The UK government is seeking a law change on gene-edited food, allowing it to be sold in the country for the first time.
The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill will allow gene-edited crops to be developed and grown in England and sold in Great Britain.
The move comes in the face of polls indicating the vast majority of the UK public are opposed to the idea.
Supermarkets remain unenthusiastic and campaigners argue that gene editing is just genetic modification by a more palatable name.
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New Scientist chief reporter Adam Vaughan tells Nine to Noon the bill is a big step and if passed will open the doors to modified foods being sold in supermarkets and seeds from modified plants passing down these new genes to further generations of plants.
He says the current bill will realistically take a few more years to come into law and see such produce on selves. Vaughan says there the post-Brexit Conservative government believes there are environmental and health benefits from going down this route. There are commercial reasons too.
“I think it's also very much a kind of showing that UK can do things differently from when it was in the EU, because this is changing the way the law was set out when we were in the EU."
Gene editing differs from genetic modification in that the plant itself is changed genetically, but no genetic material from any other organism is introduced.
Technology known as CRISPR is used to gene edit. Advocates of the technology say it produces new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.
“That’s kind of come of age in the last decade or so,” Vaughan says.
“Often, it's done using a protein to sort of cut the DNA and that can be used to disable a gene. There's different ways of using it, but that's the main one that's being used in this case for editing food. The really key thing is that it's not transgenic, as it was not taking genes from another species.
“I think the feeling is, among scientists and the UK Government, at least, that this will be sort of more palatable to the public, unlike GM food.”
He says it’s telling that there has been no public backlash or protests over the possible introduction of gene-edited foods.
This is despite the changed genetic make-up of plants being permanent, one of the controversies around the possibility of gene-editing in humans. The plants reproduce, with the genes carried on down the line.
The benefits of gene-editing may be limited by science too.
“Although, it's described as precision breeding, and it sounds super high-tech, and we can go in and perfectly manipulate the DNA,” he says.
“It's quite often not always perfect and it's quite hard often to identify the gene that will change what you want in the phenotype.”
Vaughan says the government is emphasising the commercial power of scientific innovation and the export potential of products, but there remain question marks any enterprise.
“It’s probably going to be more expensive. You could argue that people might pay for that if they think it's going to make them healthier if they think that there was on the environmental side, one example that's been used, as you know, a strain of a plant that is resistant to infection to disease, so that you therefore need to use less pesticides. People might, people might be willing to pay like an environmental premium for that.”
On the other hand, consumers are often prepared to pay a premium for organics, which can be more expensive as well.
Organic growers will have concerns about the potential of genetic cross-contamination with their produce from nearby fields of gene-modified plants. Vaughan believes those concerns are misplaced and a knee-jerk reaction
He says there are no plans to require retailers to label food as containing these products.
“I do think that's an issue and scientifically there's no way to distinguish them because they could just have been naturally bred."
The gene editing of animals is also in the sights of the UK government.
“It will be animals later down the line. That's the plan. But the scientists advising the government know that the first place to start is crops, that if they start talking about cows and sheep and so on that this might freak people out. I think there is a general kind of strategy here of gaining public acceptance of ‘we'll start with crops’, because that seems relatively innocuous, and then we'll move to animals later.”