I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I do not know how that happened, but I think I might take that as a seconding of my Amendment 86. Noble Lords might say that it is only the title and it does not matter, but it is how people will identify the Bill.
I am going to refer a number of times to a Defra press release, dated 29 September 2021, which, all the way through, refers to “gene editing”. That is what it is telling people the Bill is about, drawing a very clear distinction, as it sees it, between gene editing and genetically modified organisms, an issue I will return to shortly. That is the case for amending the Short Title of the Bill. What we are talking about is not precision; it is not marked by exactness, and there are real problems if the Bill is not named clearly.
I come to something that is arguably very significant and considerably more impactful in the nature of the Bill. This is my Amendment 11, which would exclude the use of exogenous genetic material in the creation of, or remaining in, so-called precision-bred organisms. Here I need to venture into the depths of this a little, I am afraid; I apologise to the Committee for that. If we look at many of the definitions that describe gene editing, we see that they say this is simply removing genes from an organism or adding genes from a different variety of the same organism.
That is different from genetically modified organisms. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, suggested that, 30 years ago, when GMOs were being debated, they got an undeserved bad name. But look at some of the things that have been done with GMOs: for example, a salmon that combines the genes from three different types of fish and grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative, to be released into the environment with obvious and potentially massive impacts; or, perhaps even more indefensible, the transgenic zebrafish, bred with genes from jellyfish or coral, which give them a glowing effect under certain light conditions. These genetically engineered animals were popular in aquariums and have now escaped into the natural environment, with effects we have yet to understand.
We are being reassured that gene editing is not like that; that it is a different kind of thing. Certainly, that is what the Defra press release of 29 September, which I referred to earlier, said in the name of George Eustice, the Minister:
“Gene editing is different from genetic modification, because it does not result in the introduction of DNA from other species”.
That is what the public is being told by the department.
We are going to hear in this debate a great deal about CRISPR, and I shall say this only once: CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”. This is the hallmark of a bacterial defence system which forms the basis of genome editing technology. It was first discovered in archaea, a branch of the tree of life that was itself discovered only in 1977—we are talking about very recent science here. The clue is in the description. This is using the bacterial system. The key element of gene editing is the insertion of genetic material from bacteria. That material may or may not be fully removed at some point in the organism’s development, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, set out very clearly, once we put something in, we do not necessarily understand what impact there might be in the current generation, or potentially in future generations.
I am going to borrow and excellent phrase from the joint Soil Association, Friends of the Earth and GM Freeze briefing on the Bill: it says that the genome is
“more like an ecosystem than a codebook.”
Personally, I tend to say that DNA is not a machine blueprint, because that is the metaphor—the idea of animals as machines—that dates back to the philosopher René Descartes, who has a lot to answer for and still dominates far too much of our discussion. We do not have the understanding of how biology and biological systems work. We think about them as machines and they are absolutely, definitively not.
This matters because mixing species, which is what we are doing here with gene editing, is not something that generally happens in nature. Certainly, there is horizontal gene transfer—which is of great concern in the area of antimicrobial resistance, an issue that I do a great deal of work on—but that is a far more limited occurrence and occurs mostly within kingdoms of living things rather than across different kingdoms of living things, which is what we are doing here. My Amendment 11, saying that we cannot introduce genetic material from other species, is doing only what the Government, in their own information about the Bill, say they want to do. That is why I believe we should have Amendment 11.
4.15 pm