Genetically Modified Insects (S&T Committee Report)

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, begin by paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Selborne’s chairing of this committee. The subject could not have been more topical, the science more ground breaking or the policy lessons more vital. We produced punchy recommendations which received, I am afraid, a disappointingly limp government response—I will come back to that.

I also echo my noble friend Lord Selborne’s comments about Chris Clarke, Cat Ball and Mike Bonsall, who gave us tremendous support during the committee, and what he said about Lord Peston—it was a privilege to experience his remarkable brain at close quarters and I am sorry I will not have that chance again. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for suggesting this topic to the committee in the first place.

The terrifying discovery, about a month after our report came out, that Zika was causing birth defects rather dramatically underlined the vital timing of our inquiry. I want to focus on Zika, as has already been suggested—I did not mean to frighten off the noble Lord, Lord Patel, to whom I apologise; he could have talked about Zika if he had wanted. The noble Lord said that it is 100 years since Francis Crick was born. Tomorrow will be 100 years precisely, so, again, the timing is good.

We have an extraordinary British innovation which was by good fortune already being tested in Brazil on the very species that is a vector for Zika. Oxitec is the only company in the world currently in a position to defeat this outbreak, because we do not have a vaccine and we can use the technology. Oxitec’s CEO, Hadyn Parry, testified to Congress last month and gave a very bullish account of what the company could begin to achieve. Yet the technology is being stifled by EU bureaucracy at home—I promise I will resist the invitation from the noble Lord, Lord Fox, to talk about Brexit on this occasion—so it is doing all its work in the Americas.

It is disappointing that the Department for International Development did not join in the response to our report, because, as has been said, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, this is an important area where Britain could help the developing world. We should proactively fund trials of GM insects in the UK—on agricultural pests, for example—but also in UK Overseas Territories, where we can more readily apply them to vector-borne diseases. We should fund the expansion of facilities to breed GM mosquitoes in countries such as Brazil. We should help smaller countries put in place the right sort of regulation to encourage safe use of GM insects. We should fund efforts to combat the disgraceful misinformation about this technology that has been promulgated by some irresponsible Greens. Will the Minister address the point that the £1 billion Ross Fund could carry out some of the agenda I have just listed?

It is worth going into the background of the Aedes aegypti, the mosquito in question, to understand how crucial GM insects will be in this battle. It is a domesticated species—that is to say, it only lives around human habitation, has done so for thousands of years and only feeds on people. So its viruses will adapt to human bodies or they will die out. Yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and now Zika have done that—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, there are bound to be more to come. Humanity is a sitting duck for this mosquito.

Even if we eventually get a vaccine against any new Aedes virus, as we did against yellow fever, we need to control the mosquito in order to prevent the next virus coming along. It is the only preventive option. As the noble Lord, Lord Selborne, said, unlike mosquitoes that carry malaria, Aedes is day active, so bed nets are no good, and nor is spraying the inside of houses during the day. We can continue to defeat malaria without GM insects, but that may not be true of Zika or dengue.

Brazil eradicated Aedes aegypti entirely between 1947 and 1958 using insecticides, but it came back and it is not possible to repeat that eradication today because of the vast expansion of urban areas and the fact that people are much less happy now to let people with fogging machines invade their private property and spray their children’s toys and so on, because of a general distrust of spraying. Anyway, the best you can do with insecticides these days is probably to reduce populations by about 60%.

Oxitec’s five trials in the wild, of suppressing the population by releasing males that produce offspring that cannot survive, achieved 92%, 92%, 93%, 96% and 99% reductions in population—three of them in Brazil, one in the Cayman Islands and one in Panama. There was no risk to human beings because these male mosquitoes do not bite and, by definition, of course, they cannot breed because their offspring cannot survive to adulthood. So, the trait cannot persist in the environment. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, will discuss the ecological impacts of these insects.

Oxitec is rapidly expanding its facility in Brazil. It will be in a position to release half a billion mosquitoes this year and 3 billion next year. However, it is uphill work. Outrageous and disgraceful rumours repeated by some organisations, even over here, that the GM mosquitoes actually caused the Zika birth defects have hampered the spread of this technology. This cannot be true for three reasons. First, Zika caused birth defects elsewhere in the Pacific where Oxitec has never set foot and long before it started its trials; secondly, there is a huge geographical separation between where the trials took place and where the birth defects first showed up; and, thirdly, for the basic scientific reason that it is an RNA virus and the insert is a DNA insert.

We cannot allow this remarkable technology to slip through our fingers in this country, as happened with genetically modified crops. Twenty-five years ago the UK led the way in GM crops. The John Innes Institute and the Plant Breeding Institute were world leaders in that technology and are now ghost laboratories. The technology proved to be world conquering but we played little role in it. Global economic benefits are now reckoned to be in the order of $150 billion, according to the latest report.

The net effect of the anti-GM protest, led by lords in white boiler suits, has been to make us more reliant than the rest of the world on chemicals, according to the PG Economics report. As Oxitec told us:

“As an applicant we believe that the European system does not work because it is just not predictable. You put an application in and you can never predict when you are going to receive a response. That is bad for innovation and it is bad for companies”.

Innovate UK told the committee:

“The UK has the capability in the underpinning science and technology to benefit economically whether that deployment is within the UK, EU or elsewhere. However, where deployment is only possible in overseas markets, the UK risks losing its world-leading talent”.

So it is vital that we unblock the logjam in the European Union. National derogation is supposed to help do this, but there is precious little sign that it is working. In any case, it applies only to GM crops and not to GM insects. Perhaps I may ask the Minister if there are plans to tackle that omission. As we said in our report:

“We are concerned that a situation has arisen whereby applications are not received due to concerns over the regulatory framework, yet the regulatory framework cannot be tested nor improved until such an application materialises.”

This is a Catch-22. There are no applications for GM insects in Europe because everybody knows that it is impossible to get through the bureaucracy. Yet there are obvious applications here in Europe: olive fly, diamondback moth and spotted wing drosophila are all terrific agricultural pests. Indeed, the impending threat from Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, which can carry dengue and probably Zika, will also be a concern because it is spreading through Europe very rapidly. Anyone who has been on holiday in Italy or the Balkans will have been bitten by it.

We can use this technology to combat invasive alien species. I raised in the committee and raise again now the serious point that the signal crayfish, which is devastating many rivers, including the River Blyth in my native Northumberland, cannot be controlled by chemicals or biologically and is rapidly wiping out our native white-clawed crayfish. As a matter of some urgency, we should try to fund research into ways of suppressing its population using exactly this technology. I wonder if my noble friend can respond to that suggestion—I am sorry to put him on the spot.

We have a golden opportunity to suppress the populations of major disease vectors thanks to a new and inherently safe technology, and I believe that we should grasp it.