For more than two decades, scientists have been heralding the arrival of genetically modified organisms for bioremediation. But so far, none have actually reached the toxic sites they're supposed to clean up. Perhaps the most famous incident occurred in the 1970s, when a scientist doing work for General Electric created a microbe that was supposed to eat up oil spills. Patenting the microbe led to a lawsuit that eventually reached the Supreme Court, and it set the precedent for the legal right to patent any genetically modified life-form, thus providing the legal foundation for the entire commercial field of biotechnology.

In the 1980 case of Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty, now a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, received the first patent on a genetically modified life-form. But his micro-organisms haven't flourished in the intervening two decades.

"They had genetically engineered a micro-organism which could eat oil," says Frank Chapelle, a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. "As it turns out, all that became superfluous, even though the genetic engineering was brilliant. It turns out that natural micro-organisms were capable of doing the same thing."

As the field of microbial biology continues to advance, scientists have found that some oil-eating microbes naturally occur at oil spills. Current bioremediation efforts focus on encouraging those microbes to grow faster, by feeding them fertilizer or oxygen. Natural microbes that like to eat oil are also added to sites to speed up the process. Today, commercial products used to clean up industrial oil spills, with names like BioZorb and EcoSolve, contain oil-eating micro-organisms, but their manufacturers haven't brought genetically modified micro-organisms into the marketplace.

"I can't imagine that you would get approval to use a GMO," says Jen Neve, a vice president at Oppenheimer Biotechnology in Austin, Texas, the makers of BioZorb. "A lot of the environmental departments around the world just don't want to even get into that, so you'll find that the permitting process to use a genetically modified organism might be a lot more difficult than for a naturally occurring organism."

The organisms sold in her company's products eat the oil, then eat each other, says Neve. "When there is no more oil to eat they eat themselves, and then there's just one microbe left, and he dies of starvation."

To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been very accepting of genetically modified plants produced for human consumption, marketed in everything from corn chips to soda. But the Environmental Protection Agency hasn't looked as kindly upon the nouveau critters.

"For the food, there is no mandatory testing. You can put a genetically modified food on the market without having to go through mandatory testing," says Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of science policy at Tufts University and the author of "Science in the Public Interest." "But the EPA has a much stricter set of guidelines for releasing a biological agent."

That's one reason that genetically modified organisms aren't the toxic-fighting superbugs and bacteria and plants that they've been promoted as -- at least not yet. "It's one of these things that was hyped in having great potential, but it never came to be. There's a lot of risks in releasing new self-replicating microbes into nature," says Krimsky. He points out that that genetically modified organisms have been used in "closed systems" to clean up toxins, but have not yet been approved for release into the natural environment for purposes of large-scale toxin cleanup.

"If you had a microbe that just did one thing, and after it exercised that order, it died like a Pac Man or something, that would be ideal, but generally it's hard to control." And unlike a plant, a bacterium cannot be released into the environment and then retrieved or snuffed out. If a new bacterium got out, and started mutating, it would be hard to put the genetically engineered genie back in the bottle.

A company seeking to bring genetically modified superplants or micro-organisms to market must be able to go through the regulatory hoops to make them commercially viable. So "there's a huge amount of research being done," says Fred Brockman, a staff scientist in environmental microbiology for that Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "But," he added, "in regards to what are called field tests, there is very little going on."

Public fears feed on the idea that a new bacterium or plant may spread into the environment, like some kind of superbug that cannot be controlled. After it eats the oil, what will it eat next?

But scientists say that getting a genetically modified organism or any organism enough nutrients to grow enough to do the job that you want it to do is the more immediate challenge. Unless you can engineer a not-found-in-nature organism that doesn't need oxygen or water, self-limiting factors in the environment will usually keep it from gobbling up a whole oil spill, let alone mutating and taking over the world.

"That's why the superbug idea just hasn't panned out," says Kate Scow, a professor at the department of land, air and water resources at the University of California at Davis. "Because the environment is so unyielding. It just isn't going to oblige."

Still, scientists hope that public fears about genetically modified organisms running amok won't keep their discoveries in the lab and that they can at least go out into the field and test them.

"The scientific community has not been very good at getting the message out to the public," says Schroeder, the lead scientist on the UC-San Diego metal-ingesting-plant research. "It's even ironic that the products that are out there in the field today -- insect-resistant corn, cotton and soybean -- are also beneficial to the environment, because they require dumping of less toxic pesticides."

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