Although many will have heard of necrotising fasciitis, the dreadful disease caused by bacteria which devour living flesh, far fewer will have heard of dead flesh-eating maggots used by doctors to debride wounds. However today we are celebrating a new advance in animal technology: animals designed to eat unwanted manmade objects. Enter the worm, tiny 4 cm long worms with a single purpose, which have been genetically modified by Swansea University Genetics Department from Dendrobaena worms, small 30 gram ones normally used as live fish bait . These minute hermaphrodites spend their brief lives eating plastic. They were developed jointly by Swansea University Departments of Nanotechnology, Biochemistry and Genetics.
Why worms? Basically worms are very simple creatures with a simple genetic structure. Because they are hermaphrodites they can reproduce themselves very fast and retain the same simple genetic structure without variation. They are well suited for research in nanotechnology.
These variants have been ten years in their making under the guidance of Professor Frederick Noll ( Genetics). The molecular structure of the tiny worm was reorganised synthetically to make it reject all other nutrition but crave plastics. They are cultured and kept in large lidded metal vats, no-one would want rampant plastic eaters roaming the world stripping plastic from civilisation. Once mature they are fed vast quantities of one-off used supermarket plastic bags. They gorge themselves, eating frantically non-stop until their bodies swell in size doubling, trebling, quadrupling until their straining guts can take no more, then they rest. During their latency period their body enzymes rapidly convert the plastic to a thin neutral liquid which they expel, then they die. Each worm can consume approximately 2 dozen plastic carriers in twenty four hours before it dies. The dead worms biodegrade rapidly and can be safely added to any garden compost heap.
It is hoped to expand the research to worms which can consume other types of plastic but Professor Noll’s initial thrust is against one-off discarded carrier bags. The UK led the world with charging for their use and the sale of throwaway bags has slowed down dramatically.
Now the search is on for to create other viable modified worms which can eat grease and baby wipes which cause the infamous fatbergs in UK sewers. Swansea University has already led the world in this research and its researchers assure me that staff and students have hundreds more projects in the pipeline but all details are kept under lock and key away from prying eyes.
Dr Frederick Noll is worthy of the Nobel prize for science as he and his staff and students work tirelessly to overcome the excessive consumerism of the 20th and 21st centuries before our beautiful blue green planet becomes uninhabitable and is finally destroyed altogether. World-wide education should be the answer to the 21st century’s throwaway society but are we already too late?
