Young poplars in a zip lignin test plot. (Photo by Matthew Wisniewski/Wisconsin Energy Institute)
John Ralph PhD’82 talks with the easy, garrulous rhythms of his native New Zealand, and often seems amiably close to the edge of laughter.
So he was inclined toward amusement last year when he discovered that some portion of the Internet had misunderstood his latest research. Ralph—a CALS biochemist with joint appointments in biochemistry and biological systems engineering—had just unveiled a way to tweak the lignin that helps give plants their backbone. A kind of a natural plastic or binder, lignin gets in the way of some industrial processes, and Ralph’s team had cracked a complicated puzzle of genetics and chemistry to address the problem. They call it zip-lignin, because the modified lignin comes apart—roughly—like a zipper.
One writer at an influential publication called it “self-destructing” lignin. Not a bad turn of phrase—but not exactly accurate, either. For a geeky science story the news spread far, and by the time it had spread across the Internet, a random blogger could be found complaining about the dangers of walking through forests full of detonating trees.
Turning the misunderstanding into a teachable moment, Ralph went image surfing, and his standard KeyNote talk now contains a picture of a man puzzling over the shattered remains of a tree. “Oh noooo!” the caption reads. “I’ll be peacefully walking in a national park and these dang GM trees are going to be exploding all around me!”
That’s obviously a crazy scenario. But if the technology works as Ralph predicts, the potential changes to biofuels and paper production could rewrite the economics of these industries, and in the process lead to an entirely new natural chemical sector.
You can find the full story here.