Word: bacterias
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...maze of confusing Government regulations, harassing legal actions and in some cases the industry's own blunders. Only last month, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency fined Advanced Genetic Sciences $20,000 and suspended its permit to field test a preparation called Frostban, which contains re-engineered bacteria designed to retard the formation of frost on plants. The agency charged that the Oakland firm misrepresented data and violated the national pesticide-control law by conducting outdoor tests without a permit. (EPA officials had been alerted by newspaper stories initiated by the indefatigable Rifkin...
Overblown press stories and Rifkin's rhetoric about the two cases have raised the specter of re-engineered microbes escaping into the environment with dire consequences. But most scientists are convinced that neither the Biologics viral vaccine nor the A.G.S. bacteria pose any threat to man, beast or plant...
...suspension of their permit to field test Frostban marked still another in a series of frustrating delays. As long ago as 1982, the company began partly financing the research efforts of Steven Lindow and Nickolas Panopoulos, plant pathologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who were attempting to engineer bacteria that would inhibit the formation of frost on plants. Their long-range goals: to extend the growing season and reduce crop damage caused by unseasonal frosts, which costs U.S. farmers at least $1.5 billion every year...
...Berkeley team had focused its efforts on the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae, which lives on the leaves of many plants and actually promotes the formation of frost. As the temperature drops below 32 degrees F, specks of protein produced by the bacteria act as nuclei for the growth of ice crystals (see chart). Without the bacteria and their protein particles, plants can briefly sustain temperatures as low as 25 degrees F before the dew turns to frost. The solution seemed simple enough: from 2% to 5% of the bacteria in nature lack the ability to manufacture the protein. If large numbers...
Still, the Berkeley team was not satisfied with its hit-and-miss method of creating frost-inhibiting bacteria, and set about producing them by gene- splicing techniques. For meaningful experiments, enough of the bacteria had to be sprayed on test plants to overwhelm the natural variety. But the release into the environment of any genetically engineered microbes in those days required the nod of the National Institutes of Health recombinant-DNA committee,* which in 1983 approved the Berkeley scientists' proposal to conduct their test at a tiny potato patch near the city of Tulelake in Northern California...