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Words: pharm, v.

Christopher Hawtree
Monday 23 August 1999 23:02 BST
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AMONG THE books I might produce are Some Like It Shot, a history of blood sports, and Vole Bodies, on the effect of pesticides. Meanwhile, emergent is this neat pun, to pharm animals - that is, breed them for medical research. Not in any dictionary, it appeared in the Evening Standard.

We still need an idiomatic word for genetically modified food. GM suggests an automobile firm ("brake on GM food") and Frankenstein food sounds like a gaudy snack for children. Perhaps mengele food should be the term. It echoes mangle - and would be a continual reminder of the horrors perpetrated by a man curiously absent from all the new encyclopaedic dictionaries and even from the latest version of Hutchinson's handily hefty encyclopaedia.

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