TECHNOLOGY WATCH : Monster Fears

The cornucopia of the future will look more like a test tube than the horn of plenty that the world inherited from Greek mythology.

So President Bush is right to want government to not get too much in the way of genetic engineers who are working to make the world’s food supply more abundant and disease less deadly.

But it isn’t always easy to know with any great degree of precision just what the President is trying to tell us. And that makes his pronouncement of “major new ground rules” in federal regulation of biotechnology difficult to assess.

If all he is saying is that regulators should not go beyond what is required to make certain that biotechnology companies know what they are doing, then he is on the right track.

California has a major stake in the future of biotechnology, which so far has concentrated on finding ways to cure or arrest disease by altering genetic material, although the technology’s overall potential seems both endless and awesome.

For example, laboratories are working on powerful new bio-pesticides to improve crop production and on ways to clean up the environment and stretch energy resources.

Federal agencies have been drafting proposed new rules for some years now. Understandably Bush wants to move things along.

But if he is talking about something approaching a hands-off approach, then Roger H. Salquist, head of Calgene Inc. in Davis, Calif., is right to call it “nonsense.” That approach would be dangerous.