Dr Venter, too, left the NIH in the wake of the expressed-sequence-tag incident.

ECONOMIST: The big beasts of genomics

The tag is a particular sequence of the amino-acid units of which all proteins are composed.

ECONOMIST: The 1999 Nobel prizes

By adding a solution that releases both the plant and the human DNA from the paper, the geneticist can then analyze the DNA for his or her chosen purpose--for example, to look for a mutation in the human DNA sequence--with the rice DNA sitting alongside harmlessly and acting as an ID tag.

FORBES: The DNA Bar Code