When I learned a trip to the John Innes Centre at Norwich Research Park would include a tour of the greenhouses used by Professor Cathie Martin to include her genetically modified, purple tomatoes, I expected to be handed a haz-mat suit, to have all questions of the scientists vetted by a PR officer and to have to submit to biometic scanning just to get in the front door. Experiments with mice, which were specially bred to be prone to cancer, showed that when fed with powder 10 per cent derived from the purple tomatoes, the mice lived on average 30 per cent longer than those fed regular tomatoes or which didn’t receive tomatoes at all.