Gulf Oil Slick

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by MsDemeanor

By the way, those chemicals being used to disperse the oil? The formulas and ingredients are protected, so we have no way of knowing what is in them. The companies refuse to divulge the information.

The thing is, nature *may* already have a solution. See below:

Originally Posted by AtLastHome

Bet Dick Cheny knows what they are and what is in them! Probably will get a kick-back off them.

The whole idea that someting that is developed to break down sweet crude could possibly not be harmful is just nuts! And I am sure that future generations will be posting on-line about birth defects, cancers, etc. resulting from these chemicals getting into the food-chain.

And we worry about foreign terroists destroying us!

There are bacteria that have evolved--without interference from humans--the ability to break down oil naturally. These microbes exist *now*. They are soil bacteria but anywhere there are large collections of oil it is possible to find them in the soil. Now, admittedly, it would be ideal if nature had thought to make oil-eating bacteria that lived in salt water but since there are bacteria that DO live in salt-water (bacteria live everywhere) and since bacteria, over a billion years ago, hit on the very, very cool trick of simply trading genes across different species (as if that word means a lot to bacteria) it seems to me to be a relatively trivial exercise to introduce the oil-eating bacteria to some salt-water dwelling bacteria and, in a remarkably short amount of time* we'd have a salt-water dwelling bacteria that eats oil. Introduce them to the spill and let the feasting begin.

Now, I know that some folks are going to say "hold on, wouldn't this be just as dangerous" to which I say "not necessarily", here's why.

1) As far as introducing the gene although it would be more efficient to simply find the gene(s) for salt-water dwelling and insert it into a colony of oil-eating bacteria, we probably don't have to do that. Nature could probably get there *almost* as fast because of the really fast bacterial generation. (The average bacterial species will go through in a year the same number of generations as there have been homo sapiens generations--roughly 20,000 or so)

2) If we're *really* worried about it, then we could engineer in a 'kill-switch'. Give them N amount of time to live after which cell division stops or something else which causes the bacteria to become inert.

This isn't science fiction, folks. The bacteria already exist and nature hit upon the idea first. The genetic engineering (if any) that might be necessary is *well* within what we know how to do and know how to do safely (as opposed to, say, deep water oil drilling). It's a non-toxic solution. The byproducts are methanol (alcohol), water and carbon dioxide. The CO_2 would be in the ocean where it *doesn't* contribute to global warming (and tends to get locked up as a calcium carbonate in the shells of mollusks). This is a win-win solution that is viable now.