The maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity seems to be in vogue at the Natural Environment Res-earch Council, as anyone who has just turned to June in the NERC calendar has seen. Pin-up of the month is a sullen-looking scorpion - the very one whose genes have been built into pest-resistant insects to increase their potency. Proposals to release the genetically-altered creatures have enraged environmentalists and caused ructions at NERC's Institute for Virology and Environmental Microbiology in Oxford.