Foot and Mouth

Well, it's either foot and mouth, or foot-in-mouth at Pirbright. It's all very well the laboratories there saying that they can find no breaches of bio-security. That's the whole point, no matter how good your systems are, in the end something will go adrift. It is arrogant to claim otherwise. That is a lesson which should be well learnt by the nuclear industry, but even more so by those who claim that a few hundred metres of open space will stop the spread of genetically modified pollen from fertilizing other crops.

That kind of thing just makes me despair. And the worst of that is, that while foot and mouth will die out, one way or another, and even nuclear contamination will decay to nothing in a few thousand years, once you modify a genetic line, it stays that way forever, perhaps with entirely unforseen consequences.