Who is right?

Mayor Thomas Menino sanguinely greeted this week's biotechnology conference at the Hynes Convention Center with a proclamation declaring ``Biotechnology Week.''

The Boston City Council, siding with the counter-demonstrators who organized what they called ``Biodevastation 2000,'' took the opposite tack. The council charged the industry with posing ``undesirable health and environmental risk factors'' and demanded a moratorium on genetically modified foods.

This clash over biotechnology is of more than passing interest to area residents. The Boston region's economy is increasingly dependent upon biotech. In future years, it will be more so.

Route 128, dubbed ``America's Technology Highway,'' was where much of the electronics revolution began. Today, Massachusetts is the heart of what is called the ``Northeast Biotechnology Corridor,'' with the potential to transform the region's economy just as surely as companies such as Polaroid, Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation once did.

The key technologies that make biotech possible, such as combinatorial chemistry and genomics, were invented here. The region now has 250 biotech firms employing 25,000 and generating $1.5 billion a year in revenues. That's nothing. Expect those firms to grow astronomically in coming years as the commercial prospects for biotech mature.

Moreover, biotech profoundly influences another key driver of the local economy: health care. Boston hospitals are held in worldwide renown because they are leaders in medical innovation. For the foreseeable future, those innovations will come from biotech. That's the reason the National Institutes of Health have awarded research grants to Boston area health care institutions that totalled $847 million, more than for any other city in the nation.

Given the economic impact of biotechnology, the council's demands seem startling, the equivalent of the city of Redmond, Washington - the home of Microsoft - insisting that everyone go back to using the abacus.

Still, if biotech does pose the catastrophic risks some claim, then the council is right.

After all, a strong economy is hardly a fair tradeoff for a devastated world.

Is biotechnology really such a threat?

As I write these words, my genetically modified dog lies at my feet and I am munching on some genetically modified foods. The dog, you see, is a purebred Golden Retriever. My snack is green seedless grapes. Believe me, neither God nor Nature made seedless grapes or Golden Retrievers. Like the mule - a sterile cross between a horse and a donkey - they are man-made.

Ever since Gregor Mendel a century ago figured out heredity, mankind has been messing with genetics. Plants have been crossbred to make them more resistant to disease, chickens bred to make them plumper and more tender.

But if biotech is not different in kind, it is certainly different in quality. Mendelian genetics was crude, a hit or miss strategy. Biotech is vastly more precise. Armed with exact knowledge of each gene's sequence, scientists are now much more effective in modifying genes and, let's face it, in creating new life.

And this truly is the heart of the issue. This week's much-publicized clashes over biotechnology are not about pedantic concerns on the proper levels of pre-market testing. Rather, the differences are profoundly philosophical.

Science is the effort to understand and ultimately control Nature. Its philosophical underpinnings go back to the Book of Genesis, where God gave mankind ``dominion'' over the earth. By unlocking the mysteries of the gene, humanity takes another large step forward in dominating this world.

That's an abhorrent thought to biotech's critics. Genetic engineering is ``only the most recent example of this civilization's drive to subjugate nature to its own ends,'' says Earth First!, one of the organizers of this week's anti-biotech demonstrations.

The New England Resistance Against Genetic Engineering, another sponsor of the demonstrations, is even more apocalyptic, accusing biotech scientists of trying to ``assume the position of Creator'' and of trying to ``remake the deity in their own image.''

These are all profound arguments: the future of our economy, the relationship of mankind to God and Nature, and the role of science in society. Perhaps it was these issues that lay heavily on city councilors minds when they passed their resolution.

Or perhaps not. The council resolution, proposed by a genuinelyconcerned Councilor Maura Hennigan, passed with no debate. It passed with no dissent. With little thought, the council sided with history's Luddites, rejecting scientific progress and turning its back on the region's economic future.

Tom Keane writes weekly for the Boston Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.