Free The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page A

cultures — musty, earthy — and the complicated smell of organic compounds mingling in the air. She was alone in the room among the metal and glass, desktop centrifuges, microscopes, and bottles of reagents ranged on the open shelves above each black bench. The benches were covered in bottles and stacked petri plates, some of them new and sterile and ready to be inoculated with bacteria. Others had yellow agar medium and bacterial colonies growing on them. For her this was a room full of promise.
    She had been led to this lab by a confluence of events. The first occurred while she was reading the text for her Intro to Plastics course, Plastics: Their Chemistry and Uses, at the library at the University of Massachusetts. The chapter on nylon held a brief section on plastic dissolution and degradation with the following reference.
    Kinoshita, S., et al., 1975. Utilization of a cyclic dimer and linear oligomers of e-aminocapronoic acid by Pseudomonas sp. K172. Agric. Biol. Chem. 39(6): 1219-1223.
    She closed the book and went looking for the article in the grey subterranean stacks. Marine bacteria had been discovered feeding off the effluent from a nylon manufacturing plant flushed into a Japanese river. Ridding the planet of plastic wasn’t a social problem, she knew that. But here was a technological fix. What they needed were efficient plastic-digesting bacteria. She pictured the recycling symbol, with its three arrows encircling the number 1, as a triad of snakes eating each other’s tails. The circle they made shrunk until it disappeared. Perhaps she could engineer them.
    Until that point she had been assuming she was headed for an R&D job at one of the many plastics manufacturing companies in Lowell. Before she read that article, the only environmental solution to the problem of plastic pollution she had envisaged, other than recycling, was the creation of biodegradable plastics. The problem with these — plastics made of polylactic acid and cellulose acetate — was that nobody could afford to make them.
    Then Melvin Leach came to her college to deliver a seminar, and her path was set. Leach gave his lecture early on a cold February morning in an auditorium. Benny’s class had been encouraged to attend by the prof who taught them a short course on the degradation of plastics. She had needed no other encouragement than the poster advertising the seminar:
    The Potential Use of Micro-organisms in the Biodegradation of Xenobiotic Compounds:
    Digestion of Waste Plastics
    Melvin Leach, PhD
    Cornell University Medical College, New York
    Benny scanned the auditorium for her classmate Alicia. She wasn’t there. She sat in the aisle seat, planning to save the seat next to her for her friend if she turned up. Her notebook lay open on her left knee.
    Leach was introduced, then went to the lectern, smiling to the audience of drowsy students. He wore a navy suit jacket, a maroon tie, and a white shirt. His thick hair was short, receding at the edges above his temples, and would have been curly if he let it grow. A slide of a landfill site, heaped with discarded plastic bottles, bags, and Styrofoam containers filled the screen.
    â€œThis is the heritage we appear willing to leave our children,” he began. The next slide showed what might be the same site, this time without any of the plastic visible. Corn and flowers grew on part of the site. “With bioremediation, this is the heritage we will leave them.”
    He stood, erect, with confidence, making eye contact with the few students who were paying attention. Benny was rapt as, slide after slide, he explained the work he was doing in his lab. He had adapted soil and water bacteria to eat some of the building blocks of plastic. The newly evolved bacterial strains had genetic changes that altered enzyme activities, allowing catalysis of these xenobiotic compounds.
    When Leach ended his lecture, Benny closed her notebook and rose from her seat to