Many EU citizens love to buy the latest electronic gadgets. Social and business life has been transformed by companies cleverly exploiting the potential offered by wireless and 3G phone networks and the availability of large amounts of cheap processing power and storage. When it comes to ICT, technology is good and, despite bad publicity about the tax paid by multinational corporations in countries where they operate, Google and a host of other companies have a positive image.
The situation with the biological sciences is much less clear-cut. Pharmaceutical companies have also come in for quite a lot of criticism recently for allegedly being selective about clinical trial data. Most people recognise that few drugs are panaceas and, while they benefit some people, they can have quite serious negative side-effects in others.
Nevertheless, the products of the pharmaceutical industry are sought after, despite their considerable downsides. Few patients give any thought to how the drugs they take are produced. Until quite recently, these would have been made by chemical synthesis or purification of plant extracts. However, it is now increasingly likely that medical conditions are treated with bio-pharmaceuticals, made using sophisticated enzymatic processes to produce natural cellular components outside the body or tailor the precise active site and overall structure of a molecule.
This seems to bother very few people. If we have an illness, we want something to cure or alleviate it and generally trust the medical profession and licensing authorities to provide us with safe drugs to do this. That biotechnology is the key to production of many of these is rarely uppermost in people’s minds when they are given a prescription. How medicines are produced is a non-issue.
But use exactly the same biotechnology toolset to breed new plant varieties and antennae start to twitch. Scientists and companies may prefer to talk about crop biotechnology, but what many people hear is ‘GM crops’ or even ‘Frankenstein foods’.
The reasons for this are complex. For one thing, food is a uniquely emotive issue, surrounded by many cultural and ethical issues as well as purely practical ones such as safety and nutrition. It is easy to persuade people – particularly those whose urban lives divorces them from the realities of farming – that tinkering with food should be viewed with suspicion. ‘Naturalness’ is an ill-defined but powerful marketing message, underlying the establishment of the profitable niche of organic foods.
Another factor is that, even for city-dwellers, any time outside built-up areas highlights the fact that food is being grown across a large part of the countryside. Pharmaceuticals are made in small batches in gleaming stainless steel vessels behind closed doors, while food is grown out in the open so that environmental issues come into play. Whatever safeguards are put in place, a message which chimes with many people is the danger of ‘foreign’ genes spreading in the environment and wreaking havoc with biodiversity.
The third seductive message is that crop biotechnology is under the control of a handful of powerful multinational companies, seeking to control our food supply and maximise profits with little thought for either the environment or the health of consumers. That some of these corporations are American feeds the flames: the profit motive is, for some reason, widely distrusted on this side of the Atlantic.
This potent mixture of negative messages has made many people wary of GM crops, particularly as the current generation has been designed to benefit the farmer in producing standard commodity soy and maize, primarily used in animal feed. What has been mooted by the industry for many years (and, to be fair, somewhat oversold at times) is the potential to develop transgenic plants with real nutritional or other benefits.
One of these is just appearing on the radar screen. A team at Rothamsted Research has developed a Camelina (false flax) variety which can produce large amounts of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and is now hoping to start the first outdoor growing trials this summer (Rothamsted Research submits application to Defra for permission to carry out GM field trial).
This is an important development which could benefit both consumers and aquatic biodiversity. Omega-3 fatty acids are an important component of a healthy diet and oily fish are a major source. However, fish do not make these fatty acids themselves, but accumulate them by eating the algae which are the primary source. Even farmed fish have to be fed with feed derived from other fish or fish oils so that farming can deplete overall fish stocks as much as fishing itself. Providing a plant source of these essential fatty acids could therefore reduce the environmental impact of fish farms while continuing to benefit consumer health.
There will doubtless be protests, and quite high levels of security will be needed to protect the trial plot from small numbers of activists who may want to destroy it. However, this institute has been a leading centre for GM crop development for many years and has a good history of dealing with critics. Last year, it started a programme of trials of wheat modified to repel aphids (Rothamsted GM wheat trial) and successfully prevented their disruption by publicly defending their work and openly engaging with protestors.
This work is currently being conducted by the public sector, which takes away the issue of multinational involvement. But, if successful, this crop will be taken to market by a company, almost certainly one of the major ones which have been the focus of criticism. However, the debate has now moved on to a more balanced footing and it is much more likely than previously that the general public will have no problem with this.
Indeed, the remaining problem for the whole sector is the dominant influence of parts of the environmentalist lobby on politicians and policymaking. Until that stranglehold can be broken, permitting governments to vote on the basis of scientific advice rather than prejudice, the benefits of crop biotechnology will be denied to European farmers and consumers.
Martin Livermore
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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