type of cell, one that can make a placenta.

What’s needed instead are specially prepared “naïve” cells that are better poised to form the entire conceptus—both the embryo and placenta. Jiang showed me a PowerPoint with a large grid of different growth factors and lab conditions he is testing. Growing stem cells in different chemicals can shift the pattern of genes that are turned on. The latest batch of blastoids, he says, were made using a newer recipe and only needed to start with one type of cell.

Slaughterhouse

Jiang can’t say how long it will be before he makes a calf. His immediate goal is a pregnancy that lasts 30 days. If a synthetic embryo can grow that long, he thinks, it could go all the way, since “most pregnancy loss in cattle is in the first month.”

For a project to reinvent reproduction, Jiang’s budget isn’t particularly large, and he frets about the $2-a-day bill to feed each of his cows. During a tour of UFL’s animal science department, he opened the door to a slaughter room, a vaulted space with tracks and chains overhead, where a man in a slicker was running a hose. It smelled like freshly cleaned blood.

This is where cow #307 ended up. After a about 20 embryo transfers over three years, her cervix was worn out, and she came here. She was butchered, her meat wrapped and labeled, and sold to the public at market prices from a small shop at the front of the building. It’s important to everyone at the university that the research subjects aren’t wasted. “They are food,” says Jiang.

But there’s still a limit to how many cows he can use. He had 18 fresh heifers ready to join the experiment, but what if only 1% of embryos ever develop correctly? That would mean he’d need 100 surrogate mothers to see anything. It reminds Jiang of the first attempts at cloning: Dolly the sheep was one of 277 tries, and the others went nowhere. “How soon it happens may depend on industry. They have a lot of animals. It might take 30 years without them,” he says.

“It’s going to be hard,” agrees Peter Hansen, a distinguished professor in Jiang’s department. “But whoever does it first …” He lets the thought hang. “In vitro breeding is the next big thing.”

Human question

Cattle aren’t the only species in which researchers are checking the potential of synthetic embryos to keep developing into fetuses. Researchers in China have transplanted synthetic embryos into the wombs of monkeys several times. A report in 2023 found that the transplants caused hormonal signals of pregnancy, although no monkey fetus emerged.

Because monkeys are primates, like us, such experiments raise an obvious question. Will a lab somewhere try to transfer a synthetic embryo to a person? In many countries that would be illegal, and scientific groups say such an experiment should be strictly forbidden.

This summer, research leaders were alarmed by a media frenzy around reports of super-realistic models of human embryos that had been created in labs in the UK and Israel—some of which seemed to be nearly perfect mimics. To quell speculation, in June the International Society for Stem Cell Research, a powerful science and lobbying group, put out a statement declaring that the models “are not embryos” and “cannot and will not develop to the equivalent of postnatal stage humans.”

Some researchers worry that was a reckless thing to say. That’s because the statement would be disproved, biologically, as soon as any kind of stem-cell animal is born. And many top scientists expect that to happen. “I do think there is a pathway. Especially in mice, I think we will get there,” says Jun Wu, who leads the research group at UT Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, that collaborated with Jiang. “The question is, if that happens, how will we handle a similar technology in humans?”

Jiang says he doesn’t think anyone is going to make a person from stem cells. And he’s certainly not interested in doing so. He’s just a cattle researcher at an animal science department. “Scientists belong to society, and we need to follow ethical guidelines. So we can’t do it. It’s not allowed,” he says. “But in large animals, we are allowed. We’re encouraged. And so we can make it happen.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. 

Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the “Firefly Petunia,” a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark. 

After years of writing about anti-GMO sentiment in the US and elsewhere, I felt it was time to have some fun with biotech. These plants are among the first direct-to-consumer GM organisms you can buy, and they certainly seem like the coolest.

But when I unboxed my two petunias this week, they were in bad shape, with rotted leaves. And in a day, they were dead crisps. My first attempt to do biotech at home is a total bust, and it cost me $84, shipping included.

My plants did arrive in a handsome black box with neon lettering that alerted me to the living creature within. The petunias, about five inches tall, were each encased in a see-through plastic pod to keep them upright. Government warnings on the back of the box assured me they were free of Japanese beetles, sweet potato weevils, the snail Helix aspera, and gypsy moths.

The problem was when I opened the box. As it turns out, I left for a week’s vacation in Florida the same day that Light Bio, the startup selling the petunia, sent me an email saying “Glowing plants headed your way,” with a UPS tracking number. I didn’t see the email, and even if I had, I wasn’t there to receive them. 

That meant my petunias sat in darkness for seven days. The box became their final sarcophagus.

My fault? Perhaps. But I had no idea when Light Bio would ship my order. And others have had similar experiences. Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, told me his petunia arrived the day his family flew to Japan. Luckily, a house sitter feeding his lizard eventually opened the box, and Mat reports the plant is still clinging to life in his yard.

But what about the glow? How strong is it? 

Mat says so far, he doesn’t notice any light coming from the plant, even after carrying it into a pitch-dark bathroom. But buyers may have to wait a bit to see anything. It’s the flowers that glow most brightly, and you may need to tend your petunia for a couple of weeks before you get blooms and see the mysterious effect.  

“I had two flowers when I opened mine, but sadly they dropped and I haven’t got to see the brightness yet. Hoping they will bloom again soon,” says Kelsey Wood, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis. 

She would like to use the plants in classes she teaches at the university. “It’s been a dream of synthetic biologists for so many years to make a bioluminescent plant,” she says. “But they couldn’t get it bright enough to see with the naked eye.”

Others are having success right out of the box. That’s the case with Tharin White, publisher of EYNTK.info, a website about theme parks. “It had a lot of protection around it and a booklet to explain what you needed to do to help it,” says White. “The glow is strong, if you are [in] total darkness. Just being in a dark room, you can’t really see it. That being said, I didn’t expect a crazy glow, so [it] meets my expectations.”

That’s no small recommendation coming from White, who has been a “cast member” at Disney parks and an operator of the park’s Avatar ride, named after the movie whose action takes place on a planet where the flora glows. “I feel we are leaps closer to Pandora—The World of Avatar being reality,” White posted to his X account.

Chronobiologist Brian Hodge also found success by resettling his petunia immediately into a larger eight-inch pot, giving it flower food and a good soaking, and putting it in the sunlight. “After a week or so it really started growing fast, and the buds started to show up around day 10. Their glow is about what I expected. It is nothing like a neon light but more of a soft gentle glow,” says Hodge, a staff scientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

In his daily work, Hodge has handled bioluminescent beings before—bacteria mostly—and says he always needed photomultiplier tubes to see anything. “My experience with bioluminescent cells is that the light they would produce was pretty hard to see with the naked eye,” he says. “So I was happy with the amount of light I was seeing from the plants. You really need to turn off all the lights for them to really pop out at you.”

Hodge posted a nifty snapshot of his petunia, but only after setting his iPhone for a two-second exposure.

Light Bio’s CEO Keith Wood didn’t respond to an email about how my plants died, but in an interview last month he told me sales of the biotech plant had been “viral” and that the company would probably run out of its initial supply. To generate new ones, it hires commercial greenhouses to place clippings in water, where they’ll sprout new roots after a couple of weeks. According to Wood, the plant is “a rare example where the benefits of GM technology are easily recognized and experienced by the public.”

Hodge says he got interested in the plants after reading an article about combating light pollution by using bioluminescent flora instead of streetlamps. As a biologist who studies how day and night affect life, he’s worried that city lights and computer screens are messing with natural cycles.

“I just couldn’t pass up being one of the first to own one,” says Hodge. “Once you flip the lights off, the glow is really beautiful … and it sorta feels like you are witnessing something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie!” 

It makes me tempted to try again. 

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From the archives 

We’re not sure if rows of glowing plants can ever replace streetlights, but there’s no doubt light pollution is growing. Artificial light emissions on Earth grew by about 50% between 1992 and 2017—and as much as 400% in some regions. That’s according to Shel Evergreen,in his story on the switch to bright LED streetlights.

It’s taken a while for scientists to figure out how to make plants glow brightly enough to interest consumers. In 2016, I looked at a failed Kickstarter that promised glow-in-the-dark roses but couldn’t deliver.  

Another thing 

Cassandra Willyard is updating us on the case of Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman who is feeling “fantastic” two weeks after surgeons gave her a kidney from a genetically modified pig. It’s the latest in a series of extraordinary animal-to-human organ transplants—a technology, known as xenotransplantation, that may end the organ shortage.

From around the web

Taiwan’s government is considering steps to ease restrictions on the use of IVF. The country has an ultra-low birth rate, but it bans surrogacy, limiting options for male couples. One Taiwanese pair spent $160,000 to have a child in the United States.  (CNN)

Communities in Appalachia are starting to get settlement payments from synthetic-opioid makers like Johnson & Johnson, which along with other drug vendors will pay out $50 billion over several years. But the money, spread over thousands of jurisdictions, is “a feeble match for the scale of the problem.” (Wall Street Journal)

A startup called Climax Foods claims it has used artificial intelligence to formulate vegan cheese that tastes “smooth, rich, and velvety,” according to writer Andrew Rosenblum. He relates the results of his taste test in the new “Build” issue of MIT Technology Review. But one expert Rosenblum spoke to warns that computer-generated cheese is “significantly” overhyped.

AI hype continued this week in medicine when a startup claimed it has used “generative AI” to quickly discover new versions of CRISPR, the powerful gene-editing tool. But new gene-editing tricks won’t conquer the main obstacle, which is how to deliver these molecules where they’re needed in the bodies of patients. (New York Times).