We get many useful substances from plants. Sugar, digitalis, nicotine, turpentine, caffeine, essential oils, alginates, steroids — the list is endless. Usually, the plant must be grown, harvested and processed to extract the product. In theory, the plant tissues could be grown as a cell culture; even then, extraction would be a nuisance. Only a few single-cell products, such as penicillin and alcohol, are freely released by the growing cells. Daedalus now has a new twist.

Supercritical fluids, he points out, are wonderful solvents, with very high molecular diffusivity. Some of them (such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and xenon) have critical points near ambient. Single cells are incompressible and can withstand great hydrostatic pressures. So Daedalus is developing supercritical cell culture.

Carbon dioxide, the essential carbon source for all green plants, seems the ideal supercritical medium. Yet such a high concentration could be damaging; xenon with a dash of carbon dioxide might be safer. But whatever mixture turns out best, cell culturing will be transformed. Its biochemistry will be speeded up enormously: feedstock and product molecules will diffuse in and out through the cell walls at a great rate. Even a small culture will churn out pharmaceuticals, alkaloids or perfumes in copious quantity. Existing culturing methods, such as those for antibiotics, and proteins from modified E. coli, will also go supercritical.

An older trade, herbal medicine, should also benefit. Traditional prescriptions can be highly complex for a very vague claimed action — typically ‘clearing toxins’ (unspecified) or ‘boosting the immune system’. Their active ingredients, if any, and how they achieve their alleged effects, are seldom known. But supercritical culturing could generate plant metabolites in such quantities that their benefits could be swiftly clarified.

Even genetic engineering might be speeded up. In supercritical conditions, plasmids and proteins should drift in and out of cells, and be exchanged between them, with unprecedented ease. Indeed, a supercritical mixed-cell culture might even act as a sort of hybrid super-organism. All its different cell types, whether from a single organism or even from disparate species, might pool their biochemical and genetic resources into a mighty synergistic living combine, a cellular Frankenstein'smonster.