An agreement last week within the German coalition government to ban the reprocessing of nuclear waste is a small milestone in German politics — a goal to which the majority of Social Democrats were always committed, but whose attainment was accelerated by their junior coalition partners, the Green party. Should researchers be worried about the impact of Green politics on other technologies and on science?

So far the signs are encouraging. Now nearly 100 days into their first government, the Greens have already shown themselves willing to compromise to stay in power, for example over ‘eco-taxes’ on power stations and on exempting reactors producing neutrons for research from measures against nuclear energy (see page 189). But they have made clear that their fight against the FRM II research reactor, arrogantly and ill-advisedly designed by the Technical University of Munich to burn weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium, is not over.

German scientists are now nervously waiting to see how the Greens and the Social Democrats will reach a compromise on another sensitive issue: agricultural biotechnology. The Greens tolerate, and the Social Democrats celebrate, biomedical science and its applications, now flourishing in Germany, thanks particularly to former research minister Jürgen Rüttgers.

But the equivocal and hostile attitudes expressed respectively by the Social Democrats and the Greens towards agricultural biotechnology leave plant scientists in a state of uncertainty. One issue is a promised review of how the licensing of field trials of transgenic plants and marketing of transgenic foods are organized. The Greens want this responsibility to be transferred from the Robert Koch Institute, an office of the federal health ministry, to the federal environment ministry. Plant scientists worry that any change in the system, however logical it might seem, could allow the Greens to introduce new restrictions, or at least place licensing in inexperienced hands. The field-trial licensing office in the Robert Koch Institute is rightly respected for its expertise and reliability. At the same time, the sophistication of the Green party in this area is questionable. The change should be resisted.

The second issue is the fate of the newly created plant genome programme GABI, which was launched by Rüttgers last autumn as an attempt to do for agricultural biotechnology what he has already done for medical biotechnology. The scale of the programme has never been defined, and researchers now fear that it could be severely restricted. Serious money would be needed to make GABI competitive with activities in other countries.

The root cause for concern is the fact that the parliamentary Green party has no serious expertise in biotechnology, having ensured that its only expert, former parliamentarian Manuel Kiper, was shunted well down the party list before last September's elections. Since the party has a strong, and negative, political stance on agricultural applications of biotechnology, it needs to fill this regrettable gap as fast as possible. It must recognize that GABI will deliver important basic research. The Greens' ability to compromise is welcome, but given its influence, its scientific and technical naivety is unacceptable.