Not long after midnight on July 9, 2011, six men descended on a fenced-in field at biovativ, a research facility in the northern German town of Gross Lusewitz. It was a clear, warm Saturday night, and the 115-acre farm was lit by a half moon.
Moving quickly, the men surrounded the night watchman. Shining their flashlights in his face and threatening him with pepper spray and clubs, they frisked him, took his flashlight and keys, and smashed his cell phone. Then they headed directly for their target, a potato patch the size of a tennis court. Within minutes, the potatoes—part of a research project run by the nearby University of Rostock to see if rabbit vaccines and plastic polymers could be grown in plants—had been ripped out of the ground or trampled.
Two nights later, at a farm 100 miles to the south, the scene repeated itself almost exactly. This time, a dozen masked men overpowered two guards at the Üplingen Plant Science Garden, hopped a waist-high wire fence and trashed a plot of genetically modified potatoes, along with part of a nearby stand of transgenic wheat. As police cars sped toward the farm, the raiders melted into the night.
“It’s years of lab work and greenhouse work destroyed,” says Uwe Schrader, one of the farm’s two managers. “There won’t be any results.”
