Gene Editing

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join many others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for initiating this important debate and for her very clear and informative introduction. I apologise for missing the first few seconds of it.

I also want to focus not on the medical issues but on the use of gene editing in crops, domestic animals and wild populations. In this I am indeed following the lead of the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, although he might take it as given that my views are 180 degrees opposite from virtually everything he just said.

I will address this subject from three aspects. The first concerns the very sad fact that we will be leaving the EU on Friday night. We have seen the collective efforts of the European Union, together struggling for 30 years with this fast-moving field of endeavour. We saw 10 years of uncertainty until the European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that directed mutagenesis techniques such as CRISPR, which we have been discussing, are to be considered GMOs under the EU’s GMO directive. However, it is important to point out some misinformation. The EU does not have a ban on GMOs. Around 70 authorised food and animal feed products come into the EU. That means thousands of tonnes of animal feed, soybean, rapeseed and maize. For the EU and for us, a safety assessment needs to be updated regarding the latest understanding of these imports, particularly on stacked events, where we might see interaction between the genetic modifications.

In the EU we currently have mandatory labelling and tracing that enables the public to know what they are eating and what they are getting. There is very strong evidence that that is what the public want and it is something we very much want to keep. Research is also allowed in the EU—I expect it will continue in the UK—provided there is no risk of contamination in the outside environment. We had a long debate about dynamic alignment. It is worth thinking about the fact that, from Saturday morning, we will share a land border with the EU. It will be very interested in what we are doing, because our decisions about genetic editing will almost inevitably end up affecting the EU.

The second area I want to address is the fact that gene editing can have unintended effects—and intended effects—that go much further than anyone thought they would: gene combinations, results and biological ramifications that were not intended. They can be significantly different from those produced by conventional breeding, including random mutagenesis. We need to have clear, close and tight oversight.

The noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Winston, made very powerful speeches reflecting on the interaction of science, politics, economics and society, and how those interactions can be deeply and horrendously toxic. On a perhaps lesser scale, the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, spoke about ensuring that pigs do not catch a particular disease. Maybe that means that people will think they can house pigs much more closely together, in far more crowded conditions. What will be the animal welfare ramifications of that?

The noble Viscount also referred to gene drives—possibly some of the most frightening aspects of potential gene editing, and which are being widely explored in the laboratory at the moment. They are intended to achieve permanent genetic changes to the make-up of wild populations of animals and plants. It means that you release something that you cannot then call back. I guess I should declare my Australian origins here and say that we have very close and intimate understanding of what the release of the cane toad did and continues to do to Australian ecological systems. It was released and cannot be controlled.

For noble Lords who are interested in this area, I make specific reference to a recent report known as RAGES—Risk Assessment of Genetically Engineered Organisms in the EU and Switzerland—which came out last year. Although the noble Viscount suggested that EU regulations were far too tight, the report concludes that they are not nearly tight enough. It concludes that the European Food Safety Authority’s GMO panel’s

“implicit and unaccountable risk assessment policies … indicate that those assessments are far more likely to underestimate the range and severity of possible adverse effects, rather than to overestimate them.”

My third point is the question of how we approach the world and our management of it. Genetic editing, pretty well by definition, involves a silver-bullet solution: you address one aspect of one thing. That ignores the complexity. People say that if we modify just this one gene in wheat, it will become more drought resistant and then we will solve hunger. Problems of hunger, food security and the unhealthiness of our diet are not innately biological problems, but ones of society, poverty and our food system. The idea you can take one step with one gene and make a huge difference to that is, I argue, entirely false.

I am very pleased to say to the Minister that we are now hearing from the Government about agri-ecological approaches in the Agriculture Bill. This is the alternative way to look at how we solve the huge problems we face with food security and hunger. The Government are focusing on the health of soils. These are the kinds of approaches we need to take, rather than simple silver-bullet solutions.

We also know that a huge percentage of the world’s food is produced by small farmers. Patented and costly tools produced by gene-editing technology are not the solutions to their problems. We know how fragile these apparent solutions can be when we look at the spread of herbicide resistance in weeds around genetically modified crops.

I conclude by reflecting on how complex human health and biology are. I have a personal interest in the human microbiome, some recent research into which has been looking at bacteriophages that live—I apologise to any noble Lord who is about to eat lunch—in your gut. The bacteria in your gut mostly exist as inactive prophages. Depending on the food you eat for lunch, they might be activated and that will change your microbiome.

This is complex and we have to tread very carefully. I stress that this is not an argument for doing nothing; it is an argument very much for science, research and caution. Things can be done, as we have recently seen with mitochondrial donation. We can make progress, but very cautiously.