[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]<\/p>\n
The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state\u2019s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida\u2019s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments.\u201cO.K.,\u201d he said finally on that fall day in 2005, \u201clet\u2019s make a plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who supply most of the nation\u2019s orange juice poured everything they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening.<\/p>\n
To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained.<\/p>\n
They scoured Central Florida\u2019s half-million acres of emerald groves and sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de Le\u00f3n. But such a tree did not exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,\u201d the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.<\/p>\n
In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida\u2019s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange\u2019s DNA \u2014 with a gene from a different species.<\/p>\n