Agriculture committee  As far as I know, there have been no breaches of security. In the beginning, the university and the.... By “security” you mean escapes.

Agriculture committee  Oh, there's none, to my knowledge, and I've been the one helping to look after the fish. At the marine lab in Logy Bay, where we're sitting on the edge of a cliff by ocean water, I don't see any probability of the survival of salmon leaving at any early stage, and there's certainly no way big fish can get out of there.

Agriculture committee  It's biology, isn't it.

Agriculture committee  I think they continue to work on that. With regard to interbreeding salmon, there is another expert you could talk to—not me, I'm not a salmon biologist—about the problems that farmed salmon have breeding with wild salmon. As I understand it, the farmed salmon are very poor performers.

Agriculture committee  I have not been in aquaculture for my whole career. I'm a fish physiologist, so I've worked on a lot of other things as well, from physiology to things like that. I only came into this sort of aquaculture thing because we had a particular knowledge about genes and fish. At that time in my career, nobody worked on fish genes.

Agriculture committee  I don't know what would happen in 40 to 100 years. Salmon do live in the cold water, except that they go off Greenland and go into deeper water where it's not so cold. They just have that period of time. It's an artificial situation to be coaxing them in cold water, of course. Coaxing is a farming operation, so it's not wild.

Agriculture committee  You're not in my position.

Agriculture committee  I am here to represent myself, I guess. I'll just give you a history of my personal involvement in GM salmon. At the moment I am a professor emeritus and head of the department of ocean sciences at Memorial University. I am a little nervous, so if I quiver it's because I don't want you to do this.