Plant Engineering: How to Eat an Idea

In the context of the journal Plantae, written by and for plant biologists, the contradictions look very clear, but surmountable: plants are organisms, like us in many ways; making the “next” step, here meaning the marketing of new features, is often a very difficult hurdle. It means treating plants as objects, engineering them for a particular use (to humans, of course), marketing, promoting, and selling them, like any other product. This post https://plantae.org/update-how-to-eat-an-idea-and-translate-genes-to-products/ treats the research biology — the genetic engineering — as one stage in a longer move to market, as one continuous operation. In so diminishing the cognitive clashes between studying plants and, say, eating or smoking them, it unintentionally recalls the troublesome contradictions that may still gnaw at some readers, some moral or aesthetic sense that something is “wrong,” or “offensive” about it.

I don’t know. But I was attracted to the image above. It superimposes spare, elegant chemical formulae on a flat photographic image of a plant. The graphic design conveys something significant about the post content at a glance: The viewer is shown the two utterly different systems meshed, with order, pattern, harmony.