Word: lindows
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...With reporting by Eben Harrell and William Lee Adams / London and Megan Lindow / Cape Town...
Zimbabwe lurches deeper into crisis as President Robert Mugabe's government menaces the opposition and its supporters in the walk-up to a second round of elections at the end of June. TIME's Megan Lindow spoke by phone to Mugabe's chief political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in an interview arranged by MTVu, a college-oriented music network from MTV. Tsvangirai - who expressed his gratitude to MTVu, saying its help "will contribute to the awareness of the crisis in Zimbabwe internationally" - spoke after being detained twice in a single day by Zimbabwean...
...Rifkin's first assaults on DNA technology was directed at Steven Lindow, a plant pathologist for the University of California, Berkeley. Lindow had discovered a way of snipping a particular gene from bacteria so that the redesigned microbes resisted frost formation down to 24 degrees F. Theoretically, crops sprayed with the microbes could be protected from cold snaps. In 1983 Lindow got permission from the NIH to test his bugs, which he called ice-minus, on a small plot of potatoes in Northern California...
...Lindow's bugs were to be the first genetically altered bacteria released into the environment. Although there was strong evidence that the microbes were benign, biologists at Berkeley and the NIH had failed to consider fully the experiment's environmental impact. The oversight allowed Rifkin to sue to block the experiment. The courts agreed, and, thanks to Rifkin, testing was postponed for three years while the NIH, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency struggled to draw up rules under which genetically engineered products would move from the lab to the field...
Outside the courtroom, Rifkin warned that the widespread use of ice-minus would lead to all sorts of natural disasters, including the disruption of rainfall patterns. (Lindow and his backers say this is hogwash. They note that the ice-fighting bacteria, developed into a commercial product called Frostban, was sprayed on a test field in 1987. As they predicted, it proved harmless.) Typically, Rifkin would plunge into a scientific setting, armed with papers from dissident researchers, and warn about the potentially catastrophic consequences of inadequately regulated research. Says geneticist Zinder: "The accusations are made simply, with simple words...