That was a year ago. Today, the five of them—Dottie and her teammates—have been-scattered to the wind, like seed. One would guess, if one had never heard of them, that they must have been unsuccessful as a research team. What one probably wouldn’t guess is that, on the contrary, they achieved a feat that previously had stymied dozens of other agricultural researchers—a feat with commercial ramifications down the road that could earn their employer millions. The truth is, despite their considerable accomplishment, their employer chose to let them go.
For years before Dottie and her crew began their work, geneticists suspected that it might be possible to introduce a foreign gene into a monocot, the class of plants to which corn belongs. If you could do that, they reasoned, you could create plants that are resistant to certain insects or diseases. The problem was: How do you regenerate whole maize ...
