In his laboratory at the University of Georgia, a Jat from Haryana, geneticist Om Parkash Dhanker, believes he may have a solution to history’s largest mass poisoning. It’s a mustard plant, a super mustard actually. In the plant’s DNA, Dhanker and his colleagues have successfully sewn in genes from a common bacterium, giving the mustard the ability to not just withstand but to also soak up arsenic — a poison which threatens the lives of over 100 million people in West Bengal and Bangladesh. ‘‘We will work hard to bring this technology not only to India but also to Bangladesh and other Asian countries where arsenic pollution is causing human suffering,’’ says Dhanker, first author of a study published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, announcing his team’s findings. Dhanker is part of a team of geneticists that grafted two genes of a common bacterium, Escherichia coli, into a plant called Arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family. The technique took nearly three years to develop and is now ready to be used in other plants as well. ‘‘We are moving this strategy to fast-growing plants like willow, rice, canola and water lillies,’’ says Dhanker. It’s the first step in a long-term plan to create super crops that could clean arsenic from the Gangetic soil and water, explains Richard Meagher, professor at the University of Georgia and Dhanker’s boss. ‘‘These transgenic strategies are portable to any plant and thus have wide field potential,’’ says Meagher. ‘‘We hope to collaborate with the Indian government and biotech industry to design the best phytoremediation (the technique of using plants to soak up poisons) solution to India and Bangladesh’s arsenic problem.’’ Dhanker is discussing the possibilities of transferring the technology to India. He’s informally spoken to geneticists here, including two members of the government’s Committee on Genetic Manipulation, and intends to talk to international bodies like the World Health Organisation as well. Could it work? At ground zero, the man who first brought the arsenic problem to international attention is wary. ‘‘The theory is great, and it may work very well, but here it all boils down to how the villagers will adopt it,’’ says Dipankar Chakraborti, director and head of the school of environmental studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Another expert is dismissive. ‘‘It seems an unlikely solution to the problem,’’ says Richard Wilson, a Harvard University physicist and expert on arsenic poisoning. ‘‘The problem is not arsenic in the soil but arsenic in the water.’’ Chakraborti has seen many magic bullets fail. A large number of ideas for filters and chemical treatments has been tried out in the past two years, but there hasn’t yet been a proven, affordable arsenic removal technique. ‘‘At this moment,’’ he says dryly, ‘‘this is a very, very big market for those removing arsenic.” The arsenic poisoning along the Gangetic plains is vastly bigger than the chemical leak at Bhopal and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. But it stays off the front pages because it didn’t happen overnight, and it can’t be solved with a magic bullet. The release of the deadly poison from ancient soil layers is a man-made catastrophe, released over three decades by the construction of more than 15 million tubewells. As it slowly accumulates in everything from injection vials to coconut water, arsenic poisoning has startling visible symptoms: skin lesions that can mutate into skin cancer, inflammation of the eye, gangrene, and ultimately death.
