Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Lord Krebs Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I strongly support this Bill. I would like to acknowledge my colleague in my department in Oxford, Jane Langdale, and her post-doc Dana Vlad. They spent a lot of time explaining the details of gene editing to me and showing me their work on rice.

It is widely acknowledged that current agricultural practices are unsustainable. The green revolution of the second half of the last century was a miracle. While the global population doubled between 1960 and 2000, per capita food production increased by 25%. This was a result of a combination of genetics, the application of agrochemicals, irrigation and mechanisation. But that miracle came at a cost: the loss of habitats and biodiversity, depletion of soils and water, contribution to greenhouse gases and pollution of the environment. Here in the UK, this impact is dramatically illustrated by the fact that populations of farmland birds have more than halved in the past 50 years. The simple fact is that, as we have squeezed more out of the land for ourselves, we have left less for the rest of nature. Furthermore, the gains of the green revolution are slowing down while demand is increasing. Many experts estimate that we will need to increase global food production by at least 50% by 2050.

This is why many have called for a doubly green revolution of producing more with less: more food with less environmental damage. This does not mean returning to pre-industrial, low-intensity organic farming. It means combining the best of new technologies, including GPS, IT, and genetics, to help us sustainably manage soils, habitats and water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while producing more food from the same amount of land. Precision breeding can play an important role in this doubly green revolution. We have already begun to hear of some of the benefits it can bring, including reduced use of pesticides, perhaps better nutritional properties, increased disease resistance, resilience in the face of climate change and increased yields.

Nevertheless, as we heard, a bit over 20 years ago, the application of a different advance in genetic technology—namely, transgenic modification of crops, or “GM crops” for short—stalled in this country because of objections, and I hope that that does not repeat itself. Of course, the Daily Mail’s coining of the term “Frankenfood” was a key catchy slogan for the objectors. I personally bear the scars of that campaign because I was head of the Food Standards Agency at the time. GM crops were subject to regulatory scrutiny for safety under the novel foods regulation on a case-by-case basis. But, because the FSA concluded that herbicide-tolerant soya or Bt maize, for example, was as safe as its conventional counterpart, I earned soubriquets such as “Professor Bullshit” and “The man who put the ‘con’ into consumer protection”.

There may be lessons to be learned. One is that, although the objectors in the anti-GM campaign often presented their worries as being about human health or environmental safety, they were also concerned about other things, such as the role of agribusinesses—the noble Lord, Lord Winston, referred to Monsanto—the further intensification of agriculture or simply this being playing God with nature. This meant that scientific arguments about the rigour of regulatory scrutiny by expert committees gained little traction. So we have to be aware of that, as we think about introducing this form of genetic technology.

Another factor was that the benefits of the first generation of GM crops accrued primarily to farmers in North America and South America, rather than to consumers in the UK. Perhaps the direct consumer benefit contributed to the uncontroversial acceptance of GM human insulin—which many, perhaps most, diabetics take—or GM rennet for making cheese, including organic cheese. When I talked about this to then US Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, he responded—I will not do the full American accent—by saying, “So you mean that, when we have a tomato with the Viagra gene, consumers will lap it up”. Perhaps, in this case, precision breeding will produce products that have a direct consumer benefit, which might help to get over the hump, so to speak.

I now turn to a few specific points and questions for the Minister. The definition of precision breeding in Clause 1 is deliberately—I assume—broad, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, mentioned. For instance, gene editing can be used to delete a gene, to modify a gene within the existing genome or to replace a gene from within the same species. Could the Minister confirm that all three of these are included in the definition of “precision breeding”? Could he also perhaps elaborate on what he said in his excellent introduction about the relationship between precision breeding, as envisaged in the Bill, and transgenics—GMOs—as considered in earlier legislation? Is the aim to draw a clear line, or put clear blue water, between transgenics on the one hand and gene editing or precision breeding on the other? Alternatively, is it seen that, once accepted, precision breeding is a stepping-stone to the wider deployment of modern genetic techniques? Perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

I turn briefly to residual exogenous DNA. Although the aim in gene editing is to modify genes within a species, part of the process of doing that involves the DNA from other species. This may be the agent that brings the gene into the cell, which may be the bacterium Agrobacterium, or an antibiotic-resistance gene that is used in the selection process to find out what you have gene edited. The question that some people have raised with me is: if residual bits of exogenous, or foreign, DNA remain after gene editing, is this not transgenics by the back door? However, importantly, the Bill points out that, if there are residual fragments of DNA, they would not be able to code for a protein, and they would therefore be non-functioning. In this way, even if there are a residual bits or fragments of exogenous DNA a few base pairs long, gene editing is quite distinct from transgenics. I hope that the Minister will confirm my interpretation.

How can we deal with these residual fragments if people are worried about them? In theory, whole genome sequencing could be used to search for these tiny fragments, but on the other hand it may be difficult to distinguish exogenous fragments from somatic mutations that have occurred during the process of a gene-edited organism growing up. However, it is important to note that the techniques of gene editing are not static; they are developing rapidly. In a recent paper in Plant Physiology, Yubing He, Mudgett and Zhao point out that it is already possible to gene-edit plants without any residual transgenes, so perhaps this worry will disappear in the future.

The noble Lord, Lord Winston, referred to animals. The Bill takes a very broad definition of “animal” as meaning any metazoan—in other words, all eukaryote multicellular taxa of animals. This, I understand, is designed to future-proof the Bill. While it seems unlikely that scientists will, in the near future, wish to market gene-edited tardigrades or onychophorans—your Lordships should look that up on your smartphones—the Bill could, for instance, open the way to gene-edited companion animals, such as cats and dogs. It could be a new way to create the best in show at Crufts. Given that this will be an additional cause of worry, I wondered if it might be more appropriate to proceed in a stepwise fashion and, in the first instance, restrict the Bill to farm animals. That is just a question.

Some people have argued that if we are going to have gene-edited products, they must be labelled. This seems a bad idea for a very simple reason: the gene-edited product will, on the whole, be indistinguishable from a comparable product produced by conventional breeding, so labelling could become a potential cheat’s charter. That is why I think the Food Standards Agency’s proposal of a public register of gene-edited products that have been put on the market or have applied for approval would be a good alternative to labelling to provide transparency.

My last comment relates to the Food Standards Agency’s two-tier regulatory approach, which is still under development, for approval of food and feed. The threshold for entering the higher tier, requiring more detailed regulatory scrutiny, is that the change brought about by gene editing is deemed to be “significant”. I can see this becoming a recipe for boundary disputes, and I wonder whether a single continuum might turn out to be an easier approach. That is really for the Food Standards Agency to consider as it refines its approach.

I end with a quote from Jonathan Swift. In 1727, he wrote that

“whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would … do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

In the 21st century, Swift needs to be updated for gender equality: the co-discoverers of gene editing, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna—both female and Nobel prize winners for chemistry—have done more for humanity than probably any of us will ever do.