WELCOME to a food campaigner’s nightmare. Beneath the prairie’s sheltering
sky stretch endless fields of a single alien corn. It’s all from the same
supplier, it all has the same genome—one great humongous clone as far as
the eye can see. It’s not, when it comes down to it, a very good crop. But it’s
easy to buy, and agribusinessmen are convinced there are great economies of
scale involved in having all their produce built from the same biochemistry.
One of these economies, they claim, is flexibility: the corn’s genome can be
reprogrammed remotely with the help of a…
