Barry Soper: This week's announcement is a relief for the scientific community

Twenty years ago, the naysayers were telling us the world was about to mutate, we'd see all sorts of weird things appearing on our supermarket shelves and on our streets and in our streams, like two headed fish - at least it would have doubled the chance of catching one!

But while the rest of the world turned their back on this country, leaving it to wallow in its mantra of 100 percent New Zealand Pure, which the former Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison claims to have penned when he was working for image makers in Wellington, they got on with the science of genetics.