Good stuff today in the “Letters” section of the WSJ:

Consider Mr. Gore’s Past Record on New Technology Bret Stephens is right to marvel at how seriously Al Gore’s blather is taken (“Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock,” Global View, July 22), especially given his dismal record of prognostication and judgment on technology over many years. In a 1991 article, for example, Mr. Gore condemned investors’ eager reception of Genentech’s stock offering in 1980 as the first sellout of the “tree of knowledge to Wall Street.” He also claimed that “the decisions to develop ice-minus bacteria, herbicide-resistant plants, and bovine growth hormone . . . lent credibility to those who argued that biotechnology would make things worse before it made things better.”How does history judge these pronouncements? Pharmaceutical biotechnology is now the mainstay of new drug production around the world and one of the U.S.’s most successful high-tech industries.The ice-minus bacteria were successful at preventing frost damage to crops in field trials (without any safety problems) but never commercialized, largely because of the expensive and debilitating biotech regulation championed by Mr. Gore as a congressman, senator and vice president in spite of the consensus that gene-splicing technology is no more than a refinement of more primitive, less precise and less predictable methods of genetic modification. As a result, citrus, lettuce, stone fruit and other farmers remain at the mercy of spring frosts.Herbicide-resistant, gene-spliced plants, now grown on more than 80 million hectares annually world-wide, have spurred the adoption of more environment-friendly herbicides and agricultural practices. These changes have markedly reduced soil erosion and carbon dioxide emissions while boosting yields.Finally, there is this stunningly idiotic prediction by Mr. Gore, who had spent years demanding the overregulation of biotechnology applied to agriculture, ostensibly because of concerns about environmental safety: “My biggest fear [about biotechnology] is not that by accident we will set loose some genetically defective Andromeda strain. Given our past record in dealing with agriculture, we’re far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain.”Henry I. Miller, M.D. The Hoover Institution Stanford, Calif.(Dr. Miller headed the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993.)