Jim Hopkins: Why not ask a turnip what it thinks of genetic science?

COMMENT

Many years ago, during World War II, a lot of people were trying to split the atom. Which isn't easy to do. In fact, splitting the atom is much harder than splitting the country, which needs only one foreshore and a lot of hui.

But your atom is a different kettle of fission.

If you're going to split one, you need special tools such as atomisers and titanium chisels and tiny vices that need to be tightened by highly trained spiders.

Since these tools were in short supply during World War II those who were doing the atom-splitting back then had their work cut out.

But there was a group in Germany who were doing quite well until Sir Laurence Olivier and a few of his chums came whizzing down their fiord on a bouncing bomb and blew up the top-secret reservoir in which they had been mixing hydrogen, oxygen and weightonium to create heavy water, which is perhaps better known as heiverassereiner-grossentlumpfenkoncrettishwasse.

The destruction of the reservoir was a grave setback for the Germans who had planned to drop their heiveassereinengross ... oh, sod it, their heavy water, on to an atom and split it that way.

Meanwhile, in America, a bunch of scientists in Chicago had started something they called the Manhattan Project.

Having a name like that didn't mean they couldn't read a map. Nor did it mean they planned to throw their atom off the Empire State Building - although that would probably have cracked it.

No, the reason they called themselves the Manhattan Project was to conceal their plans.

Had they been called Molecules R Us or Up And Atom, everyone would have known what they were doing and glamorous spies like Mata Hari would have tried to seduce them by gently nibbling their earlobes and softly caressing their bunsen burners until the scientists could stand it no more and frantically cast off their starchy white lab coats in a frenzy of ...

Anyway, to cut a long story shirt, these American chappies didn't get seduced, reduced, deduced or defrocked by any femmes fatale and they did eventually manage to split the atom.

Naturally, they were quite chuffed and issued a press release advising the world of their achievement.

Now, because it was a quiet news day, one of the local papers, the Chicago Tribune, sent a photographer out to capture this momentous moment.

And he decided to do something different, instead of the standard cheesy grin pic.

So he said to the scientists, "OK, youse guys, wad I wanna do is take three pitchas in a sequence. Number One, I'll get youse all standin' round, lookin' at the atom.

"After dat, I'll get a shot of youse actually splitting it and, then, number three, what I want is a pitcha of everybody starin' at the pieces. Okay?"

There is a moral to this tale, which just happens to be true - well, the last bit, anyway - and the moral is this: like that unwitting Chicago photographer, most of us exercise our intellect only by leaping to conclusions. The GM debate is a case in point.

Our picture of this new technology is probably as inaccurate as the Trib man's image of the atom.

Our Frankenstein phobias are likely to be as wide of the mark as the image he took with him into the lab.

Perhaps we should take a step back and try to see the issue from a vegetable's point of view. Put yourself in a turnip's shoes, for instance.

There you are, rooted to the spot, unable to move but daily threatened by the ravages of scrotal mange and plum pox, not to mention the unwelcome predations of the glassy-winged sharpshooter and the painted hussy moth.

Naturally, if someone came along and said, "Look, little turnip, we can stop this in a trice. With a little splice of mice - or something equally alien. What do you say?"

We know what the answer would be. As a turnip, you'd jump at the chance. Or come as close as a turnip could to jumping, put it that way. You see, from a vege's perspective, GM may be nothing more than grafting without the secateurs.

Instead of whacking a branch on, you bung a gene in. And where's the harm in that?

Exactly, comes the answer. We simply don't know where the harm is, and by the time we do, it'll be too late.

Well, yes, perhaps, but look on the bright side. Everything has side-effects. When you get right down to it, the side-effect of life is ... death.

Ultimately, something's going to get us and it might as well be a stick of rhubarb with the Viagra gene added. Better that than an ARC rates van careering out of control down Queen St. At least you'd go with a grin on your face.

And that's what we need. A grin on our faces and a smile in our hearts. Not to mention the reassuring thought that our view of the new may be as wonky as that of a nameless photographer trying to focus the future through the lens of the past.