In 2007, Steve Erikson, a plant researcher at a large public university in the south, had been working with a PhD student on a project using RNAi to silence endogenous genes and improve the nutritional quality of a particular food crop. Erikson stressed to his student, Adrianne Long (the names have been changed to maintain confidentiality of the case), that she would need to move her samples into FDA-designated containment chambers once they grew into plants, so no transgenic plant DNA could contaminate crops in the regions surrounding the college. Long told Erikson repeatedly over the course of the year that all of her seeds were still in culture, in Petri dishes, and that she had no plants yet.
But at Long's year-end graduate committee meeting, in the fall of that year, she presented data to Erikson and the rest of the committee from full grown transgenic plants. Surprised, Erikson ...
