Articles

Here’s a bit of end of year contemplation. In 2024 y organisation briefly considered – but rejected – a cheeky suggestion to bring back the provocative term ‘Frankenfoods’. The days of that kind of polemic may have passed but, as we note in our year-end reflection, the story of the Modern Prometheus still has something to teach us about foresight and accountability.

A new report from A Bigger Conversation shows that while agroecological farmers, working in a values-based system, have an interest in technology that serves those values, they have little interest in technology that does not. Its findings emphasise the importance of a more critical and context-specific approach to technological innovation, which contrasts with ‘hard sell’ of Agriculture 4.0.

The UK government says gene editing will fill our shops with better food. The reality is more empty promises and more empty shelves. Although several gene-edited crops and a few animals have been approved for commercialisation over the last decade, particularly in the US and Japan, few have made it to market and most have been abandoned.

This week we have had an opportunity to review a leaked letter from Lord Benyon, the Defra Minister leading the Genetic Technology Bill through the Lords. Its aim was to convince those peers who have been working hard to amend the bill that they should have faith in the government’s good intentions. Here’s our response.

Calls for sustainability criteria for genome edited organisms are welcome and long overdue, but sustainability cannot be used as a substitute for risk assessment

Anything can happen between now and the final version of the new Precision Breeding Bill. But government seems to have taken to heart the suggestion from last year’s Regulatory Horizons Council report to apply “creative use of guidelines, standards [and] policies” to see if it’s possible to get it right (or get away with it).

Up until a year or so ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that the issue of genetically engineered foods in the UK had faded quietly away.  It hadn’t, of course. While consumer scepticism remained a big hurdle to introducing GMOs into the UK food system – and more widely into Europe – genetic engineers were creating new genetic technologies, imagining new ways to apply them to food and farming and, perhaps most importantly, inventing new narratives to position genetic engineering as simply a natural step on the continuum of plant breeding and improvement of our crop species. In the last decade genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) became ‘gene editing’, genetic engineering became ‘biotechnology’ and genetic engineers became ‘biotechnologists’. ‘Sustainable intensification’, ‘nature-based solutions’, ‘precision breeding’ and ‘speed breeding’ have all become euphemisms for genetic engineering.

This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to two scientists―Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna―“who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.” According to the Nobel Prize committee the “genetic scissors” of CRISPR “have […]

The global spread of coronavirus/COVID-19 has sent researchers and scientists into overdrive to find both treatments and cures. In the meantime, doctors and other practitioners are, to a large extent, improvising. They are employing best-care practices for the very sick in hospital and providing best-guess advice for those with mild symptoms who are self-isolating, and […]

In a hall filled to the rafters with agroecological farmers, a man approaches the podium. Most already know what he’s going to say, but they’ve come to listen anyway—only half believing that what they’ve seen and heard about his assault on farming and farmers could be accurate. George Monbiot is a journalist and author specializing […]