{"id":12839,"date":"2024-10-02T07:05:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T07:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=12839"},"modified":"2024-10-02T07:05:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T07:05:48","slug":"eight-scientists-a-billion-dollars-and-the-moonshot-agency-trying-to-make-britain-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=12839","title":{"rendered":"Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\u201cIt\u2019s great that ARIA exists, and I think it\u2019s great that there is a plants program in it,\u201d says Langdale. \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt about that because for far too long, people like Gates have been driving the moonshot projects, and of course they have a very specific focus on what it is they want to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philanthropic foundations like Gates\u2019 also have a higher tolerance for projects that may not hit paydirt. \u201cWe\u2019ve been going quite a long time, and we certainly don\u2019t have anything near a product to put in the field,\u201d Langdale says. Government-backed science funding has historically had much less of an appetite for these kinds of projects, because it\u2019s hard to justify spending taxpayer money on projects that might take 30 years to come to fruition.<\/p>\n

Even compared to the C4 Rice Project, Burnett\u2019s synthetic plants program is a very significant chunk of money, Langdale says. Burnett is aiming to spend \u00a362.4 million ($82 million) over five years. The program will fund scientists to try to make synthetic chromosomes, the genetic building blocks of plants, and synthetic chloroplasts, which have their own separate genomes. But the program doesn\u2019t specify what new features these partly synthetic plants should have. It\u2019s a little like designing a new machine without knowing what tools that machine is going to build, says Langdale.<\/p>\n

Johnathan Napier, a science director at agricultural institute Rothamsted Research shares these concerns. Building synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts are clearly defined goals, but he\u2019s not sure whether they\u2019re going to deliver a tangible benefit. Napier tries to engineer crops to produce omega-3 fish oils, while the C4 Rice Project is attempting to make rice much more productive. But Burnett\u2019s program is much wider than either of these. In theory at least, it could one day allow plant scientists to plug in any kind of functionality into a plant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this all worked, you\u2019d be able to design your complex pathway in the computer, build an entire chromosome [\u2026] and just plug that into the plant in a single step,\u201d says Saul Purton, another workshop attendee and a professor at University College London who works on synthetic chloroplasts in algae. Purton says that he may apply for an ARIA grant, but that the five-year timeline set out to deliver synthetic chloroplasts in several crop species is extremely tight. \u201cWe\u2019ve been bashing away in terms of developing new synthetic biology tools for engineering the chloroplast of a simple model system for 15 or 20 years now, and we\u2019re still learning, we\u2019re still making mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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