Engineering Biology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, a long time ago I had the privilege of being responsible for an engineering company that made the London taxi, and I had 1,000 employees at the age of 31. Quite a few of those people were in our foundries business, making components for other companies in the days when electricity costs were so low that you could use electricity to melt alloys. Alas, all the foundries have shut down now, I am told.

Sometimes we had to plan a casting before the exact alloy had been specified, and the answer to the question, “What is this thing actually made of?”, was always unobtainium. This was a fictional alloy that never existed, and I was amused to discover that unobtainium was the valuable material in the science fiction film “Avatar” that could be mined only on that beautiful planet Pandora. There was another fictional alloy, unaffordium, but that was too expensive. The point of this story is that engineering biology can now truly create the biological equivalent of unobtainium. Rather than develop an organism and then find out what it does, we can specify what we want and develop the organism to do that. We will start with the need and end up with the answer to that need with a customer attached.

There are many stories, and some of them may even be true, of pharmaceutical developments whose markets proved to be different from those specified when the project was started—Viagra and penicillin spring to mind. Lots of basic research will get funding as it changes the question “I wonder what its properties are?” to “I wonder whether it actually does this?”

Engineering biology is one of the most interesting and exciting developments that I have ever heard of in engineering. This is an open goal for UK companies, which is why we wrote this report with the slightly cheap headline Don’t Fail to Scale. I feel that engineering biology will happen anyway, but it could happen earlier and with less risk if it has government support. Will it get full government support? Our regulators do not like new risks; that is in their nature. New risks mean new challenges, and possibly new things going wrong. This is not a party-political point; the identity of the Government does not matter, as all regulators behave similarly.

What is different between Governments is the urgency with which a problem is addressed. Let us compare this with the timing of a debate that took place three days ago. It was a two-hour debate on a report by the Economic Affairs Committee entitled National Debt: It’s Time for Tough Decisions, which was published last September. That is a really important subject, but our engineering biology report was published this January, and I am very pleased that it has such a level of importance that it is being debated in April.

I am pleased that the Government share my enthusiasm for this subject so palpably, but I would be hard put to justify why the delay has been halved while the urgency has doubled. If it means that the Government are indeed taking this subject seriously and urgently, then bravo to the Labour Party—at least in this respect. However, some recommendations have generated responses that are a straightforward fudge—for example, the recommendation in paragraph 57, which generated a response mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown. The recommendation is that the Government should appoint an engineering biology champion to push forward some action. The response was:

“The government will work internally and with the sector to explore the feasibility of a national EB champion”.


Can the Minister say whether they will actually do this or merely explore the possibility of doing it? If so, when?

In summary, this report is excellent, if too long; it could have been even better if it were half the length. However, the timing of this debate is the best evidence that the Government are taking the subject seriously, and that is wonderful. I only wish that the Treasury was taking the Economic Affairs Committee’s report on national debt as seriously as this report has been taken—then we could actually afford to do what is recommended rather than only “deeply consider” the proposals.