In North America alone, consumers have eaten more than 3 trillion servings of food that contains ingredients from genetically engineered plants without a single documented adverse reaction.

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But advance reaction to its single outing to date, at the Tokyo Film Festival, suggests that James Cameron has excelled himself as director, with a spectacle that does not dwarf the central love story between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

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It is a fact of life that if you report that five million limpets died as a result of the Sea Empress oil spill, it will produce less public reaction than the sight of a single puffin looking a bit unsteady on its feet.

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If that sort of reaction greets the idea of plants that have had single genes for things such as herbicide resistance transferred into them, what will be the response to more heavily engineered plants and animals?

ECONOMIST: The genetic starting-line

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a scientific technique in molecular biology to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence.

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However, a small percentage of people are born with a single-letter change in their DNA for this enzyme that causes the codeine-to-morphine reaction go faster.

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There was an angry reaction on the Conservative benches when Mr Murphy described the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who will become a single company to carry out public duties in Scotland, as being "reduced to guarding castles and being the backdrop to Japanese tourists' photographs".

BBC: Hammond promises 'forward-looking, modern' Army