The trend toward regulating biotechnology by product classes emerged earliest and most explicitly in the United States, where policymakers from the 1980s onward repudiated legislation targeted at the process of genetic manipulation (Jasanoff, 1995). But the European Union, too, partly followed suit, moving away from the process-based approach that had characterized the directives on biotechnology adopted in 1990. At the most basic level, policy frameworks tended to distinguish ‘red’ biotechnology, directed toward pharmaceutical development, from ‘green’ biotechnology, aimed at agricultural production. After all, the reasoning went, the former focuses on questions of human health, and increasingly also on biomedical ethics, whereas the latter engages with questions of environmental risk and threats to biodiversity. These differences seemed to demand recourse to different domains of technical expertise, as well as engagement with different constellations of stakeholders. Refl ecting these realities, most governments had long since placed regulatory authority over pharmaceuticals and agricultural commodities in different agencies or ministries (e.g., in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration for the former, and the Department of Agriculture for the latter). In the logic of modern governance, it seemed only natural to divide up the technical and political dimensions of regulating biotechnology among these pre-existing sectors of bureaucratic competence.