The fence bounds twenty-eight square meters of bare land in the middle of the Lombard countryside. Inside it a dozen researchers from the University of Milan are busy. The laptop resting on the ground shows the layout of the plots. A meter is unrolled to mark the coordinates on the ground.  Yellow tags are ready to be stuck into the clods: the inscription TEA (the Italian equivalent of New Genomic Techniques is “Assisted Evolution Techniques”) is used to mark rice that has been genetically edited for resistance to a fungal disease (rice blast), while the abbreviation WT indicates wild-type plants, which have not been modified and serve as a control group.