People who spend a good portion of their days and weeks exploring any field will almost inevitably feel a deep commitment to it. And so for those of us who have spent long days watching the useful tools of biotechnology take their nascent shape, our first reaction is to recoil with surprise at the extent to which they are now caricatured only as capitalist tools coopted by transnational corporations for their own profit-driven ends.

Biotechnology, like many other information-based technologies, is evolving at an astonishing pace, but some aspects of its developmental history are not unique. For one thing, developments in significant technologies almost invariably spin out of a culture long before it has the ability to comprehend the why and the what of how any particular technology will change the world we humans constantly shape and reshape for ourselves. And the makers of these technologies, as with most technologies, in turn can almost never themselves predict exactly how society will end up using their creations. But, as Sagar et al. point out in their commentary “the tragedy of the commoners” (p. 2), biotechnology is seemingly unique in its ability to inspire both acceptance and rejection simultaneously, in that its innovations appear to offer both the opportunity for independence and individuality and the possibility of centralization and the concentration of power in the hands of a very few.

What seems clear is that, even though it is only early days for biotechnology—our manipulation of biological material in pursuit of therapeutics and agricultural improvements is simply primitive—many people, whether they understand what it is and how it works or not, believe that it is a high stakes game. And although the battle cries are about safety and risk, in fact most of the core issues center on control and political power—who will get to decide how to use these technologies and by what right will they gain the authority to do so? The demonstrations at the World Trade Organization meetings last November featuring protesters dressed as beleaguered Monarch butterflies and oversized killer corn may appear at first sight to be detrimental to biotechnology's future development, and may truly be so in the short term. Ultimately, however, they may help ensure that these tools end up being used for the purposes for which they were first intended—healthier people, better and more readily available food, a less-traumatized environment. The demonstrations are part of the debate—making people focus now on how the products of biotechnology will impact what it means to be a person, a citizen, a community, a nation or a world in this very new century. The more people there are pulling strings, the fewer puppets there will be.