By the second day of BIO 2001, San Diego's conference center was buzzing with activity. Inside the barricades were 14,000 registered participants and almost as many police officers; outside was a single raggedy group of seven protestors (two toddlers; five adults), one of whom looked like he had dropped way too much acid in the sixties.
This was the biotechnology industry's showcase, and nothing was going to disrupt it—there was to be no repeat of the chaos in Seattle during the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization. After a mild protest on the first day, Kelli Gray, a food-science major at San Diego State University and member of the Greenpeace True Food Network, was one of the few dissenters left.
“It's not really biotech that I have a problem with; it's the government,” she said. Inadequate testing and labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods...
