It's not just the Greenpeace trial that's going on in Norwich at the moment. Thanks to Liz Wallace for the information about this event:

Conference on Nutritional Enhancement of Plant Food at the John Innes Centre, on the Norwich Research Park

Today there are workshops and Lord Traverne and Prof Janet Bainbridge are speaking.

To give you a sense of what to expect, here's Lord Dick Taverne QC speaking in the House of Lords:

"Vitamin A can be engineered into rice plants. This could save the lives of millions of children who now die from Vitamin A deficiency. I could multiply the examples. But this kind of evidence has been largely ignored, suppressed or distorted by the press, by some of the broadsheets as well as tabloids."

Ignored? Suppressed? This "miracle rice" has been proclaimed from the cover of Time magazine to Clinton at the G8 summit -- despite the limited scientific understanding underpinning the project, not to mention the simpler alternatives already available (unlike the rice which is still in the lab). And these are just the latest helpings in what has become almost a mono-diet of Golden-Rice type hype served up around the world.

Bainbridge, of course, is the GM zealot who told the public they didn't have the expertise to make any judgements about the GM issue and should just take what the experts gave them. Naturally, she heads the key UK regulatory committee for GM foods -- ACNFP.

The public can attend the conference but the whole cost on registering is £94!

ON THE LOCAL RADIO THE CONFERENCE WAS ADVERTISED YESTERDAY AS SOMETHING LIKE  " ARE ORGANIC FOODS SO GOOD FOR YOU?" !!!!

Looks like this conference will be hitting all the current biospin campaigning points:

*GM can make food better
*GM's good for the malnourished
*organics are dangerous

Well done the JIC! Another triumph for "independent" scince.

Interestingly, there appears to be no mention of this event on the JIC website, which has a conferences section.

For more on the JIC - see: http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/biospin.htm