When Pioneer, king of seeds, confronted Monsanto, juggernaut of genes, it delivered some of the best theater in Des Moines. It was hard to imagine two more different corporate personalities. Monsanto was driven, frenetic; critics said it sometimes confused motion with progress. Pioneer was the ultimate patient company; it calmly sank money into research that it knew wouldn't produce results for a decade and tested products for longer than any of its competitors. Monsanto flaunted its success. Pioneer tried to hide it. The children of its founders drove respectable midsize cars, owned respectable midsize houses, and otherwise lived their lives as though in denial of their net worth, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Monsanto came from the city; Pioneer from the country. Yet competitors of both companies universally describe each of them as arrogant.

It was also a confrontation between generations, in this case between generations of technology. Pioneer was the master of plant breeding, a technology perfected over the course of the twentieth century that requires nothing more than intelligence, sharp eyes, and a sharp knife. Corn breeders place bags over the tassels - the male genitalia - of each corn plant, to collect the pollen. The breeders then transfer that pollen to selected corn ears - the female genitalia - on the plants they have chosen as the female parent. They then take the offspring of this "cross," observe their genetic characteristics, and select those that seem most useful.

It is, in a sense, playing card tricks with nature. The cards are genes; each plant contains tens of thousands of them drawn from a deck of cards as vast as the genetic diversity of that species. With each cross-pollination, the breeder shuffles these cards together and draws a new hand, looking for the combinations of genes that will produce a more bountiful harvest. For plant breeders, it remained the most practical, elegant, and even sophisticated method for manipulating the genetic makeup of plants.

Plant breeders, particularly those at Pioneer, mocked the extravagant claims of genetic engineers. Their attitude resembled that of an aging revolutionary, convinced that true greatness lay in the past, unmatched by any accomplishment of the present. Yet their own technology, and their own company, had been born in a similar frenzy of enthusiasm. A former head of research at Pioneer, a dignified, austere man named Donald Duvick, is old enough to remember some of the pioneers of hybrid corn, including Henry Wallace. He described the spirit of the time: "They were motivated not by dreams of riches but by dreams of power - power to remold corn quickly and certainly into new and productive forms. The capacity to produce a handsome hybrid . . . produced a kind of disease - a continuing and nearly uncontrollable impulse to breed, test, and release new corn hybrids." Replace the word hybrid with genetically engineered plants and the description applies equally well to Monsanto's scientists.

The men in charge of biotechnology at Monsanto, possessed by their own "dreams of power," were convinced that the day of traditional plant breeding was passing; that Monsanto, with its new and superior science, had opened the door to an inevitable future.

Monsanto's Robert Shapiro painted a picture of that future for Tom Urban. Monsanto's gene for Roundup resistance, he said, would transform agriculture. Seed companies who offered new genes would prosper; those who did not would fail. The price of survival in the soybean industry, he suggested, was the price of the Roundup Ready gene - millions of dollars in royalty payments.

Tom Urban remained unimpressed. He and his associates rolled out the speech that they had practiced on dozens of previous emissaries from biotech companies. People at Pioneer could practically recite it: "Congratulations! You've got a gene! Guess what? We've got fifty thousand genes! Our genes make a soybean plant grow tall, produce lots of beans, and fend off diseases; these are the genes that convince farmers to buy our varieties. Without our varieties, your gene isn't worth a thing. So who's bringing value to the table here? And who's going to make money selling herbicide to spray on those plants? You know what? You don't hold the keys to the market. We do! You ought to pay us for the right to put your gene in our varieties!"

Urban's broadside wasn't just showmanship. Pioneer's plant breeders were convinced, based on decades of experience, that single genes didn't matter; what mattered was the sum total of all the genes - a plant's "germ plasm." It was an earlier, fuzzier term for the genetic determinants of a plant, almost like "personality" or "genetic makeup." The breeders also felt personally offended that Monsanto would waltz into Des Moines and argue that one gene, by itself, should double the value of a seed.

Pioneer executives also didn't believe that a seed company could charge significantly more for a single new trait. They'd never been able to jack up their prices when they introduced varieties that were resistant to diseases or more likely to stay upright in a storm. What's more, they said, they didn't want to.

One Monsanto negotiator described the Pioneer position as "a kind of socialism." Historically, for every four dollars in increased profits that a new corn variety produced, Pioneer raised seed prices by one dollar. The rest went into the farmer's pocket. The Monsanto approach, charging what the market would bear, struck them as immoral profiteering. "We're in the business of helping farmers," Pioneer executives insisted. (In fact, Tom Urban had once tried to raise prices more steeply on the theory that Pioneer was giving away value for free. Sales sagged and Pioneer quickly backtracked.)

"Sometimes we just stared at each other. It was like we were Martians. Didn't even speak the same language," recalls one Monsanto negotiator.

Yet behind their facade of bluster and bravado, Pioneer executives fretted. They knew how much farmers love to kill weeds, and they suspected that Roundup Ready soybeans might indeed turn out to be popular with farmers. They wanted the rights to Monsanto's genes; they just didn't want to pay much money for them.