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Scientists comment on reports of an EU ‘reset’ which could mean the precision breeding act is dropped from UK legislation.
Prof Angela Karp, Director & CEO of Rothamsted Research, said:
“If we are to grow our economy, the UK needs to continue to go forwards, not delay – or worse still, go backwards! Breeding is a lengthy process. We need to empower breeders to select from among the full suite of available technologies as the best approach to provide solutions to the challenges facing us in food production. This will not always be gene editing. But where other approaches are not possible, gene editing offers a powerful means to deliver resilient and sustainable crops in ways that have not been available before. The UK should be proud of its rigorous and a regulated approach to science and the way that new technologies are tested. This is the time to use this to our advantage. Hesitation or delay now will simply push back the time when much needed improvements in crops will be able to appear in farmers’ fields and the time when the UK will be able to reap the rewards of its past investments in ensuring enabling technologies are exactly that, enabling!”
Dr Joe Perry, former chair of the EFSA GMO Panel, said:
“The EU has their own risk assessment of GM and GE crops through the European Food Safety Authority. But for political rather than scientific reasons it consistently ignores and overrules these objective assessments, preferring to take a deliberately risk-averse and often illogical stance.
“It is important that the UK does not allow itself to be sidelined in the slow lane by EU demands. The concessions called for are not worth the candle.”
Prof Johnathan Napier, project leader at Rothamsted Research, said:
“In 2023 the UK diverged from the EU’s outmoded position on gene editing, creating an opportunity for our plant breeders and innovators to adopt this new technology. With the additional secondary legislation signed into law yesterday, UK industry is now well-placed to exploit the opportunities that gene editing represents. It is very telling that the EU is also trying to adjust its regulatory stance on GE crops, since they recognise that they are out-of-step with the rest of the world. But there is a golden opportunity for the UK’s plant biotechnologists and plant breeders to bring new GE innovations to market before the EU catches us up and we would be mad not to grasp this chance with both hands”.
Prof Toby Bruce, Professor of Insect Ecology, Keele University, said:
“Innovation in agriculture is needed to tackle food and environment challenges. Restricting options for crop development means that opportunities are lost. New efficient crops could improve food security while allowing adaption to climate change. They could help reduce the environmental footprint of farming and free up land for biodiversity conservation.
“The UK Precision Breeding Act is limited to gene editing. It does not cover insertion of foreign genes beyond those that could have been achieved through traditional breeding methods. It addresses a strange anomaly of current EU legislation: targeted mutagenesis using gene editing techniques is banned at the moment, but random mutagenesis induced by radiation or chemical treatment is allowed.”
Prof Nigel Halford, Rothamsted Research and technical lead for PROBITY1:
“Whilst there was some concern that the secondary legislation on the Genetic Technologies (Precision Breeding) Act might get caught up in the UK/EU negotiations, the secondary legislation is now law, so any risk has passed. It always seemed unlikely that the UK government would allow the EU to dictate to us on food standards anyway, since that would put the UK in the position of having to comply with regulations it had no control over.”
1 A Platform to Rate Organisms Bred for Improved Traits & Yield – brings farmers, scientists, and food manufacturers together to trial the production and processing of precision-bred crops to accelerate understanding of their value to sustainable food and farming. Led by the British On-Farm Innovation Network it is a three-year £2.2m multi-partner project, funded by Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme, which is delivered by Innovate UK.
Prof Nick Talbot FRS, Executive Director of The Sainsbury Laboratory, said:
“The Precision Breeding Act (PBA) will enable the UK to develop durably disease-resistant crops in a sustainable manner, preventing the use of chemicals that are fossil fuel-derived and have environmental impacts. Our negotiations should be about encouraging the EU to approve innovation in this area, rather than discouraging scientific solutions to the climate crisis.
“The scientific community within the EU understand this very well and have welcomed the developments afforded by the PBA. So, while regulatory alignment with the EU is very welcome, especially when it facilitates scientific collaboration, enabling safe and effective genetic technologies must be safeguarded, given their potentially profound benefits to European agriculture.”
Dr Penny Hundleby, Senior Scientist at the John Innes Centre, said:
“As a scientist with over thirty years in genetic technologies, I’ve seen how innovation can transform agriculture. The UK now has a rare opportunity to lead globally in precision breeding — with the legislation passed and the science ready.
“To delay this progress in order to align with slower EU processes would undermine our ability to deliver resilient, sustainable crops at a time when food security and climate resilience are more urgent than ever. We risk forfeiting a clear post-Brexit advantage grounded in science, safety, and evidence.”
Prof Huw Jones, Chair in Translational Genomics for Plant Breeding, Aberystwyth University, said:
“Closer ties with the EU are a good thing but let’s not lose the logical regulatory progress we have made this side of the Channel. Simple gene editing is a speedier and more reliable breeding method to develop the crops we need in a changing world. It’s illogical to regulate these crops as GMOs and it is the EU that has been slow to follow the broad consensus on this. If there are no foreign genes, and the changes could have been generated by conventional breeding, they need regulation – but not as GMOs.”
Prof Neil Hall, Director of the Earlham Institute, said:
“Given the pressures on global food security, driven by climate change, the growing population and new diseases, it’s important that we harness all of the technical innovations at our disposal to ensure the sustainability of our agricultural systems.
“Over the past three years, including these last few months, Parliament has demonstrated important and legitimate leadership by passing the primary and secondary legislation to enable precision breeding in plants. It’s time to enable science research to help farmers adapt to our changing world.”
Prof Jonathan Jones FRS, Group Leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory, said:
“The Precision Breeding Act (PBA) provides an opportunity to protect our crops from pests and disease with biology rather than chemistry, and also enables new routes to more nutritious food, and I applaud this government and its predecessor for taking the legislation through to final approval and implementation. It is to my mind the sole Brexit dividend.
“However, it takes a long time between producing an improved plant in a lab and creating and obtaining approval for a variety that farmers can plant. I think it’s highly likely that by the time any precision bred varieties in the UK are ready to plant (likely at least 5 years from now) the EU will have approved its own version of the PBA.
“So, the government should stick to its guns on the PBA but quietly point out to the EU that, although there are no scientifically credible safety concerns with using these methods, the timelines in this industry are such that it will be a long time before any products are authorized in the UK and thus before any potential problems might arise.”
Prof Sarah Gurr, Chair in Food Security at Exeter University, said:
“It is sad to realise that whilst we embraced the need for GM vaccines during the recent COVID epidemic and we seem reticent to embrace gene edited crops. The need for climate proofed and disease resilient gene edited crops is paramount in our quest for sustainable agriculture.”
https://www.thetimes.com/article/08fe3606-e6ab-4a66-bb31-017165028f08
Declared interests
Jonathan Jones “is a senior investigator at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, and uses molecular and genetic approaches to study disease resistance in plants. Jones co-founded Norfolk Plant Sciences in 2007 with Prof Cathie Martin of JIC, with the goal of bringing flavonoid-enriched tomatoes to market (www.norfolkplantsciences.com). Jones is on the board of www.isaaa.org, the science advisory board of the 2Blades foundation (www.2blades.org) and the board of NIAB Cambridge University Farm. Jones has isolated and is deploying new resistance genes against potato late blight from wild relatives of potato, and conducting field trials to evaluate how well they work to protect the crop in the field and to generate improved varieties of potato (see http://www.tsl.ac.uk/news/blight-resistant-maris-piper/). See also http://www.tsl.ac.uk/groups/jones-group/.”
Penny Hundleby “is part of the Crop Transformation Group at the John Innes Centre and using genetic technologies to better understand the role of plant genes. The group provides gene editing resources to the UK and international research community and have been working with gene editing technologies in crops since 2014.”
Huw Jones: “I am speaking as a researcher at Aberystwyth University and not representing other organisations that I am affiliated with. I am a member of the FSA ACNFP and Defra ACRE. My declarations of interest are listed on the websites of those Depts.”
Toby Bruce: “No conflict of interest.”
Neil Hall: “none to declare”
Nick Talbot: “Nick is in receipt of funding from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust and UKRI (BBSRC and GCRF Funding) and is a Gatsby Plant Science Advisor. He is also a member of the John Innes Governing Council and Board member of PBL Technology.”
Johnathan Napier “is named as inventor on several patent families relating to GM plants and he has previously acted as a scientific advisor for Yield10 Biosciences. He has also previously provided ad hoc consultancy advice to BASF.”
Joe Perry: “I am fully retired and have no competing interests.”
For all other experts, no reply to our request for DOIs was received.