I thank the noble Lord, Lord Winston, for giving way. I also thank him for sending me a paper by Claire Robinson which makes many of the points he has just alluded to. I would like to ask the noble Lord a question. I offered the suggestion on Monday evening that the criterion for describing an organism as precision bred in terms of the Bill should not be that any exogenous DNA—which is what the noble Lord is talking about—should not code for a protein. That is what the Bill says in Clause 1(6). I offered an alternative, more stringent, criterion: that it should not have any effect on the phenotype. That is more stringent than saying that it should not code for protein because exogenous DNA could work on the phenotype in ways other than coding protein; for example, I mentioned gene suppression.
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I think the noble Lord suggested a third criterion: that the whole genome of any organism should be sequenced before it is then released into the environment as a precision-bred organism. That, to me, also carries a difficulty because there could have been spontaneous mutations during the process of precision breeding which have nothing to do with precision breeding per se; it is just the way the nucleic acid changes. Therefore, one has to ask with whole genome sequencing: what would you actually be looking for? What would be
your reference genome? I am just wondering whether my proposition, of no visible effect on the phenotype, would be a suitable halfway house.