Is it possible to genetically modify a plant to become sentient?

Question

In my universe, nuclear warfare got to be overused and out of hand, this caused crops to die in drastic amounts.

Scientists decided to genetically modify plants to survive nuclear radiation, so they tested it on gourd type plants such as:

• Pumpkins
• Melons
• Squash

However, something went wrong and caused the plants to become sentient. The newly sentient pumpkins and melons formed an alliance to save the planet by eliminating humans, while the squashes decided to help the humans.

Is there someway for this to be scientifically possible, or is this impossible?

Answer 1

Possible? Sure. We are sentient thanks to our genes so it is, by all means, a genetic trait.

Believeable? No.

For many reasons:

• We still don't know what actually makes some animals sentient.
• "Something went wrong" works pretty much like spontaneous mutation, usually means organism can't live, is sick, or only something insignificant is changed.
• Plants do not have anything like our neurons. Nothing similar enough to be changed by simple mutation. Heck, we have no idea how to approach it on purpose.
• Plants don't have access to enough energy to run human-size brain.
• Your story requires them not only to be sentient, but also to have means of communication and locomotion. This would make them more similar to animals than what they really are, requiring more foreign DNA than DNA that would be left from original, and probably more than they already have, too. For that effect we would probably rather start from a cow or something.

Answer 2

Speaking as a college professor that works in artificial intelligence, this is basically all impossible. Sentience would require some way for plants to both sense and "model" the world around them using abstractions. To the best of our current knowledge, that requires neurons, in large quantities, in order to think. We call those brains.

It is likely that something as small as a mouse has some sentience (self-awareness), several experiments indicate they do.

But for long-term planning of strategies like you speak of, the human brain is the only one we are aware of that is capable of that. I think your plants would need brains at least the size of a young human.

Now those neurons could be distributed through much of the plant, perhaps. But even then, it appears much of our own intellect was evolved in response to our ability to manipulate objects and things. Plants do not have muscles either.

By the time you give plants all the attributes they need to evolve sentience, they are no longer plants but animals!

So I would say no, it is not possible for plants to be accidentally mutated into any form that can have sentience to the scale that allows them to plan for the future.

Answer 3

It's a popular misconception, but it wasn't the actual plants that became sentient. Rather, something went wrong with the symbiote that provided the resistance in coordination with the genetic changes. We based it off of a slime mold, so as to pervade the plant and provide adaptive repair mechanisms. This worked amazingly well, but, unbeknownst to us, the symbiote had started developing complex colony-based structures akin to neurons. In addition, it was not just repairing damage from radiation, but actually harnessing it, creating novel nano-structures to concentrate and harness the high-energy radiation and particles for a new form of photosynthesis. These structures also had a secondary function, allowing for higher frequency electromagnetic radiation to communicate signals. Yes, it had evolved biological radios.

That was the first stage of their evolution. Things quickly got out of hand when the colonies developed spores and evolved the ability to colonize animal brains, including, eventually, human brains. Combined with the radio functionality, this initially manifested as strange dreams and odd impulses, but eventually developed into a form of 'telepathy', so to speak, with the combined vegetable 'brains' and partially commandeered animal brains turning into various networks operating on different frequencies. This is how the squash made first contact.

Most humans were able to retain their cognitive functions and make their own decisions, but we suspect some of those decisions were subconsciously influenced to serve the needs of the 'plants'. Simpler animals were commandeered more completely and the 'plants' were able to use these insects, rodents and other assorted fauna as appendages to exert control over the world around them. And that's when things got really bad.

Answer 4

The genetic changes made by the scientists to increase resistance to nuclear radiation had the side effect of turning some plant structures into an analogue to neurons. In addition, the scientists made genetic changes so that the plants would cooperate with each other using a shared root system, much like a giant fungus.

The unexpected side effect was that the individual "neurons" of each plant linked together to form a rudimentary "brain". The chemical process of communicating over acres of land instead of electrically over a few inches of gray matter slows down the thinking process, but it still evolved quickly to sentience. Since each plant contains relatively few "neurons", they function somewhat like a hive mind. As long as they are connected and large enough scale (perhaps an acre of plants linked together via the root system) they reach and maintain sentience. The humans don't realize that cutting off the fruit (a.k.a. harvesting pumpkins and melons to eat, which suddenly becomes a dangerous activity...) does not significantly alter the ability of the plants to think. Only cutting through the roots or killing large sections of the plants will have any measurable effect.

The plants certainly include plenty of sensors for light (via photosynthesis and other mechanisms), water, temperature and touch. As for how the plants can affect the environment, and those pesky humans, plants act on a much slower time scale than humans. But they are persistent and widespread. And not necessarily so slow - bamboo can grow 36" in one day! Plants have limited movement, but some, like the Venus flytrap have evolved to attack various creatures, and while the watermelons can't launch themselves on suicide missions by building catapults they can still do some damage using other techniques.

The gourds have similar modifications but somehow manage to communicate with humans, though getting through that challenge was a bit of a gourdian knot. The humans learn how to cultivate large-enough groups of gourds in greenhouses, isolated from the pumpkins & melons, in order to join forces.

While humans sleep, the creepy pumpkins keep creeping into human territory, destroying the human food supply, cracking foundations of buildings and generally wreaking havoc.

The worst attacks came the day after Halloween as the newly sentient pumpkins took revenge upon humans for mutilating their non-sentient cousins!

Of course, they are doomed to be squashed by the squash, and the humans are perplexed out of their gourd!

Answer 5

It's rather unbelievable that such a mutation can be produced by "something going wrong" in a genetic research aimed to strengthen against radiation.

OTOH needed mutation might be smaller than expected. There are several, quite serious, scientists maintaining plants already have "neuron-equivalent" cells in their roots (here you have relevant Wikipedia entry while here you get a more discursive presentation).

Of course from this to self-awareness there's a long distance, but a coherent behavior (anthill-like) is not ruled out.

Answer 6

This is impossible wit anything science based in mind.

1. Plants are a different Kingdom. We only know animals to have any intelligence. We are not talking about sentience here, just any intelligence as we know it. In a different kingdom puts them genetically as far as possible from animals. The split is approximated at 1.5 billion years ago. Plants have cell walls. This makes plants have to grow from the ends instead of the middle like animals. That is completely incompatible with any idea of neurons. By the time you made genetic changes to get rid of these facts, you would no longer have a plant. You would have changed more DNA than you have not. Your other choice would be to invent new intelligence. At that point you would be making a creature from scratch.

2. plants don't have the energy.The human brain uses 20% of metabolism. We are large, warm blooded creatures, this is what lets us support our brains. Even cold blooded creatures don't have enough energy to be sentient. Plants have a fraction of even cold blooded organisms. this is why they can exist on photosynthesis. A potted plant can barely power an led, forget run any kind of intelligent system, as we know, or other. Fixing this would again most likely would no longer leave you with a plant

Answer 7

Perhaps this could work if the scientists took some DNA from an animal and managed to combine it in the plant.

For example, naked mole-rat seems to have a high resistance to cancer tumors. This could help the plants survive the radiation.

Of course, combining animal and plant DNA is in no way a simple thing to do. Perhaps their pumpkins turned out to have quite a bit of mole-rat in them, but of course it is wise to keep this fact secret if you want to sell the vegetables to general public.

Answer 8

I am no expert in anything genetic related, though, I think your idea is awesome. You should not give it up just because people can't see the way for it to be done.

Let's say those experiments involve saving plants from nuclear radiation, such as you have proposed, how about if it was a boost to their rooting system? Imagine if, by any such handwaving genetics your scientists produced plants with such genetic modifications, which led to their roots evolving into something more than a nutrient acquiring means?

Of course the nutrient acquiring feature had to increase several factors, generating bigger, brighter, healthier and tastier plants, awesome stuff to sell, suddenly, they notice they are growing exponentially, there are many more than it should, because, hell, their seeds have changed to something alike polen and are carried by the wind.

Getting back to the roots, imagine these plants roots are so developed they begin to create a giant mesh, plants become interconnected under the soil, and through an absorption of radiation from the few who are affected by it, these roots turn into synaptic ways, suddenly, your plants have a hive-like mind with a huge omni-like knowledge in the areas where they are predominant, and bam, they realize the problem are those sacks of meat running around the planet.

Answer 9

From the looks of much wiser people than I answering I think it's pretty much a no-go from the whoopsie radiation scenario, but all is not lost. You need something mobile, small and unpredictable to bridge the gap.

In the small garden beside the gleaming tower of Impossitech (there to "grow-a-row" for the hungry as a pure PR stunt, there are rows of pumpkins, gourds, carrots, lima beans and squash. This lovely little garden happens to be directly overhead of the secret underground Nanobot lab...

The Event happens, causing some seismic events and cracking open the lab and causing low level leaks of radiation from the hidden reactor that supplies power to he hidden labs. The radiation introduces a glitch in the nanobots' programming. Keep in mind the code was written by a mad scientist with dubious ethics in the first place.

The Nanobots seek out a "suitable" organic structure and go through the crack and infest the plants in the garden. The pumpkins and gourds are closest so are going to exhibit the insanity of their creator more closely.

The Squash, however, are separated from the others by several rows of carrots and lima beans. These plants are rejected by the nanobots as being structually unsuitable. The nanobots move on to the squash....

The nanobots get another dose of radiation from the carrots and lima beans, as these two vegetables are Naturally radioactive, a trait that is increased by the apocalyptic fallout. This little burst turns on the failsafe code that the directors made the mad scientist write, but he left it commented (or dummied) out.

The Nanobots do what they do, and the plants get up and walk, killing innocent animals and eating other plants along the way to fulfill the caloric intake required for locomotion and thought. The squash go to warn the humans, while the Pumpkins plan the attack!

Ok, I admit a flight of whimsy here has generated enough hand-waving to generate a decent, sustained breeze. This is not really even remotely science-based. What it does do is serve the story by giving you a path from point a (radiation is not going to directly create Sapient plants) to point b (Sqaush help humans against ravening gourds) that skirts satire without devloving all the way into outright farce.

Answer 10

Hypothesis: The geneticists increase the cytoskeletal density of the cells in your plants, creating signaling pathways like brains use. All the plants you mention contain sugars that can produce energy by chemical means, a way of storing energy taken in by photosynthesis and other reactions. Kelp genes and colonization by microbes form memory and assist decision making.

There already is a war. Chemical warfare by use of toxins and allergies in plants themselves or spread through pollen and spores. Biological warfare, especially by spreading parasites. Read about Toxoplasma gondii and learn to fear certain plants and cats and how they achieve mind control. Much of our pharmaceutical industry is engaged in fighting this war.

Communication is a tricky area. Sure, chemical signaling and all that, but that's usually interspecies and you need your mutants to make alliances and have a specific enemy. Thrumming the ground by various already understood plant mechanisms is possible but range and information density are low. Maybe take a hint from fibre optics and fluorescence and use light? Might also provide a means for humans to ally with the squashes, having someone discover a pattern in their light flashes and decode it. The plants don't have to develop technology, they just need to implement strategies of disrupting and destroying humans. Advanced kinases (see below) traveling spore-like could carry directives of successful methods.

The thinking part is not so difficult. Our understanding of "thinking" is being continually updated and neurons aren't the only game in town. Glia, microtubules, cytoskeletons (present in all cells) are all part of how information is transferred.
Think of computer chips: CPUs were power hungry beasts to begin with, like our brains; over time with changes in architecture the power requirement has lowered significantly. Glia in the brain helps in a similar way and microtubules and the structure of cytoskeletons represent nearly unpowered filament connections that act like neural pathways. Also think of present work on using carbon nanotubes for conducting signals; can be as efficient as copper and more useful in low power information systems.

Memory is required for thinking in terms of selective decision making and that ought to be simple enough to work out as it's basically a chemical addressing system similar to our emotional tagging.

Remember, we are basically half human, half microbe (plant-ish) by DNA count. So hosting is part of every complex creature and others have pointed out colonization by other bacteria, etc, would play a key role.

Protists, kinases, Paramecium. Protists are a category that both "animals" (single or multi cellular) and "plants" like algae and slime mold can fit into (quotation marks because by definition a Protist is not plant, animal or fungus). Kinases are proteins that are the directors, like symphony conductors, in organisms and use phosphates (like in fertilizer) to do this. Along with calcium fixing the pathways they can direct traffic. I put in a description below that fits into your story. Paramecium are great in that they have no neurons but seem to make decisions and even exhibit memory-like behavior.

I'm having trouble finding a link but Washington state grows a lot of carrots and they have been noted for anti-radiation properties. Around Hanford, where a lot of WWII nuclear work was done, there is much contamination and carrots were planted in an attempt to suck the radiation out of the ground. But here's a link to studies of plants around Chernobyl and Fukushima and a great line:
" activation of genes involved in DNA repair and of defence/stress responses following exposure of seedlings to radiation ".

-- (this is a bit of the technobabble from article cited above that might fit your story)

The CDPK family constitutes a group of kinases that are only found in plants and protists. In plants, CDPKs mediate Ca2+ signals that regulate a diverse number of pathways including cell cycle progression and stress responses. The canonical CDPK is composed of an amino-terminal serine/threonine kinase domain, followed by a junction domain (also known as the autoinhibitory domain) that connects to the carboxy-terminal calmodulin-like domain (Klimecka and Muszynska, 2007). The calmodulin-like domain typically consists of four EF hand domains for Ca2+ binding. The autoinhibitory domain apparently regulates CDPK by interacting with the kinase domain and acting as a pseudosubstrate. Binding of Ca2+ to the EF hand domains relieves the autoinhibition (Harmon et al., 2000).

Answer 11

As we have no real clue as to what makes things sentient, maybe plants could develop structures which could think. However, this would take a very long evolutionary process.

To speed this process up, maybe the mutations were aided by AI (not a strong AI, just any AI we already could have today), and most of the testing and generational development was done by simulation. An AI could very well help write genes which are effective and produce certain effects. If the writing-testing-rewriting process is fast enough, and the results insufficiently supervised, plants could develop unwanted side-effects quite quickly.