VANDALS have ruined the world’s first and only outdoor trial of genetically engineered coffee. But it emerged last week that enough results were salvaged from the trial in French Guiana to show that an inserted toxin gene protected the GM coffee plants against moth larvae.
In May 2000, researchers based in Montpellier from the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) planted plots of both GM and unmodified coffee plants. The GM plants had been engineered to contain a toxin gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which codes for a protein lethal to insects but harmless to…
