My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 275, proposed by my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington. Under strict regulatory processes, and after consultation—I emphasise that that is in the amendment, as referred to by other noble Lords—it is about applying exciting new technologies, supporting our superb UK biotechnology industry to continue as a global leader and an economic success. Above all, it is about strengthening global food resilience and security while potentially reducing chemical or drug use.
The amendment has particular relevance to plants but I want to support it with respect to animals and their diseases. I draw a contrast with the opinions of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who I respect immensely. The priority of disease control in animals increasingly lies in prevention, and key tools in prevention are management and husbandry, vaccines, and genetic resistance. Genetic resistance has of course occurred spontaneously by natural evolutionary processes in wild animals.
Apart from knowing what the R number is, many noble Lords will now be aware from the Covid-19 pandemic of the remarkable innate resistance of, for example, bats to viral disease. They carry infections that are lethal to humans, such as rabies and the Covid-19 virus, without apparent clinical disease. By definition, the process of natural selection occurs over many years, so conventional breeding methods to create disease resistance in domesticated animal species are extremely slow and raise real ethical problems.
Now we have the amazing potential ability to very precisely identify the parts of an animal’s DNA that permit specific pathogen invasion and then, in a very targeted way, adapt them by gene editing so as to be non-permissive to infection. This mimics changes to an animal’s DNA that might occur spontaneously but very rarely in nature, and does it in a fraction of the time. It is distinct from the wider techniques involving genetic modification yet is currently included within them and prohibited in current EU legislation, as many other noble Lords have said.
In relation to animal disease, there is already promising research to breed pigs with resistance to African swine fever, a highly infectious pathogen in pigs, distributed worldwide, that in recent years has killed millions of pigs in China, is now killing pigs and infecting wild boar, which are symptomless carriers, in continental Europe, and presents a real and present danger to our own domestic pig population in the UK.
The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh has recently created, using gene editing, pigs with resistance to the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, a disease endemic in the UK pig herd and a welfare concern as a cause of severe disease and high mortality, as well as having a substantial economic impact.
Finally, I stress that unlike processes involved in gene cloning, for example, using gene editing to establish a founder stock which breeds normally involves relatively few animals and no more intrusive processes for the animals initially than are used in normal veterinary practice. I very much support this progressive, forward-looking amendment.