The results are in. The world's largest, most concerted evaluation of the impact of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops on farmland biodiversity (see pp. 1418, 1429, 1454) reveals differences in weed and insect densities depending on the crop type and weed killer studied. The fact that these findings are specific to the United Kingdom and to the crops and weed killers used was predictably lost on the UK media, which proceeded to herald the results as a death knell for GM crops. As a result, Tony Blair and his government no longer have the option of fighting GM's corner. There will be no commercial GM plant approvals in Europe now that European authorities can point to the need to conduct trials on environmental impact.

Is this the end for UK plant bioscience? Well, hardly. Very little creative research has been done on HT crops for a decade or more. Yes, there has been a need to transfer the traits to crop species and to propagate seed. And there has been a good deal of passive 'nature study' on the environmental and agronomic effects of GM crops. But the technology that created the HT crops is ancient in research terms, harking back to a time in the 1980s when genetic manipulation in plants was more art than science. HT plants emerged early at least partly because the transferred trait could be used as a selectable marker in the days when gene cloning efficiencies in crops were extremely low.

Indeed, now might be a good time for the United Kingdom's plant biology community to refocus on gaining greater understanding of fundamentally important plant characteristics while the rest of the world works on applications. It may be a good thing for UK plant research to shift its focus from agronomic traits to those of mere (!) scientific interest. A bit of curiosity-driven plant research could be good. A lot would be better. And if the UK government really wants to get out of this mess, it could certainly do worse than backing innovative UK plant biology right now.