"Persuasion works best when it's invisible. The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently," writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot. "As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique called 'viral marketing'. Last month, the viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world's foremost scientific journals was persuaded to do something it had never done before, and retract a paper it had published." Monbiot is referring to an article published by the journal Nature and an anti-biotech campaign financed by Monsanto and coordinated by a PR firm called the Bivings Group. Monsanto and Bivings are exposed in two recent articles detailing Monsanto's dirty tricks [3].