Got the actual paper being discussed. Will go back and look at its references from the eighties as well on the university network later after working on some figures in the lab, to see exactly what sort of things were being done and how the experiment proceeded. Context is everything. I very much doubt a bacterium engineered to make excess ethanol via fermentation would not be outcompeted by wild bacteria in nature.
Got the actual paper being discussed. Will go back and look at its references from the eighties as well on the university network later after working on some figures in the lab, to see exactly what sort of things were being done and how the experiment proceeded. Context is everything. I very much doubt a bacterium engineered to make excess ethanol via fermentation would not be outcompeted by wild bacteria in nature.