How we raised $484k on Kickstarter to make Glowing Plants | Hacker News Reader

How we raised $484k on Kickstarter to make Glowing Plants

blog.glowingplant.com

72 pointstechnotony61 comments

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e5rti/whats_wro...

Early on in your project, one of your partners, Dr. Omri Drory, claimed that you would be doing two things in particular with your project.

First, I wanted to respond to the critique in several ways: check out our post "radical openness": This will be totally transparent project – we will introduce a novel concept called "constant peer review" – In academia no one publish things that didn’t work – we will publish everything.

Can you please comment on your commitment to 'constant peer review'? I'm presuming this means that you intended blogging your "ups as well as your downs" (c.f. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla... but your blog has been short on scientific details.

Secondly, in the statement, Dr. Drory stated We take being a good Steward of our backers funds as #1 priority. Our budget will also be publish online and you can see where the money went. Can you provide a link to this budget?

Thirdly, as far as I can tell from your scientific posts on your blog, you are still feeding the plant luciferin (the glow-in-the-dark chemical), in the photo that that the WSJ showed. Is this true? Or is the plant photographed biosynthesizing its own luciferin?

1. We've published everything we've been doing to our Kickstarter backers, including when it has/hasn't worked.

2. We'll publish the budget. Currently we have $230,000 left from net proceeds from the Kickstarter of $430,000

3. WSJ photo is fed firefly luciferin. We also have a (dimmer) plant which is making it's own, that's where our research focus is going.

Did the luciferin/luciferase metabolic pathway get elucidated? AFAIK it has not been.

You'll probably have to supply exogenous substrate for this to work. Additionally might need a super long exposure.

Very cool.

My friends make light sculptures that look like plants (http://www.sustainablemagic.org/magic-flowers.html)

At first blush, that's what I thought your project did too. I see now that you're creating biological glowing plants.

As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. Plants that eliminated the need for petro fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover and were resistant to disease and insects. Instead I somehow ended up in this Bizarro World, where Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops.

How can we turn the tide back, so that government serves the people instead of big corporations? You’d think the “corporations are people” would be a wakeup call, right? I’m glad to see there’s still people out there like those at Glowing Plant that see the potential in this technology before the world gets fed up and just bans GMO.

I'm having trouble telling: have you improved signficantly on the original publications from the 80s in any of the dimensions?

Given the amount of money you raised, and what you learned, how could you make the engineering cheaper next time? CAn you use CROs?

Our current prototype is way brighter than the 80's project. About 1,000 times. It's still dim and needs to be viewed in a dark room, but it's very visible to the naked eye which others glowing plants aren't. We've still continuously improving it with a long way to go to realize our full vision. Wall Street Journal took this picture of it last week, I don't believe anyone has ever recorded reflection from such a plant before: http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ (note that this is a 30 second exposure with a 4,000 iso)

um, 30 second exposure with 4000 ISO can take pictuers in near absolute dark without a light (I do microscopic photography).... but OK. Is this enough to actually illuminate things more than 10 feet away? Do you have an idea of what the max achievable illumination (quantum efficiencysurface areaflorophore denstiy)?

We need a lot more work to get it bright enough to illuminate other object to the naked eye, but we are working on that! DNA isn't like code where you write it and are confident about how it works. We have to test a lot of different designs to see which works best which is a long slow process of incremental improvement.

Sure... I have a PhD in biophysics and the thing that got me into it was a picture of a glowing tobacco plant on the cover a book.

I'm curious because 20+ years ago I assumed that glowing plants would be solving world hunger, or something. But in grad school they beat all the synthetic biology out of me because it didn't get NIH grants.

It's not really clear to me this has a use. It's neat from a technology perspective, but like glowing yogurt, I struggle to see this being a clear improvement over conventional lighting systems.

That is encouraging though: this doesn't get NIH grants, so it hasn't been pursued academically. Thus a group that is able to pursue it, because they got funding from an alternate source (Kickstarter), would be more likely to achieve good results. Indeed, it sounds like they are already 1000x better. If they can get another 1000x, I would wager it'd be a lot more useful than glowing yogurt.

There might not be many sensible uses of this technology, but sense doesn't dictate if there is a market. Give it a few years and there could well be plantations of glowing christmas trees causing chaos by utterly confusing the local wildlife.

We started this project to show people that you don't have to do research like this in an academic lab and be dependent on NIH funding. The more projects like this that happen, the more we can reduce the barriers to starting there will be an exponential take off on the kinds of things that can be done. We are so dependent on plants for so many things that this will undoubtably solve some other problems as well. Plus maybe we can make plants for lighting villages in Africa or for marking the side of the road in Canada.

There's a reason NIH doesn't fund stuff like this, its useless. A mere novelty. Say what you will about studies of syphilis in the prostitutes of Tijuana, they provide great data about infectious diseases. Super-GFP or Super-Cherry in E. coli˚ glows bright enough to see in ambient light (ie. my lab bench) -- Glowing plants solves essentially 0 real world problemsproblems.

Hope is not a strategy. I admire your enthusiasm, but I am skeptical that your plans will have an impact.

Regarding showing people you don't need an academic lab. Well, sure: I could, if I wanted, clone a gene in my garage if I had the time (since I've done it in a lab, it's pretty easy; none of the science of cloning e coli genes is hard, plants are far harder to transform). The funding isn't an issue either because, frankly, contract research labs clone genes affordably (I'm assuming a Bay Area software engineer salary permitting maybe $20-30K opcost and 100 hours/years labor).

Personally, I think just focusing on developing a general purpose technology for plant transformation would get you further and faster towards your goal. Gene guns are lame.

Can you answer this question directly?

Do you have an idea of what the max achievable illumination (quantum efficiency; surface area; florophore denstiy)?

It would be guess work at this stage as there are many many unknowns: eg how much can we improve photosynthesis? how much can we improve the base metabolic processes of the plant chassis? What about the efficiency of the energy storage process? These are very early questions which synthetic biology doesn't have the answers to yet.

you yourself are not going to be improving photosynthesis; people have been trying that for years. But feel free to be liberal. Assume the theoretical maximum 10% photosynthetic conversion. Give ball-park optimistic numbers that are literature precedented maxima (for example how well C3, C4, and CAM plants store energy)... Isn't it irresponsible to be doing this without even a back-of-the-envelope calculation?

Even an order-of-magnitude estimate should be relatively easy with a cursory amount of literature/biology textbook research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

I wasn't going to say this explicitly, but yeah, I was trying to lead the developer to the reasonable fermi estimate.

I'd be even happy with a liberal fermi estimate that pushes the envelopes and assumes "some synthetic biology help".

I ran the campaign and I'll be hanging around here for the next hour or so if people have questions

very cool project. Reading the website (not the post) I found myself thinking "this is a hoax" more than once :-)

Unsolicited feedback: please get rid of all the annoying overlays on the website. I counted 3, one cannot be closed (join mailing list) and another keeps opening even if I keep closing it (chat)

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make them less annoying/better designed.

Also, the images at the bottom/text at the top look a tad bit blurry (on Home page)

yeah, and wow. It says its 12 pt font, but it looks like 8 pt.. so small ?

I'm confused, apparently Kickstarter has a ban on GMO rewards, but one of the rewards for your project is glowing seeds. Is that not GMO?

The ban was introduced after our project was funded. This article is a great discussion of what happened: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2149613...

Have you guys actually succeeded in making a plant that visibly glows in the dark, or is it still proving difficult to make something bright enough for the human eye to see?

It's dim, but visible. This is a 30 second exposure: http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/

We are working on improving the luminosity (note I edited this one as couldn't reply to the following reply yet)

Is the plan to make them brighter?

How visible? Any pictures without really long exposures?

It's comparable to glow in the dark paint or other bioluminescent animals.

is the plant biosynthesizing its own luciferin (the critical compound that produces the photon) or are you feeding it to the plant?

Wooooo, explicit bias time!

This is the kind of thing we like over at Crowdtilt: fun enough to be fun, sciency enough to be sciency.

We have a platform called Crowdtilt Open ( http://open.crowdtilt.com/ ) that would be great for this, if you're interested.

Disclaimer: I'm saying "we" because I work there.

Can the modified plant reproduce?

What will it take before I can line my driveway with these or these and they be effective?

This is the only competitor I saw of yours, is your plant currently better than theirs? http://bioglowtech.com/

Your wikipedia page says that your estimated ship date is June of 2014, this isn't correct, is it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glowing_Plant_project

Read bits and pieces of the article, looked interesting. I usually like to go check out what it is I'm about to go read up on first though. Where's your kickstarter link? Couldn't see anything on the page. CTRL + F, nothing. I even went to google and typed "glowing plans kickstarted", and even though nature.com and washingpost.com showed up, kickstarter did not. I give up.

Great point, added.

I just typed "!kickstarter glowing plants" in my address bar which directs me to a duckduckgo search. It was the first result.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla... for reference :)

Awesome post!

Note that the "Direct traffic" row in the traffic sources at the end of the blog post is likely attributed to https as well as dark social and not someone typing in the URL manually. This can come from email campaigns, social referrers, and even IM clients.

Yes, also many of the 'Kickstarter' sources were most likely people reading print articles and then searching for the project on Kickstarter. There's no doubt however that the Kickstarter itself brought a huge amount of traffic (over 50%) which is worth thinking about when you are deciding between different platforms.

The title is rendered to a canvas element. Doesn't detect retina display, so that's a pity.

Anyone know what the benefit of rendering text to canvas is? Is it done server-side to protect the font info?

That's Cufon -- poor man's web fonts. Cufon uses flash to show text with the font you wanted instead of loading a font file, which wasn't possible until CSS3.

It now uses canvas element instead of Flash, AFAIK. Maybe it falls back to Flash when the browser doesn't support HTML5.

A bit OT but: Shouldn't it better to use native CSS3 font feature instead of canvas? Guess I know what I'll research this evening.

web fonts were available in the late 90s... long before css3

Your article says you can't wait to ship next summer. Does this mean I might get seeds in July of 2015? I don't remember, what was the original goal?

This was written initially for sending to people who asked me tips on how we ran the campaign, and I missed that in editing. We are targeting a shipping date now in October, having raised more than our goal the research is taking longer as we can do more.

original goal was April 2014. Having said that, there are plenty of kickstarter projects that have succeeded quite well even after having delays. I'm sitting here at my table with my copy of Antimatter Matters, which is late, by about 6 months, but I'm happy with it. The Ouya also was late, IIRC.

84% of kickstarter projects are late. That doesn't make it ok, but we asked our backers in January if they wanted a shipment on time or if they wanted us to ship when we are ready, over 90% said to wait. I think people understand that they are backing a long term project and we try to keep them engaged with updates etc.

I was one of those who voted to hold off shipment until it was ready. But even though I am enclosed in an adult size body, I am like a little kid and want my toys. While I get the updates I usually just skim them as they typically say: "we are making progress, be patient" Regards jhk

Seems premature to take a victory lap on a product that hasn't shipped yet!

This seems fun, but apparently you can't get them shipped outside the US.

Seriously. Glowing plants. This is what people want to donate their money for. A noble and worth cause on the same worthiness as killing cancer and poverty.

Both of those enjoy positively enormous amounts of funding, both via commercial and social means.

Glowing plants, by contrast, get virtually none. Even with this half million, the amounts are unfair to compare. Further, there's immense potential here. Many people around the world - in the billions - cannot afford night time illumination. This is essentially free for most of us, but is immensely costly without our advanced power infrastructure (including astonishing power reliability and stability).

What if all those people could have a plant light their home, even just a little, just enough to walk about safely? Without the awful smoke of oil and wood, and for only the cost of the water to feed it?

THAT is easily, undeniably worth half a million dollars. Don't be silly derailing something of such worth with shortsighted and irrelevant comparisons.

I can't seem to make the math for that work. Plant energy generation is around 1 W/kg. Lighting an average room requires around 10,000 lumen. Maximum luminous efficacy is 683 lm/W. Lighting a room requires ~15W w/ perfect efficacy.

Assuming the plant requires no energy to maintain its metabolism, that'd be 15kg of plant. Realistically, you can assume that it'll need at least double that, to maintain the metabolism.

That's a whopper of a lighting plant.

Why do you need 10,000 lumen to light a room? What sized room are your considering? And, if you are responding to your parent post, it says light enough to walk around. Even 100 lumens would be sufficient to walk around a 100 sq ft room.

Of course that's sufficient - but that's half of what moonlight provides. Given that you already can have that for free, I assume the plants are supposed to provide some improvement.

Any light output that's a marked improvement will mean either large plants, or a surprisingly large chunk of the metabolism dedicated to light generation. I don't say it can't be done - my bio-sciences fu is too weak - but I'm somewhat skeptical given the pure numbers.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

You can rely on moonlight just about 5% of the nights, because of the monthly changes in moon phase, and nightly change in position due to earth's rotation.

I am skeptical about the plants too, and like your calculations. But the numbers you have chosen seem too harsh.

> Lighting an average room requires around 10,000 lumen.

These websites seems to give lower requirement.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/light-level-rooms-d_708.ht...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux

http://maximlighting.com/fpage_lighting_need.aspx

Especially, the wiki page says only 50 lux (lumen/sq meter) is required for living room.

On the wikipedia page: "Achieving an illuminance of 500 lux might be possible in a home kitchen with a single fluorescent light fixture with an output of 12000 lumens."

And I'd rather not have my living room lit at 50 lux :)

But yes, original author's point well taken - if we just want a tiny bit of light, it seems much more doable.

To be sure, lighting an average room demands far, far more energy. Rather, I'm thinking more like grass-roof huts where roads are exclusively ruts from foot traffic.

In this case, you're racing to beat something approaching pitch black (on new moons), and where even a soft glow is a welcome improvement. Nothing to read or socialize by, though this could be a stepping stone towards realizing a plant that does (one can still dream, I hope)!

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