[HN Gopher] AI-engineered enzyme eats entire plastic containers
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       AI-engineered enzyme eats entire plastic containers
        
       Author : gmays
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2022-05-11 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.chemistryworld.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.chemistryworld.com)
        
       | rolph wrote:
       | fast forward to - AI-engineered enzyme insertion allows
       | biological agents to defeat PPE
        
       | slackstation wrote:
       | The title of this link sounds like the premise to a dystopian
       | future novel.
        
       | jrvarela56 wrote:
       | Would be cool if this eats the micro-plastics inside our bodies
       | since we've been consuming them for the past ~50 years.
        
       | ajb wrote:
       | Hmm, having paid quite a lot to replace my lead water pipe with
       | HDPE I hope it doesn't eat that too. the durability of plastic is
       | a benefit under many circumstances.
        
       | marginalia_nu wrote:
       | I've always sort of thought that, given the amount of plastics
       | that's in our oceans, together with a bunch of hungry
       | microorganisms, odds are eventually one will evolve that eats
       | plastics and it will _flourish_. Prima facie this may even sound
       | like a good development.
       | 
       | Except now you're faced with a world where plastics rot, not just
       | the plastics we want to go away, but the plastics we want to stay
       | around. We use plastics in a lot of places where this would be a
       | Bad Thing, such as electrical insulators.
        
         | myself248 wrote:
         | From 1933, before the explosion of modern plastics, the poem
         | Metropolitan Nightmare touches on a similar idea, termites that
         | evolve to eat steel:
         | 
         | https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare
         | 
         | It's mostly about climate change, though.
        
           | EdwardDiego wrote:
           | There was a Judge Dredd comic where a bacteria that eats
           | "plasteen" is accidentally released and collapses buildings,
           | and also eats a man's artificial heart.
           | 
           | I'm guessing that the writer read that poem.
        
         | Jack000 wrote:
         | it's not a given that this will happen on a human timescale.
         | The carboniferous period lasted 60M years before bacteria
         | evolved the ability to break down cellulose.
        
         | sva_ wrote:
         | > such as electrical insulators.
         | 
         | I'd worry much more about the medical sector.
        
         | ncmncm wrote:
         | There was a movie about that. What was it? Oh yes, "The
         | Andromeda Strain".
         | 
         | Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not
         | turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final
         | years.
         | 
         | The problem with microorganisms eating all the waste plastic is
         | that then the carbon in it is no longer sequestered.
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | Depolymerization was only an incidental side effect in _The
           | Andromeda Strain_. I 'd say Pedler & Davis's near-
           | contemporary publication _Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters_
           | would be the seminal work in the field.
        
             | ncmncm wrote:
             | But, without a _movie_.
        
           | jjtheblunt wrote:
           | > Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not
           | turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final
           | years.
           | 
           | Wait. I read his stuff and he carefully didn't deny it, just
           | pointed out that it's super important to have way more data
           | than pop cultural opinions were being echo-chamber based on.
        
             | ncmncm wrote:
             | That was his line. But (a) he was wrong, and (b) had the
             | oncoming catastrophe been smaller than predicted, stalling
             | action would still have been wrong.
             | 
             | The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation
             | has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been.
             | Had we started sooner, we would not only have a much
             | smaller crisis now, but we would have spent overwhelmingly
             | less on coal and oil, and polluted overwhelmingly less.
             | Even without the looming crisis, we would be much better
             | off, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would not now command
             | nearly so much influence in the world.
             | 
             | Exactly to the degree that Crichton personally stalled
             | action, blood is on his hands.
        
             | qvrjuec wrote:
             | He didn't outright deny it, but he was not acting in good
             | faith when rallying against the mainstream perspective. I
             | remember seeing an example where he specifically made an
             | argument using a projection model that wasn't accurate,
             | conveniently ignoring the fact that that model was only 1
             | of 3 and another one of the 3 was almost spot on.
        
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