Agricultural biotechnology seems to attract a lot of attention these days. Unfortunately, most of it is the wrong kind.

The genetic engineering of plants will almost certainly be needed to feed a human population that will stabilize at 10 billion or more sometime during the next century. Furthermore, it's the first arena where the techniques of genetic manipulation, developed during the 1970s, are being applied on a large scale. Therefore, the attention is justified, since we need to be mindful of what we as a species are doing to the other species on the planet when we modify the genes of our food crops.

The problem is that the debate on this topic seems to have been hijacked by extremists on both sides: environmentalists crying disaster and corporate spokespersons telling us soothingly that there's nothing to worry about-that there's nothing sinister or even unusual about genetic engineering, which, they argue, simply extends methods farmers have used since the beginning of agriculture to improve crops and livestock.