“It’s great that ARIA exists and I think it’s great that it includes a plant program,” says Langdale. “There’s no doubt about it because for too long, people like Gates have been pushing moonshot projects and of course they have a very specific focus on what they want to achieve.”
Philanthropic foundations like Gates’ also have a greater tolerance for projects that may not turn a profit. “We’ve been working for quite some time and we certainly don’t have anything resembling a product to put in the field,” Langdale says. Historically, government-backed science funding has had much less appetite for these types of projects, because it is difficult to justify spending taxpayer money on projects that could take 30 years to come to fruition.
Even compared to the C4 Rice Project, Burnett’s synthetic plant program represents a significant amount of money, Langdale says. Burnett aims to spend £62.4 million ($82 million) over five years. The program will fund scientists to try to produce synthetic chromosomes, the genetic building blocks of plants, and synthetic chloroplasts, which have their own separate genomes. But the program does not specify what new features these partially synthetic plants should have. It’s a little like designing a new machine without knowing what tooling that machine is going to build, Langdale says.
Johnathan Napier, scientific director of the agricultural institute Rothamsted Research shares these concerns. The construction of synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts are clearly defined goals, but it is not sure whether they will generate a tangible benefit. Napier is trying to engineer crops to produce omega-3 fish oils, while the C4 Rice Project is trying to make rice much more productive. But Burnett’s program is much broader than either of these two. At least in theory, it could one day allow plant scientists to incorporate any kind of functionality into a plant.
“If all this worked, you would be able to design your complex pathway on the computer, build a complete chromosome (…) and simply connect it to the plant in one step,” says Saul Purton, another workshop attendee and professor. at University College London working with synthetic chloroplasts in algae. Purton says he can apply for an ARIA grant, but the five-year timeline set to deliver synthetic chloroplasts in several crop species is extremely tight. “We’ve been working hard in terms of developing new synthetic biology tools to engineer the chloroplast of a simple model system for 15 or 20 years, and we’re still learning, we’re still making mistakes.”
when I meet Burnett again in early August had just approved his program after a grueling three-hour meeting with Gur, members of ARIA’s executive team and a panel of outside experts. “It was a little stressful because it’s a big moment that I’ve been working for all this time,” he says. In addition to funding projects working to build synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts, Burnett is also calling for research into the ethics of synthetic plants, anticipating a world in which farmers, policymakers and the public will have to grapple with the idea of crops entirely made by themselves. humans. hands. But it is unlikely that he will remain at the agency to see those scientific seeds bear fruit. Program directors are typically hired for three-year terms and the agency already hiring its next group of directors, some of whom will launch entirely new areas of projects.
In such short timeframes, it can be difficult to measure the success of long-term plays: are mistakes just bumps in the road or signs that you’ve taken the completely wrong path? Collison is cautious about defining success. Give it 15 years, he says, and it should be pretty obvious whether ARIA is a good thing or not. The agency has a little breathing room. It cannot be dissolved for at least 10 years, by which time the UK will have had at least one more general election. The new Labor government has signaled its support for ARIA, including by appointing Vallance as minister responsible for ARIA. “It is essential to harness the power of science to deliver economic growth, opportunity and scientific breakthroughs for people across the UK,” a government spokesperson said.