BioCoder #12

Chapter 3. BK BioReactor

Glen Martin

Brooklyn is perhaps New York City’s most vibrant borough, drawing the young, the visionary, and the entrepreneurial. Its restaurants express the cutting edge of culinary theory, and it’s a hotspot for IT and biotech start-ups. Maybe you still go to Manhattan to make money, but you go to Brooklyn to make a difference (and also some money, of course).

But it’s not all high-end brewpubs and succulent tapas for Brooklyn. The borough has some problems, many of them the legacy of long human habitation. Case in point: the Gowanus Canal.

Originally a network of tidal creeks and wetlands rich in fish and wildlife, the canal was transformed into a shipping hub in the 19th century, evolving into the nation’s busiest commercial channel in the years following World War 1. But such intensive development exacted a price. Decades of industrial discharges, sewage outflows, and contaminated runoff made the canal one of the country’s most polluted waterways by the end of the last century.

Today, the 1.8-mile canal has lost its industrial and maritime preeminence. The dire legacy of its commercial glory years, however, endures. While it still serves as a conduit for the transportation of fossil fuels and scrap metal, the canal is most notable—or notorious—as a Superfund site. Clean-up efforts are underway, but the water in the canal remains a toxic, fetid brew laced with heavy metals, raw sewage, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Dissolved oxygen levels ...