Stuart Strand wrote:
I’m Stuart Strand, Research Professor at the University of Washington
in Seattle. For 20 years, our lab, supported by the National
Institutes of Health, Dept of Defense, and the National Science
Foundation, has successfully designed plants that clean up pollutants
in contaminated soils and water. Now we want to create house plants
that can purify the air in your house.

The air in your home may have more benzene and chloroform (two cancer
causing pollutants) than is allowed in the workplace. Every time you
park your car in an attached garage or take a shower you are adding
benzene and chloroform to your home air.

Please explain where the benzene and chloroform gets into my showerhead and
what concentration in the house air might develop from this practice and how
that relates to the safety standards.


Rabbits have an enzyme in their liver (2E1) that grabs onto
chloroform and benzene and gets oxygen from the air to burn up the
pollutants. We have lab plants with the 2E1 gene that can remove
chloroform and benzene 20 times faster than the untransformed plants.
Now we want to take the rabbit enzyme and put it into a common
houseplant, pothos ivy, making SuperPothos plants to protect your
family.

Ordinary plants have some ability to clean the air, but the amount of
foliage required to have a significant impact on pollutants would be
hundreds of plants per room! SuperPothos plants could do the job with
only a few plants per room.

Which is quite impractical or even impossible for most people.

If you’re interested, take a look at our project website,

http://www.indiegogo.com/SuperPothos/x/1889244?c=home”

There is a movement that says you can sell anything in the western world if
you invoke the boogieman of danger to children. This idea tells us to buy
special products to sterilise the inside of our toilet bowls and every
surface in our house and to have a machine on the wall that pumps out
perfume/insecticide/ bactericide all day at timed intervals.

Now I would much prefer to house full of plants to splashing chemicals
everywhere but I am doing neither until both the need and efficacy is
demonstrated. Your web site seems devoid of both.

David