Word: plant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pitchforks? Nowadays we use guns. A so-called gene gun using gold bullets has become one of the standard methods for rewriting nature's codes. Pellets coated with DNA are fired into the chromosomes of a plant that biotech engineers wish to alter in some amazing way. Then, after patient cultivation to bring out the inserted trait, a prodigy is born. The transformed crop may be corn or cotton with a built-in insecticide, tomatoes that retain their fresh-picked texture on the shelf, or wheat with extra gluten, making for lighter, bouncier bread. The new crop of doctors...
...fruits and vegetables is good for us, but within the next decade we could be eating broccoli not just to make Mom happy but also as a way to deliver drugs that stave off infectious diseases or that treat various chronic conditions. "The idea of vaccinating people with edible plants is very new," says Dwayne Kirk of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, N.Y. "But it's a lot friendlier than injections...
...large quantities of protein, potatoes and tomatoes seem for now to be the most efficient vehicles for the new approach. Instead of mixing viral or bacterial DNA in a formula for injection, for example, scientists could insert it into soil bacteria. When the bacteria are taken up by the plant, therapeutic DNA material is stitched into the plant's genome. Another method of getting genes into plants is to coat tiny particles of tungsten or gold with foreign DNA, then shoot the particles directly into plant cells. Either way, the plant's cells start to produce whatever proteins...
...blindfolded in the chopper next to the bureau's Lewis Schiliro was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the Trade Center attack, who had just been nabbed in Pakistan. During the transatlantic leg of the flight back to the U.S., Yousef had bragged that his original plan had been to plant enough explosives in one of the 110-story twin buildings to topple it, killing maybe 250,000 people in the tower and on the ground. But his shoestring operation couldn't afford enough dynamite, and settled for a much smaller blast...
Here in the area of Michigan where I live, big artificial support payments for sugar beets are ruining the family farm. The foreign-owned sugar plants give contracts to a certain few corporate farms, paying them enormous sums per acre. Small and midsize family farms are disappearing at an alarming rate as land rents and property taxes skyrocket and the few corporate farms fight over every acre. The megafarms are pushing the fast-disappearing topsoil to the absolute limit. All this while the local sugar plant locked out longtime employees to force wage cuts. Here too we have spent millions...