Scientists at Washington University are undertaking an
ambitious project to engineer tiny nitrogen-fixing devices within
photosynthetic cells.
Since the dawn of agriculture, people have exercised great
ingenuity to pump more nitrogen into crop fields. Farmers have planted legumes
and plowed the entire crop under, strewn night soil or manure on the fields,
shipped in bat dung from islands in the Pacific or saltpeter from Chilean mines
and plowed in glistening granules of synthetic fertilizer made in chemical
plants.