Seeds of hysteria.

Last February, seven Greenpeace demonstrators dumped four tons of genetically modified U.S. soybeans outside British Prime Minister Tony Blair's office. A sign on their truck read: "Tony, don't swallow Bill's seed."

In April 1998, about 20 militants at Scotland's Boghall Farm uprooted thousands of experimental, gene-spliced canola plants in a so-called "decontamination."

Saboteurs destroyed 15 German field tests of bioengineered plants in 1995. That year, rock-throwing Luddites also attacked University of Aachen researcher Detlef Barsch as he tried to rescue his virus-resistant sugar beets.

Thankfully, such hysteria is rare here. Americans may recognize that genetically altered food is nothing unusual. "New biotechnology is just an extension, or refinement, of the kinds of genetic manipulation that plant and animal breeders have done for centuries," says Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution. Hybridization and other "classical" genetic techniques have improved potatoes, wheat, and oats that people have consumed safely for decades. Last year, about half of America's cotton and 40 percent of its soybeans were gene-spliced.

"Almost everything we cultivate in large quantities has been altered genetically, if not through recombinant DNA technology, then by standard means," says Robert Frederickson, research editor of Nature Biotechnology.

Nectarines, after all, are genetically enhanced peaches. Seedless grapes were designed that way. Thick-skinned, bioengineered tomatoes survive the trip to market better. A host of modified seeds yields bigger, disease-resistant harvests.

"We lose about 25 billion tons of topsoil annually," Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro said last October. If you go out to the Gulf of Mexico, you can see much of Iowa floating in the surf." Shapiro noted that genetically altered seeds allow "conservation tillage" to economize topsoil. Biotechnology lets farmers grow more food on less land with fewer pesticides and other chemicals. What could be more Earth-friendly than that?

Indeed, scientists consider gene-spliced foods safer than those created through older genetic methods. Researchers now introduce from one species to another the DNA for one or two specific traits. Previously, target genes mingled unpredictably with myriad others. Nonetheless, regulators have focused less on the safety of bioengineered foods than on the techniques behind them. While foods produced through old-fashioned alteration face little if any scrutiny, federal officials distrust the biotech process itself. It's as if Uncle Sam strictly regulated calves conceived through artificial insemination while winking at those spawned through traditional bovine lovemaking.

This "DNA-phobia" kills new products. Berkeley researchers adapted Pseudomonas syringae, a harmless bacterium found on many plants, to grow frost-resistant potatoes and strawberries. In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency delayed these experiments and insisted on intrusive, unnecessary risk-monitoring. Though P. syringae safely and effectively prevented frost damage, costly EPA red tape ultimately stymied commercialization of the "ice-minus" bacterium. National Farmers Union spokesman Jim Miller estimates that annual federal crop insurance losses to frost damage average $72 million.

Also in the mid-'80s, Monsanto scientists sought a nonchemical weapon against corn-eating cutworms. The EPA's own science advisors unanimously endorsed Monsanto's 1,400-page proposal to test an altered version of Pseudomonas fluorescens, an innocuous soil bacterium. The EPA balked anyway, and Monsanto halted its research on microbial pest controls.

Some firms are rejecting bio-engineered foods. Corn processors Archer Daniels Midland and A.E. Staley Manufacturing no longer buy corn grown from genetically altered seeds lacking E.U. approval. The E.U. has blocked U.S. corn shipments due to commingling of conventional and high-tech varieties, costing American corn growers $200 million in exports in 1998.

On biotechnology, Vice President Albert Gore typifies Washington's scientifically challenged ways. "My biggest fear is not that by accident we will set loose some genetically defective Andromeda strain," he explained in 1991. "We're far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain." The U.N. estimates that 9.8 billion people will walk the Earth in 2050. The hungry among them might welcome overflowing grain silos.

While the words of one potential Chief Executive hardly instill confidence, those of two past presidents do. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson said: "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is, to add a useful plant to its culture." In that spirit, food safetycrats should heed the paraphrased advice of Jefferson's successor, FDR: We have nothing to fear but the fear of biotech Itself.

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, VA, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.