[1] Four of Switzerland's five Nobel laureates held a press conference to express their opposition to the referendum.
[4] The beginnings of the movement to have a referendum on the issue were in autumn 1994, when a working group was set up which started to collect signatures for an initiative.
Newspapers based in Basel, which is the centre of the biomedical research community, opposed the initiative, with some other media, according to Schatz: "pandered openly to public fears, sometimes stooping to grotesque distortions".
[5] While the 1996 poll revealed strong opposition to gene technology, another poll published two years later revealed that almost half of Swiss citizens still opposed gene technology, the majority of those who expressed an opinion.
The alarm caused by these figures resulted in demonstrations in several Swiss cities by scientists and physicians on 28 April 1998.