Well, it was a real pleasure to hear the Minister open this interesting debate, and we are very grateful for the way he has done it. This is a Bill whose importance we should not underestimate. Although the amounts of money the Minister declared were quite small, the actual commercial value of these technologies in the longer term is massive. He has carefully, and very reasonably, understated the potential advantages to the environment: in a world that is increasingly suffering from crop pests and drought, this is a very serious issue. It has been estimated that, across the world, one-fifth of all cereal crops is lost by processes during storage, so this is massive in terms of starvation. Anything that can be done to make plants resistant will therefore be very important. Clearly, plants and animals have different consequences, and that is one thing we will need to discuss in Committee.
In addition to drought resistance, I have listed a few other things I think are important. The fact that you can make better flowers and improve the appearance of plants sounds trivial, but it is none the less part of the marketing. Certainly, for economies such as Ecuador’s, it is probably one of the most important money-spinning exports. In addition, pathogen resistance generally will be very important. Making plants that have greater nutritional value or bigger fruit will certainly be hugely valuable to a lot of people. There is a whole range of other things we might come to during this debate, which I will not go into in great detail now.
The challenges, however, are quite considerable, and before I come to that I will mention my own experience with gene insertion, transfer and modification
of various sorts in animals. My experience goes back as far as when I first visited Jon Gordon in New York, about 40 years ago, and saw the giant mice he was trying to make. At the time, that was almost one of the first possible mutations, and he was very proud of the fact that he had done this. I was amazed to see what he was doing down his microscope and thought, “I have to get into this technology myself”. I did not, really, because by that time I was already involved in in vitro fertilisation, which uses some of those technologies but not all.
What was surprising and horrifying was going down to the animal house with him afterwards and seeing the mutations he had not talked about, which had occurred as a result of the manipulation of gametes and embryos. There was no doubt that some of the animals were unexpectedly blind and had limb defects and a whole range of other things—skeletal defects of different sorts—as result of whatever it was: whether it was the DNA being inserted or the method of manipulation was not at all clear.
That has been a constant problem. In the early days, raw DNA was injected, and gametes and embryos have been soaked in DNA, from whatever source. We have made DNA, of course, using instruments, and various ways of incorporating DNA have been used, with greater efficiency. Until recently, the main way of doing this was using viruses that were piggybacked as a kind of Trojan horse into the nuclear DNA of the organism. Now, of course, we have CRISPR-Cas9. I wonder whether the Minister, when he sums up, might apply himself to how often that will be used, or whether it is involved in this legislation. To my mind, it is not entirely clear from the Bill what techniques will not be permitted. The idea of natural sources seems to be a bit blurred.
I know from our own experience of all kinds of gene expression, we get lots of surprises—it is variable. Certainly with CRISPR, although that is probably the most accurate targeting at the moment, we often do not get any kind of gene expression at all and sometimes we do not get insertion. It is well-known, as I am sure the Minister knows, that you occasionally get off-target mutations, which may cause problems to the organism, added to other abnormalities that are completely unexpected.
With any gene insertion or any kind of gene manipulation, there is a risk that in some species there will be different attitudes. There is an issue of whether or not the genetic modification that you want will be maintained and continue to be expressed in the way that you want. I see that multiple repeats will be allowed in the Bill, which may help to increase the amount of gene expression—I imagine that is why that was considered—but all these unfortunately quite technical issues are things that we will need to discuss in Committee.
Without going further, one of the clear issues as a result is that a lot of people will be concerned about the welfare of the animals. One might make large animals. The biggest animals that we have been involved with in my own laboratory have been pigs, which are pretty big, but some people have modified cattle as
well, and that may be something that we need to discuss. We do not always treat our farm animals as well as we should, and in many parts of Europe there are very heavy-bred animals that I would have thought suffer considerably because of the breeding or interbreeding that is dictated. When I do any kind of animal research myself—I did it in the past but do not do much of it now, although my team still does—we have to have strict animal licences from the Home Office. I do not see anything of quite that calibre in the Bill, so maybe we need to look at that in Committee.
The issues for a lot of people will be, for both plants and animals, those of diversity. I remember clearly Dolly the sheep, which was a very different issue but there were some similarities. When that paper was produced in Nature, I was surprised to see Dr Ian Wilmut justifying the procedure of cloning on the basis, he said, that we would be able to make better farm animals that would be used for herds. That may be true, but if you reduce diversity in a herd then you may increase the risk of that herd suffering from unexpected organisms or different traits that you have not yet identified. That is an issue that we need to look at in detail when we examine the Bill in detail.
I suggest that, apart from diversity, we have to look at how reliable the technique is. I am quite concerned by the use, in the Title of the Bill, of the phrase “precision breeding”. I know it is coming into the literature—I see it increasingly in scientific papers—but in biology there is no such thing as precision. We do not know what is precise or entirely predictable. One of the reasons for being interested in genetics is that it is not completely predictable. It is that issue that may cause concern, along with animal usage, which is something that we need to look at. I ask the Minister to address that issue.
Without going into a huge amount of detail, I am still not clear what we do when there is a high abnormality rate in any animals as a result of these techniques. Do we just cull the animals? Do we treat them in a different way? What kind of disposal of livestock will be used? That will be important. With plants, as everyone knows, one of the great issues that have dogged this technology from the very beginning is changes in the surrounding habitat: changing the environment for both insects and other plants, and the risk of plants overgrowing areas. With an unstable environment in some countries, the real question is: might you then end up destroying crops that you really need or reducing the value of crops that you already have?
These are some of the issues I am quite concerned about. The Bill continuously deals with the issue of marketing and profit. I remind the House that that was one factor in sinking Monsanto when it produced its initial modification, which was then marketed. The marketing was so aggressive. I think the marketed seeds would not reproduce so farmers could not then use them as their own technology in countries which were developing economies. That is one issue we need to look at.
All these technologies are controversial, as the Minister and the Government have certainly accepted. They should not be controversial, but no doubt the controversies will be raised in this debate. We have to be absolutely
clear, as the Minister said from the Front Bench, that everything we do with these organisms has clarity and proper accountability. We must be absolutely sure that we are not causing harm but trying to do good.
That brings in the issue of how you manage to run the regulation of this technology, which is focused on a considerable amount in this Bill. However, I am not sure it is adequate. In particular, perhaps we ought to be looking at the long-term effects—particularly in animals when looking at epigenetic effects which will not be expected at the time of the modifications or changes in DNA we are looking at—to the fate of the animal.
That will be very relevant because one of the great advantages of these plants is that they are not only good for nutrition but for making chemicals and medicines we want to use in human care. To some extent, this information will be valuable to human medicine as well when it comes to animals.
There is a great deal to be discussed, but we need some clarity over some of the terms used, particularly “precision” because I do not believe anything in life is really precise. Certainly, my expectation from biology is that it is imprecise, which is one of the reasons I probably got so interested in embryos.
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