I lost decades of my life chasing the dream of making things glow (more specifically: general germline mutation based on engineering). I agree the glowing tobacco plant was a sexy introduction to gene modification. Unfortunately doing anything non-trivial and actually useful (beyond the 'hello world' of a glowing plant) is really challenging.

Sure, and the autoluminescent plants experiment didn't use CRISPR; I was just pointing out how versatile plants are.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

> There's just something about it that people find irresistible.

It's cheap to verify and demonstrate success, so it's a natural first, or at least early, application.