What exactly is genetic engineering and do we need it? Once we arrived in Christchurch we headed out to forest research, where we met Tony and Anna-Marie and were given a grand tour of the facility The project that we saw was attempting to produce potatoes with different coloured flesh, by adding genes only from other potatoes, such as a naturally occurring purple potato. The idea was to combine the high nutritional value of the antioxidant rich purple potato, with the pest resistance, and larger size of a different variety of potato. That way you could produce a really nutritious, potato with a good growth rate that could be used in countries where food is scarce. We also got to see some of the GM potatoes growing in the greenhouse.