So Britain can benefit enormously from scientific advance. But precisely because the advances are so immense, people worry. And, of course, many of these worries are entirely serious. In GM crops, I can find no serious evidence of health risks. But there are genuine and real concerns over biodiversity and gene transfer. Human cloning raises legitimate moral questions. Advances in arms technology makes the world less safe. Humanity has, for the first time, the capacity for vast prosperity or to destroy itself completely.

Science is the language of the sceptic. It must never ever resent the doubter or the unbeliever. It must exercise its own disciplines with rigour, with proper controls in place and with absolute independence. Again:

Sometimes science is wrongly blamed for the faults of others. Take BSE. Science in this case correctly identified a new problem. The American Scientist Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize for discovering prions, and establishing the link between BSE and CJD. Bad science didn't cause the spread of BSE; it was bad agriculture and poor government.

Mr Blair's approach is necessarily ambivalent. He makes no pretence that he is other than a deeply religious man whose wife has a sharp mind, an uncompromising Roman Catholic faith and a distinct presence within No 10 Downing Street. He himself was said at one point to have been 'taking instruction'. He is deeply immersed in a view of the world that may have much to commend it. But not, if its history is anything to go by, scientific objectivity. Popes no longer insist that the world is flat. But it is fair to ask if Mr Blair and the faith he espouses are at one with millions of citizens concerned about the wisdom of biotechnicians who regard climate change as simply a cyclical blip, and are paid by governments and multinational corporations to say what they are told to say.