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In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the future regulation and governance of nanotechnologies. Given the starkness of the ‘GM Controversy’, it is not surprising that there is now speculation in many quarters as to whether nanotechnologies might not be expected to experience a similarly rough passage. Here, it is suggested, is a further potentially transformative technology, now arguably at roughly the stage of development as was agricultural biotechnology in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and subject to similar levels of utopian promise, expectation and dystopian fear (Nordmann, 2004b). Some NGOs are already suggesting that the issues and problems that nanotechnology raises are of such far-reaching political and social importance that ‘governments [should …