For James Morris, thinking about changing the world just wasn't enough.
He wanted to do something about it.
"At the university where I was, it just so happened they started an environmental
science department...and I knew, boy, that was my calling. It was exactly
what I wanted, right at the right time."
Morris is now a professor of biological and marine sciences at Yale University.
He says luck is his secret to success.
"This molecular biologist got interested in this plant that I [was working]
on, and he learned from me some interesting things about this plant," he says.
"That got him interested. [He thought], 'Gee this is a pretty special plant.
I bet we can do something really special with this.' So, from that very accidental
and modest beginning we've had some success."
With their combined skills, Morris and his colleague make a mean phytoremediation
team. Their special plant is called Spartina, a grass that grows in salt marshes.
Like all good phytoremediators, Spartina has an appetite for toxins.
Spartina, says Morris, has an uncanny ability to go where no plant has
gone before.
"This plant lives in an environment that is, for most other plants, quite
toxic and hostile naturally. Salt marshes are tough places to make a living
as a plant. And the soils have all kinds of naturally occurring toxins and
this plant has evolved a strategy for coping with the toxins."
When Morris and his colleague are through with it, Spartina will be even
better at cleansing contaminated soil. "The idea is to essentially breed these
plants to do an even better job," he says.
"[My colleague] is trying to make it even more effective and this, I think,
is a really exciting area of science. Just like we can breed crop plants to
have a sweeter tomato or a bigger fruit, we can also engineer plants to take
up heavy metals, to degrade organic compounds in their root systems," explains
Morris.
But Morris says there are years of work to be done before genetically engineered
plants will be officially introduced in the area of wastewater treatment.
"We've got to ensure that the plant we produce is not a monster, in terms
of a very obnoxious weed that takes over the natural environment -- particularly
if we're going to use it out in a natural setting."
The Environmental Protection Agency is finding ways to deal with these
problems. The agency has developed something called the suicide gene. When
turned on, the gene will cause the plant to self-destruct.
Another possibility, says Morris, is to breed sterile plants that can't
reproduce. All of these options, he says, have yet to be tested and permitted
for scientific use.
Morris doesn't expect his special breed of Spartina to become mainstream
overnight. However, he is convinced that one day we will be able to use it
safely and effectively.
"I don't think for a second that there's any kind of threat to human health.
The only threat is in producing a plant that's a really super competitor out
in nature, really a weed. A nuisance plant would displace native species and
we don't want that to happen," he says.
"There are all kinds of things we can do with plants. The sky's the limit.
We're really just at the very beginning of this kind of technology, and the
real advances are going to come when molecular biology is applied," says Morris.
And he wants to be there when the advances happen. Without hesitation,
he says about his job, "I love it!"
Tereza Dan is a graduate student in environmental biology. She is equally
enthusiastic. Dan looks at the native African lemon-scented geranium like
Morris looks at Spartina.
"We're trying to figure it out, this plant which is capable of doing just
wonderful things. We want to figure out how this is happening."
When she emigrated from Romania, Dan hoped to find a biology program that
would allow her to help solve the problem of environmental pollution. Instead
of the perfect academic program, she found researcher Praveen Saxena.
Saxena discovered that lemon-scented geraniums can absorb heavy metals
from the soil. Dan was asked to head straight to the wetlands to join his
research team.
"This project offered me a much better solution to what I wanted to do.
Sometimes, you do so much research and it takes forever to see the results,
but this program fits all of my dreams," says Dan.
"It's just amazing and it feels really good to see that if you're really
trying very hard, you can actually make a change."
After gaining some field experience, Dan wants to work internationally.
Third World countries, says Dan, will really benefit from the affordability
of phytoremediation.
"I'd like to work for something like the UN. They have a program [that]
deals with environmental pollution, mostly in Third World countries. And phytoremediation
is a very affordable technology as compared to the other technologies.
"I would like to be involved in implementing this technology in Third World
countries and [for] people who don't have access to any other solution.
"I think it's a wonderful field to explore and I would totally recommend
[it]. It's just something that you want to try in your life," says Dan.