At a scientific conference held in England in March 2000, he reported that he had not accomplished this. The British government, for instance, requires that imports of food made with gene-spliced corn be labeled accordingly. It also prohibits commercial cultivation of such corn. This bacterium is deadly to some types of insects, but harmless to humans. Among the companies in North America that make Bt corn is Novartis, a major biotech corporation.
Bt corn is grown commercially in Canada, the United States and South America.
In 1999 more than half of the corn growers in Ontario, Canada, planted Bt-corn seeds. Bla serves as a marker for the Bt gene. Because beta-lactamase gives resistance to penicillin, telling whether bla is active in Bt corn is much easier than telling whether the Bt gene is. To learn whether bla is active, one only needs expose single corn cells to ampicillin, then check them for resistance. In those that are resistant to the antibiotic, both bla and the Bt gene are active.