Making glow-in-the-dark squirt guns to raise money for science

Prolume's CEO, Dr. Bruce Bryan, sips a glowing beverage

January 7, 2000
Web posted at: 12:25 PM EST (1725 GMT)

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Not many companies encourage their employees to shoot each other with squirt guns at work. Then again, not many companies have squirt guns with glow-in-the-dark ammo.

Prolume does. And its new line of squirt guns is designed to raise money for deadly serious research.

The partnership of doctors and scientists is duplicating luminescent genes from jellyfish and other sea creatures and using them, for now, to fill up squirt guns. Next up could be glow-in-the-dark soda and beer.

The idea is to raise enough money from selling novelty items to underwrite more important pursuits, such as using the glowing genes to identify cancerous tumors or detect nerve gas.

The research is enormously expensive, with three days of boat rental for deep-sea fishing trips costing $35,000, the company says.

Prolume's catch -- jellyfish, sea pansies, dragon fish, sea worms, squid, mollusks and other sea creatures -- provides luminescent genes that can be copied and attached to other genes. Then, they can be made to glow when other kinds of chemicals are present, creating what the company calls "biosensors."

The field is "bursting with activity right now," says J. Woodland Hastings, a researcher of glow-in-the-dark creatures at Harvard University.

To raise money, Prolume last month began selling $4.99 squirt guns loaded with powdered genes that were replicated from a jellyfish caught off the coast of Washington state.

Add some distilled water to the chamber, and fire. As the liquid squirts it looks just like water. But when it hits something _ anything that contains calcium, which can be found on people and all kinds of other things -- it lights up.

The company maintains the product is safe.

The first batch of 2,000 squirt guns sold out quickly last month. Now, Prolume is working on a two-chambered water rifle that is supposed to shoot long distances. So far, the company has run into some trouble getting it to fire correctly.

"This is what happens when you get a surgeon trying to make a squirt gun," says Dr. Bruce Bryan, Prolume's chief executive.

Other possibilities include glow-in-the-dark hair mousse, ink and cake frosting, but Prolume also recently received a $298,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to start putting the genes to work on more serious tasks.

Sea creatures use light to communicate or to distract attackers or prey. Bryan, 46, was enchanted by them as a 19-year-old scuba diver off Zuma Beach, Calif., and wondered about using them as raw material.

Chris Szent-Gyorgyi, a company vice president, says light-up genes might someday used in allergy or drug tests or nerve gas detectors. During the 1970s, the Army used glow-in-the-dark genes to detect explosives.

One application that Bryan admits is far off is selling surgeons spray bottles of fluids they could use to identify tumors. In theory, it would work by having certain genes in a fluid -- which would be swallowed by a patient the day before surgery -- attach themselves to cancer cells.

Then, a second fluid containing complementary glow-in-the-dark genes would be sprayed on an organ or the skin during an operation. When the two genes combined, they would light up -- showing doctors where to operate.

The hope is that the tumor would glow when the operating room lights are switched off. Different colors could indicate different diseases.

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