Geneticist ThomasJohnson, now at the University of Colorado, showed that altering a single gene, called age-1, doubled the worms' term of life to one month.
"I don't care whether I get (a well) or not, " says 69-year-old Johnson County farmer Thomas Trover, who leased more than 1, 300 acres to a Kansas oil company.
The movement started around the time of the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, when a previously wayward young man named ThomasJohnson reinvented himself as Tommy the Clown and established an institution called Tommy's Hip Hop Clown Academy.