Boiled potato

OXFORD - A furor that erupted in the U.K. last week over the safety of genetically modified foods was based on the wrong results.

Last Monday, Professor Arpad Pusztai, a leading research scientist at the Rowett Research Institute, told the British current affairs TV program World in Action that he had evidence suggesting that rats that had eaten potatoes modified with a gene for concavalin A lectin suffered slightly stunted growth and were likely to be more vulnerable to disease. Con A is a powerful insecticidal protein from the Jack Bean...