Rooms Full of Light That Doesn’t Need a Source

Those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars you pressed to your bedroom ceiling as a kid—the ones that needed a lamp charge and faded by 3am—they planted something in the imagination anyway. The idea of light coming from inside a thing rather than thrown onto it from somewhere else.

A company called Bioglow spent years engineering exactly that. Their plant, Starlight Avatar, is genetically modified to produce a continuous soft blue-green glow with no UV lamp, no chemical charge—just the organism doing it on its own because that’s what it was rebuilt to do. It lives for two or three months. It looks like concept art for a story about the future.

In early 2014 they auctioned off twenty of them, opening bids at a dollar. I didn’t get one. I’m not sure what I’d have done with it beyond putting it on my desk and spending a week explaining to visitors that yes, it’s real—but I wanted one.

The obvious trajectory from here is decorative: entire rooms lit only by plants that glow. It would look beautiful in the way slightly unsettling things look beautiful. Somewhere between Pandora and a petri dish—which might be the same place.