Deception Read Online Free PDF

on resurrecting Crawhill as a working farm and an organic one at that. The fact that the land had not been cultivated at all for many years meant that it could be considered free of modern chemical contamination and therefore eligible for an organic accreditation, which it had now been granted.
    Steven read on and noted that the licensing dates for Agrigene’s trial pre-dated Rafferty’s organic farm accreditation by quite some time. Some pen - pusher’s mistake? he wondered. Right hands not knowing what left hands were doing? This was a fact of life in any large administration and, in this case, he could see an added complication. The setting up of the new Scottish Parliament’s infrastructure had not, as far as he could tell, led to the demise of the old one, administered by the Scottish Office. He could be dealing here with permutations of two left hands and two right hands. Not a happy thought.
    Steven moved on to the lab report from the ministry lab that had carried out the analysis on the oil seed rape crop and immediately thought it odd. It appeared that the analysis had been carried out at the instigation of the protestors. Why should a MAFF lab agree to do that? Did such labs carry out private work routinely? he wondered. He would check up on that, but even if that were the case, there must have been an original analysis carried out on the crop before the licence for the trial was granted. A comparison of the original and the latest one was surely all that was required to demonstrate whether the crops were the same or not, but the original was missing from the file. A copy of the licence itself was present and gave details of the two foreign genes that had been introduced to the grain. They had been inserted in order to enable the plant to tolerate a range of powerful herbicidal chemicals, most importantly, glyphosphate and glufosinate-ammonium weed killers. The use of these herbicides would completely suppress weeds in the fields and permit much higher yields of the crop.
    ‘ And a bloody good idea, too,’ though Steven as he read on through the MAFF analysis. The two foreign genes were highlighted in the DNA sequence but so was a third, marked in a different colour. This apparently was the bone of contention between the two parties. The protestors, through Rafferty’s solicitors, were arguing that this area represented a third, undeclared gene and therefore rendered the licence invalid. The biotech company however, maintained that this was a misunderstanding and that the DNA sequence was not being interpreted correctly.
    Steven was no molecular biologist but he did understand the principles involved in genetic engineering. In particular he appreciated the structure of DNA, the blueprint of life, and knew about the specificity of restriction enzymes that cut the molecule at particular sites. He understood the technical procedures involved in the cutting out of genes from one DNA molecule and the pasting of them into another.
    This gave him an advantage over any lay investigator and, in this instance, enabled him to wonder why the supposed third gene had not been identified and described by the analysing lab. They had just classified it as a ‘foreign element’ in the report.
    Although one stretch of DNA sequence looked pretty much like any other to the naked eye – an apparently endless, alternating alphabet of only four letters, A,T,C, and G, representing backbone of the molecule - many computerised databases had been set up to analyse these strings of letters and compare them with the DNA sequences of known genes. The lab had obviously run the sequence through a database in order to classify the suspect third section as foreign but they had not given any indication as to what it might be or where it might have come from. Steven wondered why not.
    While he was thinking about this it occurred to him that this was something he could actually do for himself with the aid of his laptop. Using a modem link to