Taxa Biotechnologies promised a light-emitting plant that could replace street lamps. Here’s why that project failed.

Down in a basement along bustling Third Street in San Francisco’s SoMa startup district, Antony Evans unzipped a black tent. It’s the same kind of tent that marijuana growers use, he told me. But it was heavy, earthy patchouli, not skunk, that hit me when I stepped inside the brightly lit cube. Petri dishes piled high on a table contain clusters of green moss.

Evans had invited me to stop by his lab in late January. He was excited to share his latest news. After four years of false starts and failed plants, his startup Taxa Biotechnologies was now two months away from finally shipping its first product, a patchouli-scented moss. By the end of March, up to 1,000 units of the perfumed moss would be ready for purchase as a novelty in small terrariums, costing buyers roughly $50 to $80 a pop.

Except that as Evans announced in a blog post last night, the moss turned out to be contaminated. It was unsafe to ship, and its replacement wouldn’t be ready until July, he wrote. But he had even bigger news to share. When he first launched his project as a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, his goal was to sell plants that glowed in the dark. The moss endeavor was just a more achievable goal that would help Taxa make ends meet and fund research on the light-emitting plants. Now, however, the glowing plant project is officially dead.

“We’re sorry to say that we have reached a significant transition point,” he wrote in yesterday’s post. Because he wasn’t able to ship the patchouli moss on time, Taxa “had to reduce the size of the team to ensure we have enough financial runway to ship the moss, and this has meant stopping the work we were doing on higher plants to focus on the moss.”

The glowing plant project is not just any old failed Kickstarter campaign. After going live on the crowdfunding site, Evans’ project quickly became the poster child of the unwarranted hype and hysteria around DNA engineering. Evans and his team hadn’t shown they could produce even a single glowing plant, and yet they managed to rake in $484,000 in orders, far exceeding their $65,000 goal. The campaign also triggered a firestorm of criticism. People worried that biohackers like Evans were opening up a Pandora’s box of genetic freaks, potentially corrupting the world for good. They fretted that the plants might spread to the outside world and become an invasive species.

Rattled by the onslaught of negative publicity, Kickstarter banned any future synthetic biology projects. Evans was surprised by the reaction, but undeterred. What better way to change the public’s mind than to let it see a glowing plant firsthand?

As he tinkered with his plants in the years that followed, the controversy over synthetic biology continued to mount. Anti**-**GMO activists grew more vocal. With the emergence of the powerful genome editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, tools for DIY bioengineering seemed to be at the fingertips of any capable amateur. Finally, genomes could be rearranged and rewritten just like software. The biological world was yielding itself to hackers.

But as 2014, 2015, and 2016 ticked by, Evans faced a different reality. He could barely get his plants to glow at all. Taxa Biotechnologies was running out of money. A cofounder quit. What had seemed scientifically straightforward had turned into a lonely, multi-year slog.

So he changed tack, setting aside the glowing plants and throwing his energies behind scented moss instead. By mid-2016, the company had grown patchouli moss that Evans considered ready for consumers. At last he could start planning for a product launch, and he picked the week of March 27, 2017. Evans had summoned me to his lab to help him tell his redemption story. He’d show the world just how amazing bioengineering could be.