It would be disingenuous of me to claim “I hate to say I told you so,” when the truth is, it gives me a frisson of schadenfreude to read about the latest genetically modified mess from the blunderful world of bioengineering.

Scientists in Australia took a gene that protects bean plants from beetle damage and transferred it to green pea plants in the hopes of providing them with the same protection. In the process, however, they inadvertently created a pea that appears to trigger allergic reactions.

The gene allows bean plants to produce a pest-repelling protein that doesn’t cause allergies in mice or humans. But subsequent tests determined that the genetically modified peas contained enzymes that altered the protein to make it more likely to cause an allergic reaction. Oops. Better can those peas. Or not.

Allergies can be deadly; consider the case of that poor Canadian girl with the peanut allergy, who died the other day after kissing her boyfriend some nine hours after he’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich.

The specter of unintended consequences looms large over the field(s) of genetically modified plants. In this instance, the problem was detected before the peas could be marketed, but our regulatory standards are so lax they can’t be trusted to protect us from potentially harmful GMO’s. I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall volunteering to be a guinea pig for agribusiness.