The Swiss face their biotech fears

OXFORD - Nobel prize winners, politicians and industrialists have taken to the Swiss streets in a campaign to head off a constitutional ban on biotech in Switzerland. Next Sunday, the Swiss people will be asked whether they support a call to ban the use and patenting of transgenic animals and the cultivation of transgenic plants. Latest opinion polls suggest the outcome is too close to call, which has set alarms ringing in the scientific community.

The Genschutzinitiative - the gene protection initiative - calls for a complete ban on: the production, use and distribution of transgenic animals; the deliberate release of genetically modified organisms; and the patenting of genetically modified plants and animals, parts thereof and processes and products derived from them...