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One News
Mothers Against Genetic Engineering have protested at the Auckland offices of The Fonterra Dairy Company over the companys decision to buy patents for human DNA.
The lobby group bared more than a bra in their bid to change the governments mind on GE.
MAdGE unveiled a billboard campaign which features a naked woman with an udder hooked up to a milking machine.
The group wants the government to rethink plans to lift the moratorium on the commercial release of genetically modified organisms later this month.
The scientific group, the Life Sciences Network, says the campaign is scraping the bottom of the barrel and denigrates women.
Spokeswoman Allannah Currie says the protest was because Fonterra recently bought patent rights to large amounts of human DNA from an Australian genetics company.
“The mothers of New Zealand would like to know exactly what the milk company is doing with this human DNA. We at MAdGE want an assurance from Fonterra that they will continue to keep our milk GE Free now and in the future and not use human genes in cows to boost milk production.”
Currie says the protesters wanted to present a letter to the companys new chief executive seeking such an assurance.
New Zealand Herald
Controversial billboards portraying a naked woman with four breasts are going up in Auckland and Wellington today to provoke a debate about the ethics of genetic modification.
The posters, designed by former singer Alannah Currie, show a milking machine attached to the womans breasts in a reference to AgResearchs plans to use cows as living factories to manufacture proteins that may help to cure diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
The image will be on five billboards in Auckland and two in Wellington this month, coinciding with a march against genetic modification on October 11 and the scheduled end of the ban on releasing GM organisms on October 29.
Currie said the cost of several thousand dollars was met by private donors - not by her group, Mothers Against Genetic Engineering (MAdGE), which was ordered last week to pay $24,000 to AgResearch for its court costs in defending a Madge appeal against its GM plans.
The woman in the photo is Curries niece Katarina.
"Its not a sexual photo," Currie said. "Its shocking but its not sexual. It has to be quite controversial and provocative in order to get this debate about ethics going."
She said the image was inspired by Auckland University physicist Dr Peter Wills, who asked why AgResearch was "going to all this trouble to make designer milk when they could clone a woman for milk".
