• Question: Technically can you breed a trifid that would kill people??

    Asked by burgerhorns2 to Louise, Michaela, Steve, Yvette on 23 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Yvette Wilson

      Yvette Wilson answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      good one! I often think of my plants as triffids when I’m sick of working on them. Maybe by starting with a plant that does rapid movements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_plant_movement) and introducing genes that produce toxins….but then how to get the plant to sense and recognise humans?…

      On a serious note…its technically very difficult to even breed simple traits – such as higher grain yield. Genetic modification is also much more difficult than it is made out to be and scientists can at best introduce just a few genes into a plant…so I don’t think we’ll be breeding any trifids:-)

    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      The difficult bit would be the locomotion – triffids can walk around, and nothing like that happens in any plants we know. It involves muscle and nerve cells that plants don’t have so it would be very difficult to genetically engineer such a thing and impossible to breed one. Also, the triffids aim for their victim’s face, which would mean they’d need vision (or really good echolocation) and a brain to process the signals. Again, no plant has anything like that.

      The lethal stinging, though, would be comparatively easy. There are already plants with stings. Nettles make hollow, brittle stinging hairs out of silica. The irritant venom inside them is under pressure, so when you brush against them you break the hair and what is essentially an edge of broken glass jabs your skin squirting out poison. To actually kill people you’d need a better poison, but plants have loads of those – for example, there’s a tree called Dendrocnide moroides whose sting that has been known to kill people, and some species of Euphorbia have sap that will blind or kill you if it gets in your eyes.

      So I reckon breeding a large deadly stinging plant would be a piece of cake. A large deadly motile sentient stinging plant – well, you’d be better off stapling a snake to a giant hogweed.

    • Photo: Steven Kiddle

      Steven Kiddle answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      No, for three reasons.

      A). It would be unethical and therefore illegal
      B). Its not in anyones interest to have killer plants, so who would fund the research?
      C). We barely understand a simple bacteria like e. coli let alone large organisms like plants, so it would take many years (or perhaps be impossible) to build a triffid.

      But who knows, maybe one sick dictator with a lot of time and money on his hands will fund the research!

    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      You could potentially supercharge a Venus fly-trap to make it bigger and able to digest humans. But that would only work if someone was stupid enough to climb inside it. The problem is that plants aren’t capable of moving fast, so you could easily run away.

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