Can humans photosynthesize?

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Editor's note: All flesh is grass, and all grass is captured sunlight. More than two billion years ago, single-celled organisms began the process of harvesting energy from sunlight through photosynthesis and releasing oxygen as a byproduct. Oxygen makes our air breathable, but back then, it was toxic to several life forms and caused a mass extinction event, wiping out anaerobic forms of life. More than a billion years ago, a single-celled ancestor of modern plants swallowed one of these photosynthetic factories and didn’t digest it. Instead, it kept these forerunners of chloroplasts. Since then, algae and plants have been using these factories to transform carbon dioxide into carbohydrates.  Could we, in turn, bypass the need to eat plants or their stored products and harness the power of photosynthesis directly? Some animals with simpler energy requirements than humans have been shown to get energy (at least for a while) from photosynthesis. More recent work (which I’ll talk about in a bit) has found that photosynthetic microbes can be used to provide oxygen to certain kinds of cells. Scientists have also calculated how much …