Free The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page B

jog down the stairs to the front of the lecture hall. Behind her was the noise of restless students, leaving their seats, chatting, the heavy auditorium door repeatedly opening and clicking shut. She was by herself with Dr. Leach at the lectern.
    â€œThis is thrilling work. Have you got far with the practical applications?”
    â€œWe’ve thought about them, certainly.” He leaned with one elbow on the lectern and took off his glasses. “But the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms behind these adaptations has taken up most of our time. I hope to push the practical side of things soon.”
    â€œCouldn’t you start with nylon digestion? You know, harnessing bacteria and fungi that metabolize amide bonds? Then manipulate their genomes to be more efficient?”
    He arched an eyebrow. He told her there were only a few papers and that it was a wide-open field. The funding potential was limitless if they could tap into governments wanting to eliminate garbage and reduce their landfill footprints.
    Benny asked if he had room for another graduate student. She told him she had a co-op placement coming up, then her final two semesters of course work. She would be graduating in a little over a year.
    â€œThen you have plenty of time to apply.” He checked her out from head to toe. “Your youthful exuberance is appealing.”
    She left the lecture hall as if she were flying among the treetops, seeing the landscape unfold beneath her on her way to the library. She found a copy of Leach’s most recent article in Science . In the Introduction he had written:
    It may be possible, in the near future, to utilize such novel life forms as we intend to generate, to treat much of the plastic waste that ends its life in landfills. There are considerable deficits in any program aimed at the recycling of plastics. It is not possible to recycle many synthetic polymers. For others there is a limited number of times they can be recycled. For those that can be recycled, the array of materials into which they can be remoulded is also limited. These processes are energetically expensive and polluting. Finally, consumer compliance with recycling programs is abysmal.
    Ideally, all plastic, including that which currently ends its life in the waste stream, could be refashioned into usable products. However, since this is not possible, those plastics that remain in landfills need to be eliminated in an environmentally sound fashion. Our work is aimed at making this possible in a clean, efficient, and economical manner using novel bacteria to digest the waste into carbon dioxide and water. Biological degradation is attractive because it is energetically neutral and non-toxic, it is self-perpetuating, and it recycles nutrients into the ecosystem. We will design bacteria to break down even the most stable and noxious xenobiotic compounds into molecules that are easily utilized by a vast array of soil-borne micro-organisms. The key is to begin the process of nutrient release. Nature will take care of the rest.
    She carried on her studies with renewed vigour. In the spring she began a four-month co-op work placement at a plastics manufacturing company in Lowell. Working at EcoPlast taught her what she needed to know about the industry. They made conventional plastics but were benefitting from environmental anxiety by creating and producing biodegradable plastics as well.
    At EcoPlast she tested novel formulations for their biodegradability. They made polymers with bonds that were unstable and, unlike conventional plastics, could be digested by bacteria and fungi. Shopping bags tattered in trees because nothing could recycle them back to the soil. EcoPlast strove to make them attractive to microbes by inserting promoters throughout the polymer structure that made the bonds digestible. Benny knew that EcoPlast’s claim that they fully broke down was disingenuous. They broke wherever a promoter was eaten, leaving