Once upon a time in America, a shiny chemicals multinational
called Monsanto found that a wonderful herbicide that it made
damaged soya beans on which it was sprayed. Some horrible
lefty subversives suggested that farmers should stop using the
nice herbicide and farm organically instead, but the company
came up with a better solution.... it would genetically alter
a soya bean seed so that it was resistant to the herbicide.
That way it could sell the farmers the herbicide _and_ the
seeds that resisted it, and make even more profit whilst
ensuring huge sales of its herbicide for years to come!!So the company examined an earlier experiment which had
inserted DNA from a Brazil nut into some soya beans; these
were then eaten by human volunteers. The trial was a
resounding success; any reports of allergic reactions to
the 'nuts' in the soya were purely vicious rumours spread
by the nasty anti-capitalists.The company was so pleased with the potential of this that it
forged ahead and found that by inserting DNA from a certain
virus and a certain bacteria into the soya beans, they would
resist the herbicide. Some short-term trialling (10 weeks)
of this soya was done on animals (not humans) and no adverse
effects were found, despite claims by the dirty lefties that
there was no way that anyone could be sure of the long-term
effects of eating parts of viruses and bacteria, and their
reminders of the totally unrelated BSE and Tryptophan stories.
So the company started selling the marvellous new soya bean
seeds to farmers who were happy to embrace this technological
progress.But the farmers weren't sure that their customers would
appreciate the full advantages of eating genetically engineered
food, so they and the US regulatory authorities ignored one of
the main free-market axioms ('choice'), and cleverly decided
to mix them all in with normal soya beans so that it would be
very difficult to tell which were which. This meant that the
farmers' customers didn't have to trouble themselves deciding
whether to eat the genetically manipulated soya or not, and
everyone lived happily ever after.....