Word: frostings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only a decade ago, however, Massachusetts was moribund, the archetypal Frost Belt state frozen in a dead-end past. Its jobless rate was higher than any other industrial state's; plant closings and layoffs were epidemic; deficits deepened. Textile mills and shoe factories became abandoned shells, their great machines rusting. Taxachusetts became the state's unofficial nickname, and businesses, feeling oppressed by heavy levies, were clearing out for more hospitable climates...
...instructors who brought their classes to meet on the Yard's less-than-lush grass weren't hoping April sunshine would rekindle interest in Tocqueville or Melville that had melted away with the March frost. Instead, they moved their classes to support the goals of the Yard's shantytown-protest against Harvard's South Africa-related investments. But faculty members and students charged the practice coerced students to support the protest...
FOOTNOTE: *Under current, overlapping regulations, frost-inhibiting bacteria are considered microbial pesticides and must be approved by the EPA for field testing or use. Gene-spliced animal biologics and plants require USDA clearance; human and animal drugs need Food and Drug Administration approval...
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...
...They warned that re-engineered P. syringae might also cause trouble. For example, they said, the altered bacteria might multiply and spread, perhaps even change the climate by retarding the formation of ice crystals in the atmosphere. Lindow and Panopoulos undermined that argument by pointing out that naturally occurring frost-inhibiting bacteria show no such inclination...