May headlines and summaries

Return to May article index

So far, consumers are ho-hum about biotech foods, grocers say

May 8
AP

"It's a non-issue. They're not even thinking about it," said Richard Ramsey, who runs a Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Blountstown, Fla. "I've not heard anything," added Dave Eber, who manages a Marsh store in Indianapolis.

But support for crops that produce genetically engineered food is slipping - even if a majority of consumers still back the technology, according to a poll released at the supermarket industry's annual convention, which opened Sunday.

Sixty-three percent of shoppers surveyed in January said they would be very or somewhat likely to buy a new variety of produce that had been genetically engineered to resist insect damage. That's down from 77 percent in a similar poll four years ago.

Fifty-four percent said in January they were very or somewhat likely to buy produce that was modified to taste better or stay fresh longer, compared with 58 percent in 1996. The new survey, conducted by Research International USA for the Food Marketing Institute, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A summary of the poll's findings said "consumers are less inclined to purchase these products" than they were in 1996.

The government has approved approximately 50 varieties of genetically engineered crops, and gene-altered soybeans and corn can be found in foods throughout the supermarket.

More than half of this year's soybean crop and 20 percent of this year's corn plantings will be of biotech varieties that are resistant to a popular herbicide or insect pests. Biotech animals, including leaner hogs and fast-growing salmon, are in development.

A few food processors, including Frito-Lay and Gerber, have stopped buying genetically engineered ingredients, citing fears about consumer resistance.

Most people, however, don't realize how widely used these so-called biotech ingredients have become, said Thomas Hoban, a North Carolina State University sociologist who tracks consumer attitudes about food. Nearly four in 10 questioned in the January poll said they had heard nothing about biotech food.

In Europe, "not only has the support for food and agricultural biotechnology gone down but also support for medical biotechnology. ... The U.S. is maybe overly positive. It will swing down, maybe," Hoban said.

Consumers who don't want to eat biotech food are expected to provide a boost to the $6 billion-a-year organic industry. The lone major grocery chain to reject biotech food so far is Whole Foods Market, which focuses on natural foods and stands to gain if consumers turn away from gene-altered products.

Biotech food "is not as much of an issue nationally as it will become," said James Hopper, senior vice president of natural food group operations for Tree of Life Inc. of St. Augustine, Fla. "People who are aware of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and don't want to be exposed to GMOs will definitely go to organic."

Ray Agah, who designs supermarkets for the 97-store Save Mart chain in northern California, isn't so sure. What matters most to consumers is the price and appearance of their food, he said. Organic food usually costs more than the conventional variety.

"They like to talk about (organic food), but they don't buy it," he said.

Critics of the biotech industry say there isn't enough known about the possible environmental or health risks from genetically altered plants and animals. They have been demanding tougher testing standards and mandatory labeling of the products.

The Clinton administration last week announced several steps meant to assure the public that biotech food is safe, including a more formal process for reviewing new products. But it said mandatory labeling was not warranted. Food manufacturers fear such labels would scare away consumers.

Promise & peril: The future of biotechnology

May 7
Sacramento Bee

Eric Aasen, a scientist at the Davis biotechnology firm Calgene, spends his days laboring over tiny tobacco plants in petri dishes. The plants have been genetically engineered to contain a protein that lowers blood pressure. Someday, Aasen says, this research could yield a powerful new drug.

His own future is uncertain. A growing international backlash against the use of genetic engineering in food has jolted the world of biotechnology -- and left Calgene in limbo.

Experts believe Calgene's new owner, New Jersey drug maker Pharmacia Corp., will put Calgene up for sale as part of a general corporate retreat from the once-attractive field of genetically altered crops. Already, employment and morale are down, several former and current Calgene employees say.

"There's uncertainty and I think it's industrywide," said Aasen, 37. "I don't think any biotech company knows what its future is."

As biotechnology forges ahead in the Sacramento region, in university laboratories and ambitious start-ups, the story of Calgene provides a cautionary tale. While many community leaders believe Sacramento can become the next great center of biotech, Calgene's experience teaches a lesson about the industry's promise and peril: Brilliant science doesn't guarantee success.

Calgene invented the world's first genetically altered food, a longer-lasting tomato called the Flavr Savr. But the product that put Calgene on the map also led to its undoing. The tomato was humbled by a series of mundane business problems that couldn't be solved in a genetics lab. Financial losses mounted, forcing Calgene into an unwanted takeover.

"Even with great technology -- and we had fabulous technology -- everything has to click," said Andrew Baum, a former Calgene executive.

That lesson is coming home throughout the biotech industry. Even as engineers make breakthroughs in food and medicine, they're discovering that the public at large won't automatically embrace their inventions.

European protests and domestic doubts about genetic engineering have prompted some U.S. food manufacturers to turn away biotech crops. This year, some farmers are rejecting biotech seeds, which a year ago accounted for half the nation's soybean crop and a third of its corn. Guerilla protesters have ripped up test crops in Davis and elsewhere. Bills are pending in Congress and the California Legislature requiring that genetically engineered foods be labeled as such -- a move that biotech backers believe would scare off consumers.

Even the pharmaceutical side of the biotech industry, somewhat shielded from the genetic engineering backlash, has seen its share of turmoil.

While biotech fuels a powerful new generation of drugs, investors are struggling to take the measure of an industry that, for all its dazzle, collectively lost $5 billion last year. Confusion over possible breakthroughs in decoding DNA has sent stocks of biotech companies fluctuating wildly. New forms of genetic testing, which can predict a person's odds of developing diseases including some forms of cancer, raise unsettling questions about privacy and discrimination.

Into this uncertain world tiptoes Sacramento.

The area is home to one of the world's pre-eminent biotech research centers -- the University of California, Davis -- and a modest cluster of biotech companies.

Yet Sacramento has yet to blossom into a major biotech region. Its biotech work force pales in comparison with those of the Bay Area and San Diego.

"There is certainly no biotech mecca here," said former Calgene Chief Executive Roger Salquist, who runs a venture capital fund that bankrolls biotech companies.

Salquist and others believe Calgene's downfall hurt the cause of biotech in greater Sacramento. Because Calgene stumbled before it really got going financially, the company didn't spin off the second-generation start-ups that could have formed the basis of a much bigger Sacramento industry today, Salquist said.

"We didn't become an Amgen and didn't spawn a bunch of millionaires," he said, referring to the ultrasuccessful pharmaceutical biotech company in Thousand Oaks. "We didn't become a model for success."

Instead, Calgene, nearly bankrupted by its high-tech tomato, was swept up by chemical giant Monsanto Co. as part of its drive to establish itself as king of the crop biotech industry. Besieged by the anti-biotech movement, Monsanto recently sought refuge in a merger with drug maker Pharmacia & Upjohn to form Pharmacia.

Pharmacia plans to sell some stock in its agricultural unit, including Calgene, to the investing public. Industry analysts believe the stock offering is just the first step in eventually unloading the unit entirely; hence the current unease around Calgene's Davis complex.

Calgene founder Ray Valentine, who still consults for the company, said uncertainty about the future -- and the recent departure of several scientists to the Bay Area biotech firm Maxygen -- damaged morale.

Baum said his former Calgene colleagues are "totally in limbo. Half the people there are waiting for packages -- severance packages."

Corporate officials say Calgene is not for sale -- and not in limbo. Although the 119-employee payroll is down from the 150 or so employed in Davis in the early 1990s, officials say turnover is about the same as it's always been, and Calgene is moving forward with full support from its corporate parent.

"We're ready to make those quantum leaps, we're ready to start running," said Calgene site director Nordine Cheikh. "There's a huge commitment (from corporate) to what we do here."

Calgene scientists today work mainly with canola, the oil derived from rapeseed plants. For example, they're engineering a canola that produces more saturated fat -- a form useful for making margarine without the transfatty acids believed to be bad for the heart. The company also is readying for market a canola oil rich in beta carotene, which probably will be donated to developing countries to help combat blindness in children.

Several employees said they're enthusiastic about their research and confident about Calgene's prospects. Aasen, even while acknowledging his uncertainty about the company's future, believes Calgene ultimately will prevail: "As far as I can see, we're making great products with great benefits to the consumer and the environment."

Yet there is wistfulness about what might have been.

"Every janitor and dishwasher at Microsoft is a millionaire," Aasen said. "We got close. Who knows how close we were."

Calgene was born on a dream. Obsessed with finding "a billion-dollar gene," as he puts it, UC Davis plant scientist Valentine co-founded the company in late 1980 with Norm Goldfarb, a budding entrepreneur who'd worked at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara.

Money was tight early on -- one of their first labs was an old rail car -- but Goldfarb and Valentine believed the possibilities were limitless.

"We were leaders of a new industry," Goldfarb said. "We were doing good things for the world. It was great."

In Salquist, a former Navy submarine officer, Calgene found a dynamic new chief executive officer. In short order, Calgene raised $30 million in an initial public stock offering.

In 1983, the young company scored a scientific coup. Working with tobacco, whose structure makes it a favorite among plant scientists, a team led by Italian-born researcher Luca Comai succeeded in altering a plant's genetic makeup. The plant now could resist glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's popular herbicide Roundup. The implications were obvious: A farmer could spray his fields with Roundup and not damage the crop.

Calgene eventually gave up its quest to perfect Roundup-resistant seeds, reasoning that it didn't have the financial wherewithal to bring such products to market. (The idea didn't die, however: In the mid-1990s, Monsanto commercialized "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds, which became one of the hottest-selling biotech products so far).

The Davis company focused on cotton, canola oil and, increasingly, the idea of fabricating a better-tasting tomato.

As a business prospect, the tomato's potential was tempting: Americans each year bought $4 billion worth of fresh tomatoes, but often found the quality lacking. Most tomatoes were picked green and hard, then ripened chemically so they could withstand the rigors of commercial shipping. But by reducing their time on the vine, growers sacrificed flavor. If biotechnology could slow the rate at which tomatoes softened, growers could leave them in the field longer, and Calgene could charge a premium price for the product.

In 1988, a team led by Calgene microbiologist Bill Hiatt succeeded in turning off the gene that hastens the breakdown of tomato flesh. The Flavr Savr was born.

Some Calgene scientists shrugged at the discovery, Comai said. But Salquist saw it differently. He had spent years wooing Wall Street on a vague promise of biotechnology from a company that was consistently unprofitable. The tomato give him a tangible, enticing product that investors could sink their teeth into.

"We had a good story, and I was a good salesman," Salquist said.

Comai, now at the University of Washington, put it this way: "The desire was to make it big, to make it huge, on that tomato. Roger was a bag of hormones, he was testosterone driven, he was ready. He was saying, "This is it, we're going to do it.'"

Before long, the company was pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Flavr Savr.

"It was the tail wagging the dog," former executive Ken Moonie said. "It was the first product, and we invested way too much to do it."

Figuring it needed the government's blessing before consumers would eat a high-tech tomato, Calgene applied to the Food and Drug Administration in early 1993 for an advisory opinion declaring Flavr Savr safe. The company began building a system to market and distribute the tomato. It opened a subsidiary in Chicago, Calgene Fresh, and hired a NutraSweet executive named Tom Churchwell to run it. It arranged with farmers in California, Florida and Mexico to grow Flavr Savr. After extensive consumer research, it settled on a warm and fuzzy brand name for the tomato: MacGregor's.

Problems arose. As the FDA approval process stretched into 1994, the company had to lay off workers and cancel non-tomato research programs to conserve cash.

Then anti-biotech activist Jeremy Rifkin led a public relations campaign against Flavr Savr. Under pressure from Rifkin, Campbell Soup Co., a major buyer that had backed Calgene's early research, said it wouldn't use biotech tomatoes in its products in the foreseeable future. Scores of restaurants across the country said they wouldn't serve the tomato.

As it turned out, Flavr Savr's failure had little to do with anti-biotech protests. For that matter, it had little to do with biotechnology.

Rather, Calgene had spent so much time working on gene splicing that it had neglected the old-fashioned art of developing the right kinds of tomato varieties to plant. Its first crop, to be grown in Florida, was a strain of tomato better suited for the soil and climate of Northern California, said Jeff Bergau, a former Calgene spokesman.

"Until you put a gene in a given variety, you don't know how it's going to perform," Salquist said. "Plant breeding takes seven to 10 years."

Calgene didn't have that kind of time. The public and Wall Street were waiting for the Flavr Savr. The company had already started growing Flavr Savr tomatoes in Florida in significant quantities, and two days after the FDA called the product safe to eat, the tomatoes went on sale in Chicago and Northern California.

"We gambled and did the best we could with what we had available," Salquist said. "We knew it wouldn't be perfect, but we thought it would at least be adequate."

It wasn't. Crop yields fell way below expectations. So did quality: Only about 10 percent to 20 percent of the tomatoes were good enough to merit the MacGregor's label. The rest had to be sold for canning and processing at non-premium prices pushed even lower by a bumper crop in Mexico.

One other thing: While Flavr Savr technology delayed the tomatoes' softening, they were still more delicate than the traditional hard, green tomatoes. Calgene begged its growers to handle the MacGregor's with care, to no avail. The tomatoes suffered at the hands of the growers' roughhouse, highly mechanized system for packing and shipping fruit; many were ruined before they reached Calgene's distribution center in Chicago.

"You can't treat them like baseballs," said Churchwell, the head of Calgene Fresh. "What we got was a whole lot of tomato soup in Chicago."

The tomatoes that made it intact to Chicago proved popular, but Calgene's costs soared out of sight. Consumers were willing to pay $2.99 a pound for MacGregor's, more than double the price of conventional tomatoes. But that was still a fraction of what it cost to produce them, said Moonie, then vice president for operations at Calgene Fresh.

Salquist blames Churchwell for many of the Flavr Savr's woes, saying the Chicago executive "scaled up" the business too quickly, and largely without Salquist's knowledge. "I was always out debating Rifkin or talking on public radio," Salquist said.

Instead of attempting a national rollout, the company should have started distribution in California with tomatoes grown in California, Salquist said. "The whole cost structure was bloated and we were spread out all over the bloody country," Salquist said.

Churchwell counters that the Flavr Savr had to become a national product, and quickly. The whole point was to serve cold climates where it was impossible to get good tomatoes year-round, he said. Limiting distribution to California would have proved nothing to investors, he said.

The tomato drained what little financial juice Calgene had left. In late 1996, Calgene harvested its last crop of tomatoes in Mexico. Its accumulated losses since 1980 totaled $338 million. Moonie said the company probably lost $150 million on the Flavr Savr alone.

By spring 1997, the company's cash had dwindled to $1.8 million. Having sold a 49.9 percent stake to Monsanto a couple of years earlier, Calgene sold out altogether to the chemical giant from St. Louis. In a deal that was completed recently, Monsanto sold out to Pharmacia, leaving current and former Calgene employees to ponder what happened to their dream.

"The science on this was good," ex-Calgene scientist David Stalker said of the Flavr Savr. "We just didn't understand how to make money on it."

Glickman says new biotech rules are a 'good first step'

May 5
Bridge News

USDA Secretary Dan Glickman said Thursday the new biotech food regulations proposed by the Clinton administration were "a good first step" in improving the U.S. regulatory process but he added he does not think "it is the last step" in the GMO regulatory process.

Glickman, who spoke to reporters following a short meeting with the National Academy of Sciences biotech advisory council, also said it is " way premature" to make a decision on mandatory labeling of foods containing GMO crops.

The US is "not in a position" to impose labeling requirements, Glickman said, because the science is not yet good enough to reliably and consistently say what is GMO-free and what is not.

"Much of the industry has asked for guidelines on how to do labeling," Glickman said. "We wouldn't even know how to go down that road (of mandatory labeling of biotech foods) right now even if it were a good idea, and I'm not presupposing that it is."

Glickman formally presented the administration's proposal unveiled Wednesday that would give the Food and Drug Administration more power to regulate biotech crops.

Under the proposal, FDA can require a 6-month evaluation period prior to the marketing of any biotech crop and will develop standards that will allow food manufacturers to label food as GMO-free.

Glickman told the advisory board that U.S. biotech regulations must be flexible enough to evolve with technology, because currently the technology changes far faster than the regulations governing its products.

"The main thing we've got to do is ensure public confidence that the food supply is safe, and that we're doing everything we can to advance the science of this," he said.

The National Academy of Sciences--which earlier this year released a report recommending that USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency and FDA tighten and centralize rules governing biotech crops--were very important in helping ensure consumer confidence. 

"No one has the expertise and impartiality that you have," Glickman said.

The biotech advisory council eventually will make recommendations the use of antibiotic market genes in GMO crops and the potential of " environmental pollution" from genetically engineered crops.

New theme for shareholder activism: Policing genetically modified food

May 4
New York Times

A growing global backlash against gene-altered food has found a new battleground: the annual corporate shareholder meeting.

Twenty-one resolutions calling for restraints on the use of genetically modified ingredients are on the annual meeting agendas at some of America's leading food and seed manufacturers this year, up from zero a year ago.

The resolutions vary in severity, but many call for more long-term research before genetically altered animals and plants are used in food. Others propose mandatory labeling of any products with genetically altered ingredients.

None of the resolutions are expected to pass, and the few that have been put to a vote so far have been overwhelmingly defeated. But even in defeat, all of the resolutions have garnered the minimum 3% of the shareholder vote required to automatically reappear on the annual meeting agenda next year, under Securities and Exchange Commission rules.

Moreover, experts in shareholder activism say the resolutions are already making an impact by putting a sensitive consumer issue squarely in the faces of American corporate executives.

Some activists draw a parallel to the initially slow momentum of the anti-apartheid shareholder resolution movement 30 years ago, which pressured American companies to quit doing business with South Africa. That movement ultimately played an important role in the downfall of South Africa's white minority racist regime.

"The goal of shareholder resolutions is to move a company in a certain direction. At 6% to 8% you're getting the company's attention. At 10% you are getting action," said Michael Passoff, associate director of the corporate accountability program of the As You Sow Foundation, a shareholder advocacy organization. "At 15% of anti-apartheid votes, companies were making decisions, but it took a few years."

Although genetically modified foods have been declared safe by the food industry and the government, activists say no issue has drawn as much shareholder attention since the anti-apartheid movement. As a result, they say, some companies are likely to be more inclined to revisit their policies as a result of the resolutions and the support they are mustering. Shareholders at Coca Cola, Kellogg, Phillip Morris and PepsiCo have already voted on the resolutions, which garnered a respective 8.3%, 5.6%, 4% and 3.2% of the support of voting shares.

Advocates of more testing and labeling of genetically modified foods call the shareholder resolution effort an important part of a broader international outcry against such products.

"Change will come because of a synergy of factors," said Tim Smith, executive director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which has coordinated the resolutions on behalf of 300 religious and socially concerned investor groups that have more than $100 million in investments.

Some recent steps taken by the federal government, companies and farmers show they already are sensitive to consumer concerns.

On Wednesday, the Clinton administration announced it would require biotechnology companies to notify the Food and Drug Administration 120 days before introducing any new genetically engineered ingredients for food and animal feed. The FDA will then post its conclusions as well as product safety data regarding these products on the Internet.

Until now, biotechnology companies had not been required to notify the FDA before selling modified products.

The administration also said it would set standards for companies that want to voluntarily label products in order to indicate whether they contain genetically altered substances.

Although critics of the biotechnology industry said the moves fell short of their demands, these steps could provide some momentum for the movement against genetically modified food. Manufacturers who want to allay consumer concerns may have a hard time using labels to their advantage since genetically modified products pervade many everyday grocery staples in America.

About half of U.S. soybean and about a quarter of corn crops are grown from genetically modified seeds, which farmers like because they are more pest resistant. Even when conventional seeds are used, the crops tend to get mixed together during the manufacturing process.

This will make it difficult for many suppliers and manufacturers to assure that their foods are free of genetically modified ingredients.

Take Coca-Cola. The company says it does not use any genetically modified ingredients in its soft drinks since the corn protein that is altered in the modification process never makes it into the final product. But they cannot necessarily guarantee that the corn used to make the corn syrup did not come from a genetically modified seed.

"Attempting to stamp our product biotech or non-biotech would be misleading," said Trey Paris, Coke's manager for global communications.

Some companies are starting to ask suppliers to provide them with non-genetically modified products while others are declaring that certain of their products do not contain genetically modified ingredients. But understanding whether a company is making substantial efforts to rid its products of such ingredients is not necessarily easy.

McDonald's has requested that its potato supplier, J.R. Simplot, provide it with conventional potatoes. But genetically modified potatoes account for only 4% of the potatoes grown in the U.S., according to a McDonald's spokesman, making the move relatively painless. Meanwhile, Heinz and Gerber said they were eliminating genetically modified ingredients from their baby foods. Infant foods, however, are pretty much derived from pure fruits and vegetables, such as carrots and peas, which are not genetically modified.

The big problem lies with more complex processed foods that use ingredients derived from corn and soybean byproducts. In response to the growing concerns, particularly overseas, suppliers such as Archer Daniels Midland are asking farmers to keep conventional crops and genetically modified crops separate during the entire growing and harvesting cycle.

"We are encouraging farmers to segregate crops," said Larry Cunningham, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Archer Daniels Midland. "And we have an opportunity to also benefit from it. In Europe and Japan some people are willing to pay a premium for segregated crops."

A study conducted by Pioneer Hi-Bred, a subsidiary of DuPont, indicated that, of the 1,200 U.S. processors surveyed, 24% were planning to segregate corn crops this year, up from 11% in 1999, and 20% were planning to segregate soybean crops, up from 8% last year.

Segregation at the processing stage depends on farmers' ability to guarantee that the conventionally grown crops they are selling have not been tainted by residue in the combines and augers, or by cross pollination in the case of corn. Farmers, who currently reap most of the benefits from genetically modified foods in the form of heartier crops, must now decide whether to make the investment needed to guarantee segregation.

Farmers are already starting to scale back the acreage dedicated to genetically modified varieties of soybeans. A U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of 63,400 soybean farmers showed that 52% of their acreage would be dedicated to genetically modified soybeans, down from 57% in 1999.

Some corn growers said they also expected a partial return to conventional seeds until U.S., European and Japanese consumers were convinced that genetically modified foods do not pose a health or environmental risk.

Gary Goldberg, president of the American Corn Growers Association, said farmers were currently doing the math to evaluate whether it would pay to clean out their combines and augers every time they switched crops, a process that could take up to three hours.

Goldberg said such a decision had nothing to do with whether farmers like genetically modified crops. Rather, he said, "It's an issue of what they can afford."

Elliot's can of worms

May 4
gofish.com column by Peter Redmayne

I’ve known Elliot Entis, the man behind the super salmon, for a long time. Before he started chasing biotech dreams about 10 years ago, he had a fish company down on the Boston Fish Pier. Well, Elliot is on to something big. I think he’s going to be rich.

He and a group of Canadian scientists have patented a process that takes a gene from a winter flounder (or an ocean pout) and splices it into a salmon. The result is a salmon that grows 12 months a year, instead of just during warm-weather months. The fish also convert feed more efficiently.

The bottom line in fish farming is production cost, and Elliot’s salmon cost about a third less to produce. Now what fish farmer could resist that? Elliot has his broodstock ready to go, and he’s ready to start selling millions of eggs to salmon farmers. All he’s waiting for is regulatory approval, which he’s confident he’ll get. His fish is identical to any other farmed Atlantic except that it grows faster.

But Elliot’s salmon is raising a big stink. Salmon-farming associations have opposed any biotech "super fish," because they fear a consumer backlash similar to the brouhaha over genetically modified foods, which have rattled Europe. Privately, though, salmon farmers are very interested. Who wouldn’t want a 30-percent edge on their competitor?

Although retailers and restaurateurs are probably oblivious to what’s up down on the farm, in time I think they’ll be interested, too. The cheaper the salmon, the more they can sell. Do the math.

Elliot isn’t sure his fish will have to be labeled any differently, although he’s all for educating consumers about the advantages of his fish, and he even wants to brand them. They’re eco-friendly, he says, because they use resources more efficiently. It takes less fish to feed them, and you can get twice as much production out of the same cage.

But I’m not too confident retailers and restaurant operators can get Elliot’s message across. They can barely communicate the difference between wild and farmed fish.

What I see is a huge opportunity for substitution. Publicly, most people won’t cop to growing or selling genetically modified fish. It’s not worth the hassle. Behind the scenes, though, it’s going to be a different story.

The problem is, there’s no way you can tell a super salmon from a regular salmon. That means that some farmers, no doubt, will be tempted to grow the super salmon and sell them as regular farmed fish, which could mean an extra profit of about 50 cents a pound — not exactly salmon feed.

There’s extra money to be made further down the distribution chain, too. Some honest farmers, no doubt, will be inclined to sell their super salmon for what they are. And that means distributors, restaurateurs and retailers can sell them for what they aren’t — and make some extra money in the process. It’s just too tempting, and I see no reason some of the people who sell seafood will change their ways.

And it won’t stop with salmon. Elliot has tried his gene on a lot of other fish, and it works just as well. So welcome to the brave new world of biotech. If only it were a matter of super fish at a super price. Unfortunately, it’s also a can of worms.