I am sorry; I cannot speak for that company. What I can refer to, because I was just talking about it, is the rice article to which I referred. As I said, the article refers to—we need the noble Lord, Lord Winston—the multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification-based method. I would be happy to provide a reference to both the noble Lord and the Minister. The article says that this method can definitely determine whether the impacts of CRISPR-Cas9 are intentional or unintentional, or whether it is something that has happened independently but at the same time. So there is at least one method here, in a respected peer-reviewed journal, that sets out how this can be identified.
Further, I point out that the US Government this year announced a collaboration to develop
“an initial set of computational tools that assists trained analysts to identify genetic engineering in a next generation sequencing data set. It makes it possible for scientists to detect engineered DNA at scale”.
That is a US Government project happening this year. Any claim that this is all impossibly difficult and cannot be done simply does not stack up. If the noble Lord, Lord Winston, was here, I am sure he could cite many more cases, but the evidence, I think, is clearly there.
I want to pick up some of the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Cameron of Dillington. First, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that we cannot have extra labelling: there is not enough space, and it is too confusing. If we pick up an average packet of something in the supermarket—say, a packet of pasta—it will have some very large branding on it and a small space dedicated to nutrition and other information. Possibly, we need less space for the branding. Very little packaging has insufficient space for extra information of the kind that consumers want.
The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, made some points about random mutagenesis techniques and other techniques that he used, and said that they are not labelled. There may be an argument that they should be labelled, but putting that to one side, the fact is that comparing genome editing to those kinds of techniques is comparing apples and pears. Basically, gene editing can access and amend parts of the genome that are protected from naturally occurring or induced mutations. This is something that perhaps we have not brought out in previous debates, and we might want to
explore it further on Report. There is a difference between the parts of the genome that can be accessed by these different techniques.
I have dealt with a lot and am aware of the hour. It is clear there is a strong demand from many sides of the House for this labelling and a strong demand from the public. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, but I have little doubt that we will return to this on Report.