My Lords, I apologise that I seem to be dominating; I am sure we will get away from this. Amendment 12 appears in my name. In some ways we are returning to some of the issues that we were discussing in the first group about the definition of “traditional” or “natural”. If a genetic technology breeding process has been granted a patent under international or national law, novelty is a condition of acquiring a patent. Therefore, how can it be traditional or natural? I freely confess to your Lordships’ House that I am not an expert on intellectual property, and Amendment 74 in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and others deals with how this interacts with intellectual property law and the issues that were raised by your Lordships’ House’s oversight committees which the Government have insufficiently considered. I am going to leave that entirely to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, because intellectual property is definitely not my area.
However, I think it is worth exploring how something can be both traditional or natural and patented, whether we are using that as the process to create an organism or the organism itself. It is worth thinking about how the words “traditional” and “natural” are used. The idea is that something traditional or natural has been tried or tested for generations. It is associated in the public mind with safety. We know that food, feed and seed labelled as “traditional” or “natural” draw a higher level of consumer trust, so these words are important in their own terms and in terms of the technical understanding.
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It is worth going back to CRISPR-Cas9 technology and noting that the four pioneers in this area were once collaborators and colleagues but are now involved in a bitter patent dispute over who has the right to the core technology. They are said to have collectively paid €16 million in legal fees to prove that their technology is novel, invented and industrial, which seems to mean that it cannot also be traditional and natural. I note that one of those inventors, Jennifer Doudna, signed a deal with Dupont in 2015 to serve gene-edited maize to the American consumer. So, if something is indeed novel, uniform and anthropogenic, surely a proper risk assessment is essential and should be an absolute requirement before such processes or products are authorised or given access to the English market. This relates to some issues we will discuss later, on labelling: surely consumers and farmers have a right to know whether their purchases are novel, untested, artificial, synthetic or human-made, as the existence of a patent says they must be.
The amendment seeks to bring coherence to the Bill. It does not primarily deal with issues of patents as such, but it shows how patents and the claims of the Bill simply do not fit together. I beg to move.