A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA  Share with
others:  Print Email Read Later  CLEWISTON, Fla. -- The call
Ricke Kress and every other citrus grower in Florida dreaded
came while he was driving.  "It's here" was all his grove
manager needed to say to force him over to the side of the road.
The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green,
already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the
state's 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's
Natural, sat in silence for several long moments.  "O.K.," he
said finally on that fall day in 2005, "let's make a plan."  In
the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers
who supply most of the nation's orange juice poured everything
they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening.
To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge,
they chopped down hundreds of th