Engineering Biology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the committee and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for their careful, detailed work and informative introduction. I have two points to make, about the general approach and about risk. I am taking a different, rather more sceptical approach than we have heard from speakers thus far.

First, to start with a traditional metaphor—fitting for me as a carpenter’s daughter—if you only have a hammer then everything looks like a nail. I understand that the committee may not have considered this within the scope of its inquiry, but I note that it did not consider which problems and issues are appropriate for synthetic biology solutions, and which need different approaches. If we are to avoid silos and have joined-up, systematic government, we need government and Parliament to think about prioritisation, funding, and even rhetoric and policies, as well as about what problems and big crises our societies face and whether synthetic biology is the best way to tackle them. Human time, talents and money are all scarce resources. They need to be used well and not in dangerous directions or into dead ends.

I will revisit these issues with my fatal Motion on the gene-editing regulations next Tuesday but, to use an example to illustrate my point, ScienceAlert yesterday published an article titled:

“Scientists Engineer Bacteria to Make Soils and Crops ‘Glow’ Different Colours”.


It quoted an MIT researcher explaining that

“adding two different bacteria … could, in effect, make fields glow red when pollutants take hold and green when nutrients are high”

so that

“it might respond to metals or radiation or toxins in the soil, or nutrients in the soil”.

We are talking about messing with the genetic make-up of bacteria and letting them loose on the world to know whether a field is contaminated with heavy metals or whether you have applied too much fertiliser.

I posit that there are other approaches here. You could have land managed and cared for by a farmer or grower—informed by government-funded, expert agro-ecological research—who intimately understands every corner and is protected by a society that has adequate regulation to ensure she will not be pushed to spread sewage sludge contaminated with heavy metals on it or forced to use irrigation water loaded with pesticides and pharmaceuticals. We need to stop assuming that we can make a mess, destroy the immensely complex earth systems developed over 4 billion years, and just engineer something to fix it. That is solutionism, and operates only to magnify the damage and, for a while, allow it to continue.

There are problems—the need urgently to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, for example—for which synthetic biology is the right emergency response, but rather than assuming we can always scramble to that point, we need to think about how we stop the crises emerging in the first place. Synthetic biology cannot help us there. Ultimately, we need, as the Oxford geographer Jamie Lorimer explains, to work our way towards a probiotic: a healthy society and planet.

The final six pages of the report talk about risks, focused particularly, and with good cause, on the danger of inappropriate technology and materials falling into ill-intentioned and ill-prepared hands. This is an important issue, and I am pleased to see the focus here, but there is no real focus on the general systemic risks of messing around with an immensely complex biological system, about which we are, to compare with the education of a child, around early to middle primary in our understanding. We have just about mastered basic mental arithmetic, while life is operating at the level of the most sophisticated maths professor. Synthetic biology is mucking with systems that we just do not understand.

To illustrate that, I draw on another piece of just-emerging knowledge; it is an absolutely fascinating, paradigm-shifting discovery. I reference a Nature article published on 8 April and entitled:

“Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?”


That mitochondria can swap around cells is an entirely new discovery. It is massive. Most—nearly all, probably—of our synthetic biology does not take into effect how gene editing of cellular material might interact with that.

I have one final, extra thought here; it is an example of how we have inherited from the 20th century lots of ideas that we need to unlearn. Francis Crick’s central dogma was grounded in Crick’s reductionist belief in the possibility of explaining biological entities in terms of their physical and chemical components. He was absolutely wrong. Ultimately, I would urge, at the base, consideration of the phrase “engineering biology”. You can engineer machines, but life’s living organisms and ecosystems are nothing like machines. We need to acknowledge and examine carefully the long-running category error that we inherited from the 20th century.