"My sessions with the kids are heartbreaking because of the severity of their illnesses," says Kruse.

Kruse is keen to see Pakrasi scale up his experiments to check that Cyanothece 51142 works as well when cultured in larger volumes.

“Lehman Brothers was a sort of a switchboard for the industry,” says Peter Kruse of Vestas, the world’s biggest wind-turbine manufacturer, “and they didn’t pick up the phone any more.”