Why I'm happy to eat GM food

An opinion poll conducted last year for the International Food Information Council asked the public in Europe and America a deliberately idiotic question: "Would you eat food that contained any genes?" They got a predictably stupid answer - two thirds said no.

It could be that respondents misunderstood and thought they were being asked about denim. More likely, they were replying honestly - and that is the big problem with the great row about GM food.

It is impossible to have a rational debate about the issue because of the hysteria raised by the mere mention of the G-word - the meaning of which few of us have the slightest inkling.

"Genetic manipulation" of this or that raises the spectre of human cloning, a master race perfected through eugenics, dangerous "Frankenstein foods", or environmental armageddon.

It is easy to see why the media - and particularly the Press - runs so big with GM scare stories. Fuelling fear is always good for "modifying" circulation figures. Nor is it hard to see where the Luddite Tendency is coming from - in the main they are the protesters at the WTO summit in Seattle last year who object to globalisation. They have a friend in Prince Charles - who has been known to talk to plants but can't grasp that we have been "engineering" them for millennia. Together they have turned healthy scepticism about the boasts of science into worrying doubt about the great idea of Western civilisation that progress can be made through inquiring into the world and harnessing technology.

It is more difficult to see why science has done so little to fight back. Scientists on the whole live in their own little world, find it hard to speak or write in English and have been arrogant about accepting their share of responsibility for past mistakes - the BSE episode does not inspire blind faith that they are right all the time. They have made overblown promises of Brave New Worlds that have failed to materialise. We are still waiting for the cold-fusion nuclear power that will give us endless energy with no risk to the environment.

But it is amazing that at the beginning of the 21st century a case has to be made for the fundamentals of the scientific method, which have stood the test of time and created a world where, at least in the West, we can doubt in comfort, freed from backbreaking peasant labour by fantastic inventions, and use instant communications (developed by whom?) to demand of scientists that they cease doing their job of relentless inquiry.

Scientists have made mistakes; but throughout history have been far less dangerous to humanity than demagogues who appeal to fear and superstition.

On GM crops, science has a powerful case that has gone by default. The charge that genetically modifying organisms tampers with nature is true. We have always done so. Nature is not a benign force that is out to protect homo sapiens. Jenner defied nature - and, many thought, common sense - when he began looking at cowpox. Antibiotics defy "natural" bacteria which, left alone, kill us. If the Prince of Wales had been around 100 years ago he would probably have told the Wright brothers that if God had wanted man to fly he would have given us wings.

Using new knowledge to do the same task, more precisely and more skilfully, that farm-ers have done for hundreds of years through the comparative guesswork of cross-breeding does not seem any more "unnatural" than breeding new strains of wheat by traditional means - or indeed new breeds of cattle.