Claims

Sam is working with a Japanese biotech firm that has found a natural way to graft inter-family plants, and on a smaller scale they're working with plants to graft bouquets of flowers that can continuously grow, suggesting future possibilities for cross-family fruit grafting.

Left-handed sugars (mirror-image molecules of regular sugar that are metabolically inert) represent an extraordinary commercial opportunity worth hundreds of billions of dollars if someone can manufacture them at scale and develop organisms that consume them, since they would enable zero-calorie sugar replacements in all food and beverage applications.

Genetic engineering could increase biomass growth in topsoil more rapidly than conventional no-till farming by engineering crops to put more biomass into roots.

Engineered termites could be designed to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses; engineered trees could be designed to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.