Editors' Summary: The biotechnology revolution has arrived, bringing the promise of great benefits in medicine, agriculture, and pollution control, but also the potential for serious harm from deliberate releases of new organisms into the environment. Already, federal agencies are assessing the need for regulation. The regulators must grapple with questions about the nature and magnitude of the risks of biotechnology, and about whether existing statutes or comprehensive genetic engineering control law is the best way to protect the environment from the new technologies. The authors describe the new directions in biotechnology and the potential for releases of man-made organisms into the environment. They agree that a regulatory scheme requiring expert risk analysis prior to releases, coupled with authority to control the conditions of the releases, is needed. The authors then review federal environmental statutes assessing their suitability for regulating the environmental impacts of living organisms. They conclude that a new statute is not needed if gaps in the coverage of existing statutes can be filled and the several federal agencies with fragments of necessary authority can coordinate their efforts.