This issue contains four features (pp. 935–947) on public attitudes to biotechnology. Although not directly comparable, they provide valuable snapshots from Europe, Canada, the US, and Japan of what we are always being told is a highly important influence on the development of the life sciences. If that is so, the survey results might be cause for concern. All of the surveys report time-series in which comparable groups of respondents were asked essentially the same questions several years apart. All of them show that the number of people who are optimistic about the future contribution of biotechnology across several applications is declining and the number of pessimists increasing.

We do not believe, though, that readers should be overly downhearted. For one thing, information on public opinion on biotechnology is not, in general, like data from laboratory experiments. Public opinion is extremely fluid. That means that “experiments”—which is what public opinion surveys try to be—can never be repeated, and surveys a year from now will give an entirely different set of results.

The second reason not to be downhearted about biotechnology's diminishing status is that public opinion and the influences on it vary with location. One thing that rapidly becomes clear from the European survey, for instance, is that there is no specifically “European” position on genetically modified food. The proportion of “opponents” of biotechnology (among those people who have formed an opinion) is apparently around 25% in the Netherlands but as high as 80% in Greece. These differing national positions are strikingly aligned with the positions of the ministers of the environment in each of the countries (see p. 918). France, Austria, Denmark and Greece—four of the five countries whose ministers are behind Europe's de facto moratorium on commercial GM crop planting—have the highest proportions of opponents to GM food amongst their surveyed populations. Conversely, the Netherlands, Finland, and Spain, which have the lowest proportion of GM opponents, also have environment ministers who are supportive of the European Commission's attempts to move out of the moratorium. Idealists will attribute this to the power of democracy, cynics to the influence of politicians on public opinion.

The third reason to remain cheerful about the prospects of biotechnology is that we have finally laid to rest the fiction that antipathy to certain biotechnology stemmed from ignorance or lack of understanding. People were afraid of what they didn't know, the argument went, and when they were informed, they would become reassured. This was a soothing message to scientists because it pointed to a cause that scientists could do something about: they could speak more plainly, explain their plans publicly, and stress the intrinsic safety of their products. The ignorance-to-knowledge hypothesis lasted as long as surveys showed that public acceptability of biotechnology were rising. It was no use at all in predicting the near universal downturn in biotechnology's standing with the public.

Another theory will doubtless emerge to replace it: there are, for instance, hints in the articles in this issue that public attitudes are shaped by “moral acceptability” of specific biotechnology projects. Inappropriate theories are unlikely to guide biotechnology companies and researchers to relevant treatments for the malaise. They may, unfortunately, serve again to direct legislators to inappropriate actions. They will fall when a different chaotic butterfly tips public opinion on its head once more.