[extropy-chat] Let the mine detectors bloom!

[Anders Sandberg]

>From my blog, preaching to the choir here:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=1&u=/nm/20040127/sc_nm/arms_denmark_landmines_dc
Yahoo! News - Flower-Power Could Help Clear Land mines

A very nice biotech application, a plant that changes color in the
presence of nitrogen dioxide, marking where mines are buried in the soil.
The plant, the beloved Arabidopsis thaliana, has been modified by Aresa
Biodetection. Since the plant can be made male sterile or reproduction
limited to in the presence of a growth hormone concerns about spreading
can be ameliorated. But is that the right solution? Maybe we should allow
it to spread wildly instead.

The careful approach of first clearing the land, then sowing the plant,
waiting, and then removing the mines and planting something else, might
work where the mine density is fairly high and doing this kind of clearing
has few other effects. But in many places clearing the land would cause
severe erosion, and if the mine density is low it would be a very
expensive way of finding them (although likely better than plenty of other
high-tech solutions, and of course safer than having people poke with
sticks). The method is not presented as a panacea, and it isn't.

But what if modified Arabidopsis (that is also clearly visible as
modified, e.g. by leaf shape) is simply spread and allowed to grow freely?
That would be an extremely cost effective way of finding out the presence
of those truly unexpected mines and marking them.

The ecological risk of the change appears low. Most likely the normal
strain has an advantage over the modified strain since it adapts to stress
by changing color (an evolved response that presumably is an advantage)
while the modified strain won't do it except near mines. And if other
species were to pick up the mine detecting effect, it would actually
extend the benefit. Anthocyanins are even antioxidants , so it might be a
good thing if they get into food :-)

Of course, the political climate in the West is likely mostly against
this. But if the choice is between a potential, vague and likely very
small ecological risk and the real and serious effect of land mines, the
only thing the precautionary principle tells us is to add safeguards to
the modified plant, not to avoid spreading it. Those holding the
bioconservative view that nature should not be tampered with under any
circumstances, they need to explain how the tampering done by slowly
decaying landmines (not to mention their human cost) is less than the
change in coloration behavior of a plant.

There are many more likely practical showstoppers - can the seeds be
produced cheaply, will the plant thrive in affected areas, can people
reliably use it to find mines and so on. And in many situations other
methods are still superior. But I think we should carefully consider one
day releasing this kind of safeguard plants deliberately into the
environment. If our environment could clearly signal pollution or danger
it would be far easier to protect - and it would protect us better too.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.