"Anybody you see around here dressed in a Tyvek suit will be someone from Greenpeace," David Stoltzfus joked as we surveyed the thousands of carefully numbered corn plants growing in the stony rust-colored soil of a former sugar cane plantation just a few miles inland from the spectacular Wailea Beach. Stoltzfus, who heads Monsanto's Piilani seed production farm on Maui, was referring to the white disposable coveralls that protesters wear for the TV cameras when "decontaminating" biotech crop fields.

Hawaii is the epicenter of a furious campaign to shut down production farms that yield genetically modified seed. It was September, and I was there to see for myself the "Frankencorn" that haunts activists' choleric imaginations.

Anti-biotech signs and literature were scattered across the Hawaiian Islands. The Crystals and Gems Gallerybiotech varieties. Instead of celebrating this triumph of human ingenuity, anti-biotech activists are urging the Hawaiian state and county governments to force growers to cut down and burn all of the disease-resistant papaya trees. Some of them aren't waiting: In September, 100 of the trees were macheted down during the night.

The anti-biotech campaign has frightened residents so much that state and local politicians are proposing and passing legislation that could end up pushing seed companies off the islands. In October the county council on the Island of Hawaii (a.k.a. the Big Island) passed a bill that would prohibit the open-air cultivation, propagation, development, or testing of genetically engineered crops and plants. The bill justifies the ban on the ground that it aims "to protect Hawaii Island's unique and