It is kind of sad to he honest. It's a complex chemical process that got solved halfway by a scientist, a startup company then tried to sell that they could figure out the last half and make it a consumer product. They made some progress but locked up a bunch of the work behind a patent, and then failed to make a glowing plant. Leaving the whole process locked legally and not easily picked up by the next person.

Capitalism can only give us avatar on the big screen. R.I.P.

(And the plants were small herbaceous annuals, arabidopsis. Theory was to figure it out there then market and make enough to move on to larger and more useful plants, house plants, etc.)