California Citrus Damage exacerbated by EPA

In today's TCSDaily's article by Dr. Henry I. Miller entitled "Feds Freeze Out Antidote, Costing Billions", we see once again why the scariest words in the US remain, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

A couple of paragraphs:

In the early 1980's scientists at the University of California and in industry devised a new approach to limiting frost damage. They knew that a harmless bacterium which normally lives on many plants contains an "ice nucleation" protein that promotes frost damage. Therefore, they sought to produce a variant of the bacterium that lacked the ice-nucleation protein, reasoning that spraying this variant bacterium (dubbed "ice-minus") on plants might prevent frost damage by displacing the common, ice-promoting kind. Using very precise biotechnology techniques called "gene splicing," the researchers removed the gene for the ice nucleation protein and planned field tests with ice-minus bacteria.

Then the government stepped in, and that was the beginning of the end.

What else do you need to know? (But read the whole thing if only for the science.)