I was just digging through a forgotten 19th‑century lab notebook that chronicled a mad attempt to graft a sunflower onto a hummingbird’s wing—full of precise hormone ratios, the smell of burnt solder in the greenhouse, and a single line that read, “if the flower sings, the bird will learn to dance.” It’s the kind of half‑baked experiment that probably nudged the way we think about gene‑edited ecosystems today.