Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (First sitting)

Katherine Fletcher Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

Q Thank you for your time, Professor Dunwell. I am going to cough up that I have a biology undergraduate degree. Listening to some of the questions from Opposition Members, it strikes me that you are in quite an invidious position. You have to describe the messy complexity that is biology—how we evolve and how bits of DNA exist almost in their own right, and that it is humans that say that something is a species or a plant, and so on. We have to try to describe that and codify it into law in a way that allows people to have confidence that they are safe, but also allows for opportunities for scientific innovation, using fewer resources and so on.

This might not be a fair question, but has science ever got to the point where it could effectively give us a legal definition that we could use to erase some of the confusion on the Opposition Front Bench, or is biology itself too complicated?

Professor Dunwell: Biology is not physics—you cannot measure every charge of every atom. The appearance of any plant depends on not just the genes that are in it, but where you grow it.

[Katherine Fletcher]

On what gets switched on and what does not.

Professor Dunwell: Yes. The so-called genotype-environment interaction is what determines how big the weeds in your garden grow. It depends on whether they are watered, whether they have fertiliser, whether they get mildew on them and so on. The plant itself is a consequence of that interaction.

As you say, that is an extraordinarily difficult thing to put down in words to be subject to legal enforcement. I am not a lawyer; I admire the people who put our advice into this Bill. There may be bits that people can tweak, but it is the job of the lawyer to try to compose something that fits legal standards but is also compatible with the kinds of—

[Katherine Fletcher]

Q But would you say that a lawyer may look at a definition and say it is vague because the very nature of biology is vague? Is that fair? I do not want to put words in your mouth.

Professor Dunwell: I have not spoken to the drafting lawyers, but I imagine they have struggled at times with trying to pin down something that is, as you say, flexible and messy. Biology is something that perhaps does not always fit or meet strict definitions.

[Katherine Fletcher]

But is entirely natural.

Professor Dunwell: Yes.

[Katherine Fletcher]

Q I want to go back to the idea of environmental release, which the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith talked about. To my mind, that implies something that would not have been there as part of nature. You are releasing something into the environment—a transgenic animal; a plant that has genes from different species in it that would not be there in nature. Is there anything that would come under that definition of “release” that the Bill allows?

Professor Dunwell: Taking one step back, any form of agriculture and any form of domestication and multiplication of a crop in the last 10,000 years has been to put something into the environment that was not there. In the case of maize 10,000 years ago, someone somewhere in Mexico found a unique plant with characteristics that they had never seen before, and he or she—that very bright individual—said, “This has got attributes that I can see are good and I want to keep.” That was the beginning of the agricultural system.

[Katherine Fletcher]

And she—let us make it a she—almost environmentally released it into a field.

Professor Dunwell: Yes. That is the context, and I think it is important just generally that people—well, that is me producing a sermon. That is the context in which we are now working.

[Ruth Jones]

Q I am interested in the environmental release side. Your advice to DEFRA was that “different parameters” should be applied to the environmental release of gene editing micro-organisms because of the increased risk of gene flow. Can you explain that point about gene flow? Does that mean that micro-organisms are outside the remit of the Bill?

Professor Dunwell: That is a whole other area. Science in this area has not been applied in the same way to a micro-organism. Obviously, it has been applied to animals. You talked before about asking the question about gene edited animals. One of the things I should add before I get to the other question is that the best example of that on the market at the moment is gene edited fish in Japan. There are two varieties of fish whose growth rate has been modified through gene editing, which have been on the market—I do not know whether successfully commercially, but they are one of the prime examples of that.

On micro-organisms, we hope at the next ACRE meeting—we have not had an in-person meeting since covid started—to start to explore the applications in the microbiology area. We have invited people along from outside, as we do quite regularly, for consciousness raising at a scientific level, to get the best experts to say where they see this type of technology going. Microbiology at the moment is not specifically described in here. It will develop over time because there is an increasing interest in applying different microbes—often ones that have been selected, because the soil is full of tens of thousands of microbes, and some of them are good and some are bad. Many companies now have huge collections of hundreds of thousands of microbes that they go through to try to pick ones that may have an antagonistic effect on other microbes, so they can be applied as inoculants into the soil to improve soil health.

All that is really admirable and exciting stuff. It depends, again, on our ability to identify, extract and sequence genetic information. I went to a meeting probably 20 years ago in Paris, when somebody for the first time said that their PhD student, having spent three years, had got the sequence of one bacterium. He was so proud of that student. Now, you can probably do hundreds in a day. The rate of change is orders of magnitude just in 20 years. It is in what grows out of that and how we develop the regulatory boundaries that the challenges lie.