Prince Charles played into the hands of the sensation-seeking media -- and drew the groans of scientists -- with his comments last year on genetically modified crops. They are, he said, "Frankenstein foods." Rather than genetic manipulation, he urged investment in "traditional systems of agriculture."

So instead of any reasoned treatment of the issues, we got a media feeding frenzy tacitly endorsed by a public figure who might have better directed his words about plants to his plants. If His Royal Highness' objections to GM foods are due to misgivings about genetic manipulation of their genome, which from the Frankenstein comment they seem to be, then he confuses the issue right from the start.

All farming is "unnatural" in this sense. All plants grown commercially are freaks of nature -- peas are 10 times the volume of their ancestors in the wild; cobs of corn are 30 times longer than those produced by natural selection. The changes were brought about slowly, by artificial selection acting to exaggerate existing traits. With transgenic plants, big, new changes are brought about very quickly -- and here's where people get worried, and newspaper writers get some juicy, scary copy.