No Better Bacteria
If they'd had the voices to do it, the whole population of one kind of creature living in Prince William Sound would have raised a great cheer when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef. It would have been a very tiny cheer, though; no matter that incredible numbers of them live there, hydrocarbon-eating bacteria couldn't make much of a racket. From the perspective of a bacterium of the right sort, a good big oil molecule looks about like a platter of pancakes to a lumberjack. Some of these bacteria found in the waters off southcentral and southeastern Alaska usually make a living from terpenes---natural hydrocarbons given off by coniferous trees such as spruce and hemlock. Molecules of crude oil are close enough in construction and content, as far as these microorganisms are concerned, to be just as edible as terpenes. Thus, to them an oil spill is a community banquet.
With that kind of enormous food supply, the community grows pretty quickly. Given their healthy appetites and ability to reproduce quickly in the presence of plenty to eat, our hydrocarbon-devouring bacteria will eventually mop up the spilled oil. Don Button, a researcher at the university's Institute of Marine Science who studies these little creatures, has calculated that they could clean up the whole Prince William Sound spill in 10,000 days.
That's about 27 years, a bit slow for the good of the larger organisms, including humans, who also depend on the sound's waters to make a living. People will have to do quite a bit to speed the cleanup of Alaska's waters and also of those near Delaware, Rhode Island, Texas---all the areas fouled in this sadly oily year.
Those other places don't have Alaska's particular natural bacteria food, abundant terpenes, but they will have hydrocarbon-eating bacteria. Theirs have been nurtured by decades of smaller spills, from oily bilges and leaky tankers. But neither they nor we can make use of one kind of bacteria that was specifically engineered to eat up spilled oil.
Developed by microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty, this altered form of naturally occurring bacteria was the subject of a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980: the justices ruled that a genetically engineered organism could be patented. Thus, Chakrabarty's employers could own all colonies and all rights to the bacterium he developed.
The problem is that his employer at the time was the General Electric Company, and GE decided that chewing up oil slicks wasn't part of their corporate business. The court decision was that they could own the bacterium, not that they had to proceed with developing it.
Releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment is a tricky business, hedged about with regulations and concerns, so it's not that GE was simply being selfish in hanging onto something they didn't intend to use. According to the recent issue of Science magazine reporting the matter, GE did investigate licensing its bacterial oil-battlers, but found no takers. Even the Coast Guard didn't want to take over development of the microorganism.
Could it be that the time has come for a new kind of lab-bench aquaculture in Alaska? It's a wild thought, but the frustrations of dealing with tons of gloppy crude oil can do that to the mind. I'm hoping Dr. Button and Dr. Chakrabarty find themselves at the same meeting sometime soon; maybe they can have a little chat.
