Word: montana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Equally sharp-eyed Canadian mining companies have snapped up the rights to some 40% of the new gold-digging projects in Montana, Nevada and other Western states. In Northern California, foreign investors have picked up more than two dozen of the region's 300 wineries, among them the Almaden label (now British) and the St. Clement Vineyard (Japanese). In Alaska, Japanese investors control more than one-third of the state's $680 million seafood-packing industry. U.S. farmland might be a bigger target for raiders, except that more than two dozen states have imposed controls or bans on foreign ownership...
Late last week a cordon of Montana State University police stepped aside as Gary Strobel, a professor of plant pathology, led a group of onlookers to a stand of 13 American elms in the Bozeman campus research grove. He took a chain saw and severed the trees six inches above the ground. Then the trunks were sawed into sections and trucked to an incinerator. The stumps were doused with a powerful herbicide, and the surrounding soil was fumigated. Said a tearful Strobel: "Now maybe I can go back to other things...
Disturbing new evidence emerged last week that Strobel had released altered bacteria into the environment prior to his experiment with the elms. In an Aug. 10 letter to the EPA, Strobel admitted he had released a "new strain of Rhizobium meliloti . . . in South Dakota, Montana, California and Nebraska in 1983-84." The Rhizobium had been altered to enhance nitrogen fixation in alfalfa plants. Though it is not yet clear that those experiments violated regulations in force at the time, they are under investigation by Montana State...
Plant Pathologist Gary Strobel knew that he needed permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to inject genetically altered bacteria into 14 trees in the hope of protecting them from Dutch elm disease. But the approval process can take months, and the Montana State University professor wanted to get on with his experiment. So in June he made the injections anyway...
...action, which Strobel discussed with Montana State University's biosafety committee last week, incensed Jeremy Rifkin, the activist who has led a crusade against releasing genetically altered bacteria into the environment. Rifkin, who contends that man-made bacteria might proliferate out of control, demanded that the EPA and other agencies "immediately terminate" the experiment and destroy the trees. But EPA Spokesman Al Heier, acknowledging that the agency's regulations are "somewhat complex," said "nature has enough controls that this product would not get out of hand. That's likely what our final determination will...