Unarmed with actual knowledge, we have no way of telling which scientist is which - or of understanding that most are neither. So when a group of 'top international scientists' came out against GM last week, backing the research of Dr Arpad Pusztai whose work on altered potatoes triggered the initial scare, their verdict was hailed as significant in itself. The experts had spoken. Yet if 21 self-styled experts on the Balkans had issued a declaration of support for, say, Kosovar independence they would have been ignored. Their opinion would have mattered little more than anyone else's.
Science commands an extra respect.
Yet there is another impulse, pulling us in the opposite direction. The 20th century has shown through painful repetition that science is not value-free, and far from coolly neutral. We know that Josef Mengele conducted his Auschwitz medical experiments in the name of science, and that the inventors of the atom bomb were motivated by politics as much as physics. That makes us suspicious of men speaking of cauliflower's and mosaics in a complex tongue we don't understand. An additional strain has been introduced more recently.