
How we raised $484k on Kickstarter to make Glowing Plants - technotony
http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/85922974558/how-we-raised-484k-on-kickstarter-to-make-glowing
======
dnautics
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e5rti/whats_wro...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e5rti/whats_wrong_with_the_glowing_plant_kickstarter/#)

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...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-
natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts/469999\);) 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?

~~~
technotony
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.

~~~
possibilistic
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.

------
bravura
Very cool.

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

------
slacka
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.

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dekhn
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?

~~~
technotony
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/](http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/)
(note that this is a 30 second exposure with a 4,000 iso)

~~~
dekhn
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 efficiency _surface area_ florophore
denstiy)?

~~~
technotony
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.

~~~
dekhn
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.

~~~
technotony
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.

~~~
dekhn
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.

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

~~~
rohansingh
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?

~~~
technotony
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...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2149613,00.html)

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euphemize
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.

~~~
Morgawr
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...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-
natural-lighting-with-no-electricit?ref=discovery) for reference :)

------
Duhck
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.

~~~
technotony
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.

------
hmottestad
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?

~~~
solox3
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.

~~~
batuhanicoz
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.

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zafka
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?

~~~
dnautics
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.

~~~
technotony
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.

~~~
zafka
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

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

------
arctansusan
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.

~~~
HCIdivision17
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.

~~~
groby_b
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.

~~~
joesb
> 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://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/light-level-rooms-d_708.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux)

[http://maximlighting.com/fpage_lighting_need.aspx](http://maximlighting.com/fpage_lighting_need.aspx)

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

~~~
groby_b
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.

