21 May 2011 | NewScientist | 3

TAKE a deep breath. You can thank cyanobacteria for that lungful of oxygen. These prolific microorganisms were the first to oxygenate Earth’s atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago. Now with the help of genetic engineering they’ve been persuaded to turn sunshine and carbon dioxide into something else we need: fuel.

The organisms have been engineered to carry out this trick by Joule Unlimited, a firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a result, they can feed themselves through photosynthesis and secrete alkanes, the chief building block of diesel. Even better, unlike the hydrogen economy, their products do not require us to overhaul our energy infrastructure (see page 6).

However good an idea looks on paper, unforeseen problems can arise, as GreenFuels Technologies

found to their cost. The algal fuel company got as far as building a pilot plant in Arizona. But the company was wound down in 2009 due to unruly algal growth and the high cost of growth chambers.

We may now be witnessing another false dawn in the attempt to harness microorganisms to

create energy but their chemical talents are too diverse to ignore. Like us, the vast array of microorganisms in soil fight for limited resources of carbon and energy. The difference, of course, is that microbes have had billions of years to evolve ways of securing their share.

Fortunately, many firms are involved in the quest to harness the talents of microbes, from LS9, a San Francisco-based company that engineers Escherichia. coli to Craig Venter’s efforts to create synthetic organisms for oil giant ExxonMobil.

Like all world-changing technologies it is unlikely that any company will crack the problem at their first attempt, but the wider the diversity of approaches, the more likely we are to succeed in finding a cost-effective way to persuade microbes to make energy. Of all the approaches, it seems most appropriate to strike up a relationship with cyanobacteria, the microbes whose waste product was life-giving oxygen. It’s about time that we returned the favour by nourishing them with our waste carbon dioxide. n

Make oil as the sun shines

EDITORIAL

Efforts to squeeze fuel out of microbes have passed a turning point

EVERYONE agrees that stem cells will one day revolutionise medicine. But an unexpected setback (see page 10) has highlighted the dangers of restricting the scope of research in the field, as happened recently in the US.

A study has shown that patients’ immune systems might reject induced pluripotent stem

cells (iPS cells), obtained by reprogramming skin cells to return them to an embryonic-like state, even though cells and patient are genetically identical. This surprising discovery undermines a key argument made against therapeutic cloning, in which stem cells for potential therapies are obtained from embryos. Those who object to using human

embryos for this purpose have argued that iPS cells can be used instead as they are just as versatile. Indeed, many researchers have abandoned research using embryonic stem cells because it is easier to create iPS cells, practically and ethically.

Doubtless, the iPS rejection problem will be overcome, but the finding has a broader message. When it comes to finding new treatments, we must explore every scientific avenue. n

Keep stem cell options open

“Genetically engineered cyanobacteria can make oil without requiring us to overhaul the economy”

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THE world of political theory is littered with traps for unwary scientists. That has not discouraged Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico,

Albuquerque. He claims that the nature of a country’s political system – specifically, whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship – is determined by psychological biases triggered by the threat of disease (page 34). It sounds simplistic, but how does the evidence stack up? Thornhill can invoke a handful of studies

in support of his claim, and we may discover more by examining whether improvements in public health lead to democracy taking root.

However many gaps remain in Thornhill’s idea, it does provide grit for the oyster. Whether a pearl of wisdom is the ultimate result remains to be seen. n

Germs, genes and politics