I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. As he knows, I have genuine respect for him, and rightly so; he is very distinguished in biology, and no one doubts that for a moment. His contribution has been, and continues to be, particularly important, as is his interest in the environment and its protection.
But the phenotype can mean many things. The animals might be, apparently, phenotypically normal. However, for example, plants might turn out to produce as a result of gene editing some allergen—or possibly some toxin—that is completely unexpected but occurs in plants. Both of these could be damaging to human health even though the phenotype of that organism is normal. That is essentially the problem. It still means that that we have to be looking, as far as we can, for data. This is the key thing that we both want to see—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, is in favour of this because we have talked many times in different environments, particularly in the Science and Technology Select Committee, about how important it is.
We have the ability to amass that data. The advantage of these amendments would be that this country would be supreme in doing this really well. We would be able to build up a databank of extraordinary importance. I do not think that answers his question in any way as, of course, there may be bits of DNA we miss. If you are doing CRISPR in a laboratory on a farm and are not using stringent precautions as we try to do in a human laboratory—in laboratory conditions under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, for example, with a licence for the premises and person—you run a risk. For example, somebody coughing 30 metres away from a dish where CRISPR is being done could introduce human DNA. That human DNA would be completely random—off the skin or off the cough. It is a real issue which has happened. It happened when we were trying to do our original work deciding whether somebody had a fatal genetic defect way back in 1988. Therefore, we had to be very scrupulous.
Again, the same problem arises; you could pick up those markers and see not what you would expect to see in a genome. I do not think it fundamentally changes the risk of introducing either organisms or bits—we talked about plasmids and other bits as well—of DNA which might arise. They are not simple; some of these are quite big chunks which can go in. Once you have taken the double-stranded break—which is what happens during CRISPR—the DNA is vulnerable to the introduction of foreign DNA that you do not expect or want and might express. That is one of the problems.
Off-target mutations are another issue entirely, which is very clear from the literature. I spent a long time reading last night before going to bed to make certain I was sure of this. There are dozens of publications looking at mammalian DNA which show that off-target mutations, which are unwanted and may cover abnormal effects, would result in a fairly normal looking animal producing something we would not expect.
That brings me to the next part of these amendments. I am afraid this is difficult with farm animals, because we are looking at long gestation periods. It is not like mice. With mice, we can do this within a month; in two months, we get two generations; in three months, we probably get three, more or less, because they have to get to sexual maturity. With mouse work, you can have several generations and you can get the same results. Actually, what we have to see is whether what happens with mice happens with farm animals, which seems highly probable. Their progeny, of course, are what is key to the success of this technology, ultimately—whether or not you can safely produce a herd. That is a fundamental difficulty with the Bill as it stands.
This is not necessarily a bad Bill. I hope that we can help. In fact the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and I have discussed this privately. Neither of us wants to delay useful technology that might help at a critical stage in our development as nations when we are looking at a big threat to the planet, but we could actually make that threat worse if we got this wrong. That is why I tabled Amendments 20, 22 and 23. I beg to move.