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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Oxford Martin School. My name's Charles Comfrey, I'm the director.

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Before welcoming our speaker this evening, I also welcome Melanie Whelan, the chief executive of BBC.

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And I can go over there and see CEO of Rotherham said research is very welcome at the school.

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It's an enormous pleasure to welcome utterly, utterly later to the school autoline as a hugely distinguished plant molecular biologist.

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She's director of the Sainsbury's lab at the University of Cambridge.

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And I think is that the picture from your window that might have been utterly off office looks at over the botanic garden.

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She's professor of plant development. She's active in a huge number of other things in the UK.

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She's a fellow of the Royal Society, and she chairs the Royal Society's Policy Expert Advisory Committee.

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She's a member of the Council for Science and Technology that directly advises the prime minister on those issues,

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and as I said, she was made a dame in 2017. I think you're very welcome here.

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Please come and give your talk. So thank you for the invitation, it's really a pleasure to be here.

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I've been sort of going over in various ways what I wanted to talk about.

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I was originally going to give a sort of very general implant, wonderful talk,

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and then decided that the opportunity was actually too good to miss with this kind of mixed audience instead to talk about about GM at some level.

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I very rarely talk about GM in that defined way, and you'll see as I go through why I very rarely talk about GM in that defined way.

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But I think now is actually an extraordinarily important moment to start thinking about it again in a in a different way.

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OK, so that's the preamble. So as I understand it, this is the seminar as part of a series in the kind of general kind of food futures books.

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And I think one of the things that is very clear about the future of food is there is a very broadly held consensus about what's needed.

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I wrote this slide and then I found something almost exactly the same on the Martin School website.

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Everybody pretty much agrees that what we need is this, you know, reliable, resilient supply of food that is safe,

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obviously, and nutritious and affordable, and it's produced in a way that's environmentally sustainable.

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And if there are any risks and certainly when there are benefits, they should be equitably shared in an appropriate way across the food chain.

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So very clear, everybody's. Pretty much can sign up to this thing.

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And yet we are in a situation where many of the the issues that surround is common goals are highly contentious.

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So how you go about achieving this is very unclear. And my area, which is plant genetics, is particularly contentious.

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So what are the contributions for plant genetics to delivering these goals?

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And they are particularly contentious in the context of of genetically modified crops and that the quality of the debate around GM.

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In my opinion, is very poor and and highly polarised and not helpful.

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And having worked in this space more or less through the whole period of time when this debate has been going on from its inception forward,

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it's been interesting watching the discussion about the debate.

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So generally speaking, I would say there are two hypotheses for why it is that GM is so controversial.

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And one of them, which is a kind of classic deficit model, has been around for a long time right from the beginning and refuses to go away,

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despite the incredibly powerful evidence that it really has nothing to do with it.

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So there are still many people of the view that GM is perceived as dangerous just because people don't understand what it is.

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And if only we explained it to people and these people, whoever they may be, then everything will be fine.

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It's there, and as I say, it refuses to go away as an explanation, despite the very good evidence that it's not what's going on.

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There is much better evidence that what's going on, you can frame it in various different ways.

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I like to frame it in the context of social identity theory.

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So GM has become a kind of poster child for nasty, profit driven agriculture and nasty profit driven agriculture has associated with it a variety

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of characteristics that go completely against those goals that everybody agrees or could go.

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So it's supposed to be a poor in the context of food safety.

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It's supposed to be very poor in the context of quality across the food supply chain,

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and it's supposed to be very poor in the context of its environmental sustainability.

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And unfortunately for those of us working in in science, science has become associated with that whole package.

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Profit driven nasty agriculture is science driven,

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whereas the nice sort of agriculture is all about nature and the science like this stuff is terribly kind

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of reductionist and and unsophisticated in a way where the nature stuff is all lovely and holistic.

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And you see this very straightforwardly in supermarkets. If you label your food as natural, however incredibly unhealthy it might be.

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If it's labelled natural, it will sell and it's lovely.

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And then this is I'm very much like this advert for a particular sort of sauce, but it is very direct.

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Scientists should not be allowed to make food. I don't know if you can read this thing here, but it says if, if so, if you let scientists loose on,

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this will only be about efficiency and all the rest of it, and it will taste horrible.

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And OK, so this is obviously slightly jokey advert, but at the same time, it's it's an advert.

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It's selling you food and it says science has nothing to do with this food because science would not create high quality food.

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And then, you know, in this nature science dichotomy that the one is the loudest people is His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

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And these are quotes from a recent lecture he gave in 2011, which absolutely highlight this tension that is perceived to be going on.

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We're told that science has all the answers that the depiction of science is kind of arrogant and and reductionist.

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So they say when actually we should be thinking about nature, which is this much more lovely, holistic, complex, beautiful thing.

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And we need to restore the balance between the reason of instinctive wisdom and this the

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rational insights of scientific analysis as those two things were completely separate.

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And you know, we need to show greater respect for the genius of nature's designs on this stuff.

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As I say, you know, Prince Charles doesn't mean it's unusual that people go, Yes, we agree with Prince Charles.

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But nonetheless, this this kind of narrative is very common in the entire debate,

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and this is where this kind of idea of social identity comes into play.

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So social identity theory was developed primarily by Henry TouchFLO, and it's about.

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A very deeply held psychological mechanism for dealing with insecurity and feel of fear of the unknown and what you do is

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you get together in an enquiry and you all tell each other how correct you are and how wonderful and support each other.

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That's that's not too bad. But unfortunately, part of the whole thing requires that to be an outgroup.

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So part of the bonding of the in-group is that we don't like those people over there who disagree with us.

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And as I say, lots of I'm very impressive experiments arbitrarily dividing people into groups who within hours will adopt in-group outgroup idea.

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They support the people in their group.

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They don't like the people in that group, even when you've given those groups completely arbitrary things that they like and don't like.

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So the basis of these experiments. So you wind up with in-group favouritism and outgroup derogation and within Greek social influence,

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which homogenised is both the the the opinions of the in-group, but also the opinions of the outgroup.

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And then you have polarisation and that you can see incredibly clearly in the context of this science nature and

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actually more broadly in the concept of science as a activity done by strange boffins in labs versus people,

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and particularly if those scientists are kind of corporate and therefore profit driven,

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you wind up with the in-group who these scientists who are, you know, feel embattled in their labs.

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You think they're doing a good job trying to see the world pitted against the outgroup,

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these people who seem to not like the job that they're trying to do.

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So this is the in-group and outgroup, and the identity of these scientists is a wonderful, rational, knowledgeable, innovative people.

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The identity of the people is that they're much more holistic and intuitive,

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and the scientists don't like people because they think they're irrational and Luddite.

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And the people don't like the scientists because they think they're so reductionist, robotic, arrogant people.

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And you see this really clearly and a lot of the kinds of discussions that I've, you know, witnessed in this, the GM space.

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And actually, I think it's that that contributes to the persistence of the deficit model because the scientists, the in-group,

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it's part of their identity that they're knowledgeable and they know things and the people over there are a Luddite and stupid and don't know things.

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And so obviously, the difference between us is, I know this stuff.

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You don't know this stuff. And if only I tell you this stuff, then you will change your mind.

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And it's it's directly unhelpful to try to tackle this problem using this deficit model

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because it precisely ramps up the very differences that this model kind of defines.

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So, I mean, you can pass it out slightly differently in this science nature way.

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And if you're in the science group, reductionism is a good thing. It's a helpful tool to help you understand the system.

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You think you're fully rational, even though everybody knows that people are not fully rational and they shouldn't be

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fully rational because that's actually problematic for creativity and things like that.

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And scientists think they're terribly knowledgeable. And that is what kind of drives the arrogance.

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Mirror image of knowledgeable in in the opinion of the people on the other side of the divide who think that they have this much more sophisticated,

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holistic understanding of what's going on.

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That's that's clearly deeply intuitive and humble, and that that kind of narrative is what's branded as ignorance by the people on the science side.

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So somehow or other to get through this GM debate, we need to get through this false divide between science and nature.

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And I think it's particularly powerful and particularly difficult in the context of genetics and in this case, climate genetics.

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Because of the the the narratives that genetic, the geneticists have used to talk about their discipline over the years.

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So I'm particularly, for example, in the context of this reductionist, holistic paradigm.

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There is a. And narrative about genetics that it is highly reductionist, so if you go with some, you know, Wikipedia type definitions,

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the practise of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of simple fundamental constituents,

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especially when these are said to provide a sufficient explanation, there is a genetics narrative,

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which is that the DNA is the blueprint of life is a sufficient explanation, even when it is obvious that it isn't.

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And to me, as a geneticist, this holistic holism definition is exactly what genetics is about.

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It's the theory that parts of a whole are intimately connected with that whole and that they cannot exist independently of the whole.

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Then you can't understand without reference to the whole what's going on.

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And for me, genetics, particularly developmental genetics, which is where I've worked entirely.

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What's happening is an attempt to try to understand the relationship between things that you might call cults and the Oh,

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it's and it's about that information flow between the levels of organisation in the system.

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So one way you can think about that is in the context of the gene Typekit.

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That's the sequence of of the DNA, which is happening at this kind of scale nanomoles, not a nanometre type scales.

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And how that genotype relates to the phenotype, which is at the level of the whole organism, look like what is it doing?

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Which in the context of the plant, I work on this in this kind of tens of centimetre scale.

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And what we're trying to understand this is what these arrows are.

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Genetics is about understanding precisely the relationship between the parts at different levels of organisation

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is very difficult to say what the part is because always there's something smaller in something bigger.

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So is it a part or is it a whole depends on which direction you're going?

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And it's the dynamic interactions between those scales that's really resulting in this phenotype,

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which is an emergent property of anything of the genotype and itself contributing to building the genotype of the next generation.

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And this scales. This is. Actually, quite kind of phenomenally mind boggling.

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So this is a slight stolen from Rico Cohen, which points out that what we're talking about is the relationship between this and the world.

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I mean, this is this is many, many orders of magnitude that we're trying to map across.

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So to argue that genetics is reductionist when what you're trying to do is understand information

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flow across those kinds of scales is is extraordinary and yet deep in the narrative of genetics.

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Is this kind of deterministic, almost reductionist narrative which begins with, in some ways with Mendel, who is a hero because he really.

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A put into place the tools with which we could start to understand the relationship between the genotype from the phenotype.

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So I mean, a couple of sides kind of practically back to school on Mendel and maybe a thing that you didn't talk about in school,

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which is starch branching enzyme. But probably what you did talk about was round and wrinkled peas and Mendel's first floor,

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which says traits are governed by hereditary factors which exist in pairs.

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So you one from your mother, one from your father that you inherited and they don't mix during your life,

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but they segregate into your gametes, into the next generation.

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So everybody's kind of familiar with this is the pot with the round and the wrinkled peas.

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And if you cross a true breeding ground pea with a true breeding wrinkled pea, then the first generation are all round.

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But in the second generation,

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because of that independent separation of the of the gene you inherited from your mother in the junior inherited from your father.

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You wind up with the famous three to one round two wrinkled ratios.

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And so that relationship there between these hereditary factors, which immediately then sound like unitary parts,

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which are a sufficient explanation if you want to put it in that way for a phenotype.

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Way up here in terms of random and copy piece, that's also that's the kind of bedding in this notion of genetics is reductionist.

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But of course, now we know a lot more about what's going on, which is where starch branching enzyme comes into play.

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This gene encodes starch branching enzyme and in the wrinkled pea, it's mutant, so it doesn't work.

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So there is no gene for wrinkled. The gene for wrinkled is not having the gene for round.

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That's important. And if you don't have that gene when you're trying to build your,

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you fail to build your starch into more sugar, which is a building block of starch accumulates in the seed.

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And if there's more sugar at the time that the siege is maturing, they have this higher osmotic potential.

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So they suck up water and so that they are all kind of bougie, you say, growing with water.

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And then when they dry out, that water is lost and they wrinkle. And so a wrinkled pea is a wrinkled pea because of lack of starch branching enzyme.

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And you can draw a chain of events which looks very linear and maybe reductionist.

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But if you don't have starch branching enzyme, you don't make the RNA, you don't make the protein.

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Your starch synthesis is slowed, so you've got more sugar.

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So then I mean, but this is going on in the context of a whole organism which long here is a part is very hard to tell.

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There is, of course, all kinds of other stuff going on in the background. And then this wrinkled seed is building the next generation of peas.

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So again, although you can describe this in the very genes for reductionist way, this is what's happening.

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It's it fits, in my view, much better into this whole ISM debate, but also do some arithmetic.

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But this reductionist mystic has emerged in the way that we talk about genes we talk about genes for.

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We talk about the idea that there is a gene it maps on to a phenotype and it's a one for one thing.

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And it's it's a very deep feeling about anxiety.

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I think about genetic determinism, which in my view,

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is one of the reasons everyone's so excited about epigenetics because they view it as a kind of escape route from genetic determinism,

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rather than as a mechanism whereby gene expression is controlled, which we knew about already, and that genes for idea has been amplified.

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I think in the context of of the narrative around DNA sequencing.

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So genes are made of DNA. People talk about DNA, as I said all the time as being the blueprint for life.

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So if you had the sequence, you would be able to build the organism which you call out.

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The sequence by itself does nothing. You have to put it into a cell.

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The cell already has a huge amount of information in it. But admittedly was built using information that was in the DNA from the generation before.

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But this information is never naked, and you cannot build an organism out of a piece of DNA.

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You have to have the machinery that decodes that and rebuilds the cells.

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And so the blueprint analogies is that it contributes to this reductionist idea and it's problematic.

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And it then is extended to a blueprint for life with genes along it, like beads on a string.

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And you get this idea that genomes an amazingly fixed,

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organised things that behave beautifully in a kind of Prince Charles Nature's design kind of way.

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And it's just like that. And one really potent example of how it's just not like that is emerges from the work of Barbara McClintock,

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who using mice and especially maize kernels was able.

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You demonstrate effectively that there's bits of DNA that move about the genome is transposed by elements and you see them,

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you see the effects of them everywhere in your goals and in Snapdragons.

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Those patched particles of different colours are to do with bits of DNA,

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of hopping in and out of the genes that are required to make the pigments that coloured pencils.

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And so this instability in the genome is is very powerful and it's there.

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And in fact, Kathy Martin a number of years ago showed that the original almost certainly the original round and

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wrinkle mutation of Mendel was caused by the insertion of one of these transpersonal elements.

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And now that we have the sequences of of the genomes of of many crops, we know that they are absolutely stuffed full of these transposons.

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So this tiny bit at the top here in the all of the DNA sequences of of the wheat genome,

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the wheat is a hybrid of three different genomes, so it's actually got three genomes for abbey and genomes.

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And this bit up here is the genes. All the rest of the DNA is of the stuff, and these coloured bits are transposed with elements.

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So most of the genome is of wheat is made of these bits of DNA that in principle can cut themselves out and hop in and stick somewhere else.

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In practise, there are many mechanisms that keep them comparatively inactive, but nonetheless, the idea that you've got these beautiful,

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well-designed genome genes organised in a lovely way on a string,

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if it's nonsense and the way genomes work and the way they're organised is frankly a mess.

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And it's astonishing to my mind that they work at all and see how this fits into this notion of the way genetics works.

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This is kind of reductionist, rational thing is problematic and how it fits into the notion of how nature works.

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It's a beautiful, holistic design that is behaving in this beautiful race.

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That's also problematic that neither of these extremes, unsurprisingly, because extremes value are how things work.

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Neither of them are useful ways to think about the space and as well as the transposons jumping about the genome.

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Of course, there are many other mechanisms that are generating genetic variation within organisms, like when the DNA is copied, there are mistakes.

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Here are the transpose elements. There are big rearrangements in the genome that happen, particularly during the formation of the gametes,

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where bits of the crop, the chromosomes or paver to generate genetic variation.

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But that can go wrong so you can get bigger rearrangements. That's environmentally induced DNA damage that we all know about sunblock and so on.

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There are mistakes in that recombination process where the chromosomes was swapping over.

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When your repair mechanisms are doing your best to hope this mess together, they don't always work properly and they can make mistakes.

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And then, as I've described, there are actually hybridisation between species events, particularly in the plants,

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and there are whole genome duplications where you fail to make a cameo, but you nonetheless make a plant.

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And then there are also mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer where particularly microbes will,

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which make a living out of sticking their bits of DNA into genomes of plants and indeed animals,

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and then taking them back out again afterwards and then going and infecting another plant can move bits of DNA about between plants.

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So this idea of the beautiful genetic machine doesn't work.

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This is a. Not a very good way of encapsulating what's going on, but nonetheless,

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somehow it works if you are sitting in a room with all the mess that they're in and

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that kind of series of of mutational events that I talked about actually has driven.

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That's what underpins evolution, which also is kind of alluded to in the Prince Charles quote that there's been

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this kind of rigorous test of time over millions of years that is in theory,

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selected out the lovely, beautiful ones. And it is true that evolution has happened.

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This is true and that it's a mutation that underpins it and the difference between us.

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Watson and Crick and Chimpanzee are a number of mutations that have arisen over time in starting with the

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common ancestor of those two things and diverging along the the two lineages the chimpanzee and humans.

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And it is also true that which of those mutations is has survived is at least in part,

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although by no means in how determined by those that confer a successful phenotype on the organism.

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And this is the survival of the fittest notion of Darwin with which we are all very familiar.

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This is true. And so some of the quotes of Prince Charles, you might say then is in a in a good place.

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It is the case that that nature, if you want to put it that way, has picked out solutions to various problems that organisms face.

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But that also provides a very important cornerstone, I think,

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in the in the debate about the difference between the notion of science and nature as different ways of thinking about things.

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And the reason for that is because a lot of your ability to survive as the fittest has to do with your ability to defend yourself.

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So nature is red in tooth and claw. If you're a plant,

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it's not really the tooth and claw that so much of a problem as the slime and nasty

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digestive enzymes or indeed of our teeth and claws or teeth at least also involved.

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But nonetheless, you're a plant, particularly if you have to answer your rooted to the spot.

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You are complete sitting duck for all kinds of things and say plants that have survived have

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survived because they can defend themselves very strongly against all kinds of attacks.

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So in the real world, plants are poisonous or spiny or tough.

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And the notion that nature has provided all these wonderful things for us to eat and those natural foods must be the best is seriously problematic.

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It only works if you forget the plants and living organisms that are fighting for their own existence and trying to defend themselves hotly.

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And nobody says to their children, go into the woods and eat anything you can find.

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It's natural, so it must be good for you. It doesn't happen.

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And and that's I find it very interesting in some ways that this notion of nature is of a bounteous provider has

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arisen in in the context of a of a narrative that's about respecting nature and not putting humans ahead of nature.

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And yet, that narrative depends on the concept that humans are in some way ahead of nature.

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And that link, I think, is a very important leap to close.

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And fortunately for us, our ancestors over the last ten thousand years have noticed that natural plants are not very good for you.

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And so Darwin, as well as his work on natural selection, did quite a lot of work on domestication.

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So how you take an organism that has evolved under natural selection and chewed it through breeding to provide an organism

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that has evolved through human selection to deliver properties that are actually much more appropriate for what we need.

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So if you think about that in the context of a plant natural selection,

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if you were a plant is about allocating the resources that you have available to you, the nutrients that you capture,

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the photosynthesis that you do to minimise viable offspring,

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your grandchildren in the face of stiff competition from other plants and from things that are trying to eat you.

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So you are trying to collect as much resource as possible.

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Invest it as far as you possibly can in your grandchildren, Wolf defending yourself from the opposition and to do this.

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Plants have evolved with these complex multiscale regulars, regulatory systems that I alluded to,

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and those systems deliver really flexible growth habit that's adaptable depending on the

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environment in which the plant is growing and then all kinds of mechanisms to protect the plant,

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particularly the seed, which is the children, the plants, children and quite often indigestible or poisonous.

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They're also minimally resourced because that's a kind of bet hedging mechanism.

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If you want to make as many things as possible, all of which have a good chance of surviving.

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And your immobility also means that if you're not careful, all your children will will live in your house forever.

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And it's a much better idea to try and disperse them so you would like the seed to be dispersed of the pond.

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And that list of characteristics from the point of view of us wanting to get all food from plants is hopeless.

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And so human selection, which is about the survival of your favourite,

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is much more about allocation of the maximum amount of resource to the part that we want to eat,

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which for most of the calories that we eat, is the seed in cereals.

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We are not interested in plants investing in in competition because we want to grow them all in the field and we want to play nicely together.

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So we've actually removed a lot of those competitive mechanisms. We also don't really want them to label their seeds full of poisonous things.

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So we've had to.

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Who gave a lot of those natural defences as well over the eight to ten thousand years that we've been doing this domestication process.

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So you wind up with crop plants and crop plants. Nothing to do with natural plants.

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And they have less flexible growers, have it. They have this very lovely, digestible, nutritious said.

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The seed is usually retained on the plant so that you can harvest it and it's maximally resourced.

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And one of the most powerful illustrations of that is that this slide,

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which you may well have seen before here is Tucson Tea, which is the closest living wild relative of maize.

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There's still cross fertile, and here is maize, which has been produced as a result of the ingenious,

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very industrious activities of mostly Central American farmers over the last eight thousand years.

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This is natural. This is not natural. And whilst I work in the Sainsbury laboratory,

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that is the product in many ways of the success of the supermarket chain and also obviously the vision of David Sainsbury.

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I have to show this slide. Sainsbury's naturally sweet, sweet, cool.

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This is definitely not naturally sweet, sweet corn.

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This is the product of a thousand years of human ingenuity because this is plant babies and plants really don't want you to eat their babies.

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So this is unnaturally sweet, sweet corn.

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And that's a jolly good thing because I don't want to get my nutrition out of the naturally the natural equivalent because it is just not as good.

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It really isn't. So we've taken as a human race all of these lovely sources of genetic variation that are random that crop up,

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and we use that variation to select out plants that do better than the natural plants that providing the food that we want.

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And then we've very carefully mixed and matched the combinations of genetic variation that have arisen

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to assemble these linked lines that we have now are way better than their closest living relatives,

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providing the food that we want. And this then creates a problem for us.

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And that problem is that if we want to add yet another new characteristic into that plant like a disease resistance characteristics,

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for example, for a new disease, it's cropped up. It's a nightmare because you've got this genome with all the genetic variants that you want,

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that you've assembled into one plant and you'd like to add a gene that you found in the wild

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relative that gives the plant this resistance to the disease and you can cross them together.

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That's great. But then the next generation is a mixture of the genome from your elite line, plus the genome from your wild relative.

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And you have to spend an awful lot of time cleaning that up through back crossing so you you can take your early crop blind.

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You can cross it to the wild relative with some useful disease resistance.

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This is what it looks like the wild relative of maize and you get this 50 50 hybrid and then you have to take the children from that

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cross and back across it to the elite line over many generations until you gradually get to the point where you've got only the disease,

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or at least not much more of this wild relative genome in the in the breeding line that you're generating than just that disease resistance line.

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And it's a lot of work and so on. People over the last 50 years ask themselves,

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how can we increase the genetic diversity in these elite lines without having to do this mammoth crossing effort?

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And we came up. We've come up with a variety of mechanisms. In the 1960s,

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we started upping the rate of of of mutagenesis in these lines by deliberately antagonising them and treating the plants with

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mutations like MS or x rays or something just to increase the rate of mutation in the in the line that you wanted to start with.

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You still have to do a lot of cleaning up because you can wind up with mutations that were not the ones that you want,

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but it's less dramatic than having to cross in things from a wild relative.

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And then more recently, we've developed these fancy techniques for adding genes from other species, be they plants or even not plants.

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So you can Dillip to do what you might call deliberate horizontal gene transfer from another plant.

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And more recently, we found ways to target specific genetic changes,

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which are these rafted techniques that are going under the banner of genome editing.

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So these are potentially very useful tools in the in the breeders toolbox for adding genetic diversity into these elite lines that we have.

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These are very controversial approaches, and they are controversial because they are being rolled out in a narrative of science reductionist,

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rational thing vs. nature, holistic, intuitive thing, and they are firmly placed in this science box.

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And this science box is associated with profit driven agriculture,

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which is in turn associated with nasty effects for environmental sustainability, poor food safety, all of these things.

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And that's the problem. The problem is when you're trying to use these techniques in an environment where people's.

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Identity as as good people who are in favour of environmental sustainability and equitable distribution

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of benefits across the food supply chain are using GM as a badge that defines the group they don't like.

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And at the same time, the scientist group are fixed in in in this their identity,

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which is that they're knowledgeable and they know what to do and their rationalist and

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those people over there are irrational and they're not behaving in a sensible way.

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And so that the narrative on both sides of the fence of building the fence up moment by moment,

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which is why we wind up with this kind of behaviour at some level.

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And so the reason why we're back,

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I'm back talking about it now after years of kind of not talking about it for reasons I'll get onto in a minute is because the laws that

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the European Union has put into place to govern the use of GM crops are laws that are based very deeply on this science nature dichotomy.

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And this has come to the fore again because with the arrival of genome editing crops,

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the question has become which is an extraordinary indictment of the value of these laws or genome aged crops of GM or not.

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Because if they are GM, we should do this. And if they are not GM, we should do that.

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I find this extraordinary. But the method by which you've made your plant makes an enormous difference.

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But what you've done to it makes very little difference at all. So the current law goes like this.

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If you want to get a new variety of crop registered, an agricultural crop variety, you have to do, you have to get it onto an approved list.

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And to get it onto the list, you have to prove that it's a new variety.

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So it's distinct. It's not the same as what's out there already.

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You have to prove, prove that it behaves itself across the field and through generations.

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So it's uniform and it's stable. It behaves itself across generations.

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And there are organisations that will do these so-called ducie tests for you and allow you to certify your crop.

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If it's an agricultural crop. You also have to provide some evidence of equal value for cultivation and use, which is a piece you.

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And that means that there has to be something about this new variety that makes it better than than the existing varieties,

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and that's what you have to do to get your new varieties registered.

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Now on the government website, it says there are additional rules for genetically modified plants,

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and what that means is if you've made your plant fit, even if you can demonstrate its distinct uniform and stable and has value for cultivation

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using genetic modification and in the European Union now also using gene editing,

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then there is triggered a huge raft of additional safety tests and all kinds of things that you have to do if you didn't use those techniques.

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Find straight into the field, if you did use those techniques is of of extra testing and the rest of it.

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And that is because the EU law is explicitly balanced on this natural, unnatural, unnatural kind of dichotomy.

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So the law says that any approach to crop genetic improvement,

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but also certain genetic material in the way that does not occur naturally should be GM.

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And that includes what one might call traditional GM, but also the European Court of Justice recent ruling.

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Gene editing these new techniques because they would not occur naturally, whereas those random mutagenesis methods,

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because they've been around for a long time, are in an exemption clause because they're considered to have a long safety record.

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And there is now a massive rule going on following the European Court's ruling about

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whether it was the right ruling with the genome editing should or shouldn't count.

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And would there be a way possibly to get it into that exemption clause, or at least some of it into that exemption?

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I think the entire focus of the debate is wrong, and I can understand, you know, why with that.

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But. The law is based heavily on on these social identity paradigm,

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where people who want this wonderful set of common goals that everybody agrees have

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decided or have bought into the idea that the GM is in violation of these goals,

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and that's because of this natural science dichotomy. So the idea that the identity defining factors for that group of people are that big business

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can't be trusted to deliver the goals that we all agree on and that natural is good.

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And if we want to make any progress at all on moving towards a system so we never regulatory system that is based on this distinction,

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rather than based on actually achieving the goals and the fact that we've aligned the goals which we all agree on,

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we have this thing that we don't agree on is extraordinary to my mind.

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We should start with the thing that we all agree on and work forward from there,

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rather than stop the thing that we will disagree on and work backward from there.

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Because the legislation based on the thing that we disagree on on this natural unnatural

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is in a totally inadequate really in delivering the outcomes that we all agree on.

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It's not going to do it. It doesn't ask those questions. And the core of it is this natural is good kind of hypothesis.

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And if we're going to move forward with this debate,

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then we have to have the conversation about how we want to build a regulatory system that delivers the things that we all agree on,

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but doesn't require people to give up their identity.

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That doesn't deny people that that their identity is people who really care about the environment,

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about nature and about equity ability in the food supply chain, which is fine because we all agree on those things.

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So we need to discuss these solutions to food security using a narrative that's about holism.

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It's about intuition. It's about humanity. And it's about nature in some way.

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And that's actually really easy to do. It's very easy to talk about solutions to delivering food security that has nothing to do with

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GM because a huge proportion of what we need to do to deliver food security is not about GM.

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GM is not the is not the thing on which the whole thing pivots.

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We should be talking about the whole space. We should be talking about the requirement to reduce waste across the whole supply chain.

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We should be talking about the the contribution of meat consumption to reducing food security.

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We should be talking about all kinds of economic practises that we could introduce that would contribute to food security,

379
00:43:30,200 --> 00:43:32,990
but also crucially to the sustainability of the system.

380
00:43:32,990 --> 00:43:40,340
And yes, we can be talking about crop genetics as part of a whole raft of much more holistic interventions.

381
00:43:40,340 --> 00:43:46,850
And the fact that we are talking endlessly about GM is actually an incredibly reductionist argument and

382
00:43:46,850 --> 00:43:54,200
that people on the nature side of the of the of the line are also investing heavily in that argument.

383
00:43:54,200 --> 00:44:02,750
It tells you that something's gone wrong with the system. So that's one thing we can do talk about the supply and the food supply system holistically.

384
00:44:02,750 --> 00:44:10,340
The second thing we can do is talk about nature in a more humble way.

385
00:44:10,340 --> 00:44:15,920
So natural is only good for you. If you think that humans are the centre of the universe,

386
00:44:15,920 --> 00:44:23,690
if you acknowledge that nature is much broader than humans and that plants also have an agenda,

387
00:44:23,690 --> 00:44:31,250
then you move very rapidly and intuitively into a situation that acknowledges that natural is not good for you.

388
00:44:31,250 --> 00:44:40,940
And we need to talk about that. We need to talk about that. This framing of nature as a bounty of supply of urban needs is a human centric,

389
00:44:40,940 --> 00:44:47,690
arrogant way of talking about it, and we need to think about it more as an integrated system.

390
00:44:47,690 --> 00:44:56,330
So again, this is an argument that that plays well with people who care about those things and we do care about these things.

391
00:44:56,330 --> 00:45:03,530
And then we need to acknowledge as scientists that this kind of decision involves evidence from science.

392
00:45:03,530 --> 00:45:07,880
But it is actually not a decision that is about rational choice.

393
00:45:07,880 --> 00:45:15,050
It's a decision that is very heavily driven by values, and we as scientists are not good at that.

394
00:45:15,050 --> 00:45:22,460
I've heard so many scientists saying we need to move to a law that's more rational and we don't.

395
00:45:22,460 --> 00:45:30,110
We need to move to a law is more based on the values that people actually want to be delivered from the food system,

396
00:45:30,110 --> 00:45:36,230
which is this list of things on which we can all agree. So I think we can shift the debate.

397
00:45:36,230 --> 00:45:46,760
We can allow people to keep their identities as people who worry about the safety of the food chain and the the

398
00:45:46,760 --> 00:45:55,550
sustainability of of our activities on this planet by replacing natural is good as a paradigm which doesn't work,

399
00:45:55,550 --> 00:46:02,880
doesn't deliver the values that people say they hold for a more general statement that values really matter.

400
00:46:02,880 --> 00:46:11,490
And this set of this list, identity defining factors, I think, is in this that most people could buy into.

401
00:46:11,490 --> 00:46:16,120
And it's very clear that the current regulatory system does not address this list.

402
00:46:16,120 --> 00:46:22,500
It addresses something altogether different because it's very heavily based on this natural is good paradigm.

403
00:46:22,500 --> 00:46:36,330
And so we could move to a much more robust regulatory system for crops that would allow a much more would support the shared goals that we all hold.

404
00:46:36,330 --> 00:46:45,390
But you shouldn't be able to introduce a new crop that's not in some way consistent with these widely agreed goals and that the product,

405
00:46:45,390 --> 00:46:53,820
the crop itself is what matters and what it does to contribute to these goals and the method by which you made it is not important.

406
00:46:53,820 --> 00:46:59,820
Now, obviously, the method by which you made it could have an impact on its safety,

407
00:46:59,820 --> 00:47:04,680
for example, the unintended effects of whatever intervention it was that you made,

408
00:47:04,680 --> 00:47:10,020
be that through conventional breeding or through the most fancy up-to-date technique you could possibly imagine.

409
00:47:10,020 --> 00:47:17,100
But the primary issue is what the crop does and what it is, not how you made it.

410
00:47:17,100 --> 00:47:22,740
And so you can imagine a system that that builds on our current registration system,

411
00:47:22,740 --> 00:47:27,900
which is not quite the same as the regulatory system where we ask about distinct uniform and stable.

412
00:47:27,900 --> 00:47:37,440
And we ask about value for cultivation and use in a much broader way that is based around these common goals for food production that we share.

413
00:47:37,440 --> 00:47:47,520
And then we, for every single new variety, introduce a question about risk.

414
00:47:47,520 --> 00:47:53,730
And based on the answer to an initial, fairly low level risk assessment,

415
00:47:53,730 --> 00:48:02,700
we can then trigger tiered additional risk assessment methods of methods that would cover all new crops and therefore genuinely

416
00:48:02,700 --> 00:48:10,980
deliver these kinds of common goals of environmental sustainability and safety because the current law simply doesn't do it.

417
00:48:10,980 --> 00:48:26,820
And to my mind, now is quite an important moment to to do this with the whole everything is is so unstable politically and this.

418
00:48:26,820 --> 00:48:33,750
Which is scary, but I think also creates the opportunity to do things that are quite disruptive.

419
00:48:33,750 --> 00:48:37,830
And this kind of approach is an approach that's a unifying approach.

420
00:48:37,830 --> 00:48:39,480
It starts with common goals.

421
00:48:39,480 --> 00:48:46,890
And I think if there's anything we need in this country just at the moment and indeed in this continent, it's things that bring people together.

422
00:48:46,890 --> 00:48:51,540
So I think taking an approach to regulation in the food system that does that,

423
00:48:51,540 --> 00:48:57,390
that starts with things that everybody can buy into is the way we need to move forward.

424
00:48:57,390 --> 00:49:16,300
And I think we have the opportunity to do that, which we should seise. Thank you.

425
00:49:16,300 --> 00:49:23,530
So I'd like to thank Autoline for a really fabulous talk. Just before we have questions to remind you that we are broadcast.

426
00:49:23,530 --> 00:49:32,380
And if there are any royals who would like to email in the question, then I'm sure we'll be very happy to answer royals questions.

427
00:49:32,380 --> 00:49:39,880
We have a question in on the Isle of Wight if he could wait for the.

428
00:49:39,880 --> 00:49:49,630
Thank you. Do you agree that it's bad enough chattering classes objecting to us producing GM crops in our own country?

429
00:49:49,630 --> 00:49:59,020
But is it even worse than preventing Third World countries from getting a drought resistant crops and so on?

430
00:49:59,020 --> 00:50:06,220
Vice President Mike Pence and prejudices around the world.

431
00:50:06,220 --> 00:50:16,960
Absolutely, I think one of the the outcomes of the highly contentious debate in the developed world where we have enough food has

432
00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:26,390
been to slow the deployment of whatever tools people in developing countries want to improve their agricultural systems,

433
00:50:26,390 --> 00:50:34,180
and there are many and different approaches they could use. But my view is this is a tricky, complex problem.

434
00:50:34,180 --> 00:50:35,950
It's a holistic type problem.

435
00:50:35,950 --> 00:50:45,370
We have a whole variety of different ways in and all of these tools should be available to us and we should use the right ones for the right jobs.

436
00:50:45,370 --> 00:50:49,960
Thank you. Question there. And thank you very much.

437
00:50:49,960 --> 00:50:56,380
Nice. Good topic. I was thinking that this house, I believe Brexit, the whole situation.

438
00:50:56,380 --> 00:51:10,690
And anyway, my question is, isn't the issue really that the companies that obtain benefit financial benefits have got too much power on scientists?

439
00:51:10,690 --> 00:51:14,200
Because most of these are legally bound and non-disclosure agreements,

440
00:51:14,200 --> 00:51:25,810
they lose their job if they took and by the people and by the pure fact that they are driven by financial gain with very little recourse.

441
00:51:25,810 --> 00:51:30,890
Sometimes for people who get damaged by what they are doing to.

442
00:51:30,890 --> 00:51:43,300
To bring some retribution for these companies is an estimate that I have a more robust regulatory system that controls patents that controls.

443
00:51:43,300 --> 00:51:51,610
Either formal or informal controls, the way in which this thing are necessary to avoid a situation that is happening now,

444
00:51:51,610 --> 00:51:56,440
which is people are taking things when they take extremes, they just fight each other.

445
00:51:56,440 --> 00:52:00,420
If you are not or if you're if you're going to read, you are wrong.

446
00:52:00,420 --> 00:52:08,690
In the case of a stronger regulation and political efforts to have signed this approach disclosure,

447
00:52:08,690 --> 00:52:13,290
except that it is needed to try to bring the two sides together.

448
00:52:13,290 --> 00:52:16,720
I think there are a number of very interesting points that you've made,

449
00:52:16,720 --> 00:52:25,870
and I think it's certainly true that the the way that the landscape has been divided up has indeed made things worse.

450
00:52:25,870 --> 00:52:32,440
So an example for that is that because GM is classified as a kind of different special thing,

451
00:52:32,440 --> 00:52:39,190
it's actually the kind of patent protection you can get as a breeder or as a company on it is much more,

452
00:52:39,190 --> 00:52:47,980
much more rigorous than the classic breeders rights protection, which allow people to continue to use your for your lines in breeding.

453
00:52:47,980 --> 00:52:54,310
And that division has come about because of this definition of GM as a sort of different thing.

454
00:52:54,310 --> 00:53:01,630
And so again, if we if we roll that out level the playing field and it was everything was regulated in the same way.

455
00:53:01,630 --> 00:53:10,750
I think we would have more opportunities indeed to, you know, to to create a system that genuinely delivers what people want,

456
00:53:10,750 --> 00:53:17,450
including proper scrutiny on the behaviour of companies that people are worried about.

457
00:53:17,450 --> 00:53:23,330
Questions back a bit provocative. Thank you very much.

458
00:53:23,330 --> 00:53:33,860
Excellent presentation. Do I understand you right that you're one of the few scientists in Oxford and Cambridge who actually

459
00:53:33,860 --> 00:53:44,270
see an opportunity and Brexit by being able to break out of the GM restrict Europe GM regulations?

460
00:53:44,270 --> 00:53:57,350
So I am interested in the whole of the European Union being able to build a regulatory system that supports these common goals that we all have.

461
00:53:57,350 --> 00:54:02,570
There are a number of my colleagues who have expressed the view in the way that you've expressed it.

462
00:54:02,570 --> 00:54:08,540
I've heard people more or less saying, Hooray, the silver lining is now we can have GM.

463
00:54:08,540 --> 00:54:12,740
And to me, that is fundamentally the wrong way to go about it.

464
00:54:12,740 --> 00:54:21,830
I'm I'm not. I mean, I'm genuinely, genuinely of the opinion that what we need is a regulatory system that rolls in all of these safety issues,

465
00:54:21,830 --> 00:54:31,040
of course, but these value judgements. And if that winds up not using very much GM, I'm I'm okay with that.

466
00:54:31,040 --> 00:54:33,170
I'm not about yes, we have to have GM,

467
00:54:33,170 --> 00:54:45,440
I'm about how can we build a system that actually gives people what they want and assesses the value to delivering these goals of safe,

468
00:54:45,440 --> 00:54:49,910
affordable, nutritious food in a way that that is yeah,

469
00:54:49,910 --> 00:54:55,670
it's robust and genuine rather than the current system, which simply doesn't even address those questions.

470
00:54:55,670 --> 00:55:04,910
So I'm not sorry. I'm not willing to rise to your provocative challenge, but thank you for the question.

471
00:55:04,910 --> 00:55:12,290
When you say that, like the method by which you make the crop is not important or like that, the tools are not available to everyone.

472
00:55:12,290 --> 00:55:18,920
I feel like, um, like I feel like a lot of the hesitancy that comes from people who are sceptical about science,

473
00:55:18,920 --> 00:55:22,340
who are making these like nature versus science. Arguments, as you put it,

474
00:55:22,340 --> 00:55:29,540
is from like recognising that the socio economic area that we live in make it

475
00:55:29,540 --> 00:55:33,710
so that not everyone has access to these same like genetic tools are like,

476
00:55:33,710 --> 00:55:42,070
these are expensive, like gene editing or gene gene sequencing facilities.

477
00:55:42,070 --> 00:55:51,230
It might like historically that these like places like academic institutions and places where science, like with the capital as happens,

478
00:55:51,230 --> 00:56:02,870
is done to profit, industrial agriculture and, for example, not like small farmers or not in an equitable way as you say it.

479
00:56:02,870 --> 00:56:10,820
And that might be the reason why I like the treatment of like that crossing or traditional types of plant breeding is different from like GM,

480
00:56:10,820 --> 00:56:20,480
just because of this difference, difference in access and difference in like products that result from these different techniques.

481
00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:25,430
Not saying that, like intrinsically, there's something about those techniques that make one bad and one good,

482
00:56:25,430 --> 00:56:31,160
but rather that just because of the society that we live in, this sort of like discrepancy exists.

483
00:56:31,160 --> 00:56:38,090
So I mean, that is a very interesting point. But again, this is another case where there's a kind of deep irony in the system,

484
00:56:38,090 --> 00:56:44,630
which is that the reason using GM in a in an agricultural in a crop breeding context is so

485
00:56:44,630 --> 00:56:51,470
expensive is is the regulatory hurdles that you have to jump through to get your crop registered.

486
00:56:51,470 --> 00:56:55,910
But actually, making the crop is really not that expensive anymore.

487
00:56:55,910 --> 00:57:03,110
There's a lot of money invested in universities in understanding which genes you might want to to look at,

488
00:57:03,110 --> 00:57:06,770
but that's mostly open access data that anybody can get ahold of.

489
00:57:06,770 --> 00:57:11,870
And certainly a fairly widely available.

490
00:57:11,870 --> 00:57:20,840
That's not the the the it's investing in the research and academic institutions generates a lot of data that's available to everybody.

491
00:57:20,840 --> 00:57:24,830
But the techniques of genome editing and GM, they're not trivial,

492
00:57:24,830 --> 00:57:32,240
but the kinds of countries that would be interested in developing crops for smallholder farmers and so on.

493
00:57:32,240 --> 00:57:40,160
They they are perfectly capable of using those technologies. It's not they're not out of the realm of possibility.

494
00:57:40,160 --> 00:57:44,210
And the hurdle at the moment is that, you know,

495
00:57:44,210 --> 00:57:49,160
the reason it's mostly these big companies using the approaches is it's so expensive to get

496
00:57:49,160 --> 00:57:53,750
the crops licenced because you have to jump through all of those those kinds of hurdles.

497
00:57:53,750 --> 00:58:02,510
So I think the question of of cost is important, but it doesn't play out quite in the way that you suggest.

498
00:58:02,510 --> 00:58:09,290
And a number of charities have invested quite heavily in trying to get particular applications out there,

499
00:58:09,290 --> 00:58:17,020
and it costs a huge amount of money because of all the testing you have to do, which is unfortunate in many ways.

500
00:58:17,020 --> 00:58:25,180
Question at the back there. And you mentioned that improving crop genetics is one of four ways towards food security.

501
00:58:25,180 --> 00:58:33,670
I was just wondering whether you can illustrate with an example of some of the most kind of outstanding.

502
00:58:33,670 --> 00:58:39,700
Crops or whatever tools or resources that are being considered currently, and so there are many things that we have to do anything,

503
00:58:39,700 --> 00:58:44,650
Charles is one of the people who've thought very hard about what one might have to do to to improve

504
00:58:44,650 --> 00:58:50,800
food security for many people in the audience could help and in the context of crop genetics to my.

505
00:58:50,800 --> 00:58:56,950
So there are lots of things to say for GM.

506
00:58:56,950 --> 00:59:02,890
Many of the kinds of things you can do with GM are things where it is a single gene that makes a big difference.

507
00:59:02,890 --> 00:59:07,570
And there are quite a number of those things. But there are also traits like drought resistance,

508
00:59:07,570 --> 00:59:11,680
where actually probably the most robust drought resistance is more likely to come out

509
00:59:11,680 --> 00:59:17,770
of rather more complex multi gene assemblages and conventional breeding approaches,

510
00:59:17,770 --> 00:59:24,040
or assisted micro assisted breeding approaches might be a better way to achieve those.

511
00:59:24,040 --> 00:59:28,750
In the context of things you can definitely do now with GM, that will be super helpful.

512
00:59:28,750 --> 00:59:32,980
Right up there is disease resistance because there are really well known,

513
00:59:32,980 --> 00:59:40,750
really well understood genes that absolutely will convey resistance to serious pests

514
00:59:40,750 --> 00:59:45,220
and pathogens that are out there that are spreading because of climate change issues.

515
00:59:45,220 --> 00:59:51,100
And we really could deploy those pretty quickly if we had a different regulatory landscape.

516
00:59:51,100 --> 00:59:59,500
And I know people who work in that disease resistant field are particularly frustrated by the difficulty in moving forward with that.

517
00:59:59,500 --> 01:00:09,820
And so to me, that disease resistance would probably be top of the list of things I would want to do with the genome editing or GM kind of now.

518
01:00:09,820 --> 01:00:18,400
Kenny, I'm going to ask you about genetics and particularly the this kind of reductionist, holistic dichotomy.

519
01:00:18,400 --> 01:00:25,030
I hasten to add I'm not a geneticist, as you will probably be revealed in a moment.

520
01:00:25,030 --> 01:00:31,960
But one of the kind of most compelling narratives which I've taken on board

521
01:00:31,960 --> 01:00:40,900
around genetics is the Richard Dawkins selfish gene blind watchmaker analogy.

522
01:00:40,900 --> 01:00:50,830
And that seemed to be very interesting because it demonstrates how you can create lots of diversity from very simple, deterministic rules.

523
01:00:50,830 --> 01:00:56,950
But from what you've just said, that may actually be a corruption of our understanding.

524
01:00:56,950 --> 01:01:03,160
It's certainly an extremely deterministic reductionist version is ultimately reductionist.

525
01:01:03,160 --> 01:01:10,780
So is if we got the wrong end of the stick by reading Dawkins.

526
01:01:10,780 --> 01:01:22,000
So one of this is there's a whole nother talk I could give about what you might call systems biology.

527
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:26,170
So, so biological systems are complex.

528
01:01:26,170 --> 01:01:33,580
They involve information moving both up the levels of organisation and down the levels of organisation,

529
01:01:33,580 --> 01:01:36,820
and they involve huge amounts of feedback driving those systems.

530
01:01:36,820 --> 01:01:43,480
So, you know, you can you can encapsulate that's a little bit in the in the concept of what came first, the chicken or the egg.

531
01:01:43,480 --> 01:01:52,390
And that's what is kind of rolled out infinitely many times in the in the life of a of a of an organism.

532
01:01:52,390 --> 01:01:57,370
So and those feedbacks are really interesting,

533
01:01:57,370 --> 01:02:03,700
and they're the things that generate a lot of the robustness that we've managed to achieve as organisms,

534
01:02:03,700 --> 01:02:10,280
despite the fact that our genomes are so messy. And why is this relevant?

535
01:02:10,280 --> 01:02:14,950
It's relevant because those concepts are actually quite difficult for people to deal with.

536
01:02:14,950 --> 01:02:18,130
People really like linear narratives.

537
01:02:18,130 --> 01:02:24,730
That's how you can best understand anything a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end where where you're going along.

538
01:02:24,730 --> 01:02:31,840
And Dawkins is a master of taking complex issues and rolling them out into a very compelling linear narrative,

539
01:02:31,840 --> 01:02:37,420
which is why he's such a good science communicator. But science, none of the things he's talking about a linear.

540
01:02:37,420 --> 01:02:44,410
And so then you get from the same benefits of talking about them in this and very engaging way.

541
01:02:44,410 --> 01:02:55,420
The misapprehension that things are deterministic in that sense and that the information is flowing always in that linear way was seen in feedbacks.

542
01:02:55,420 --> 01:03:04,150
And it's that in the wider society, but it's also actually there in the in scientific community as well.

543
01:03:04,150 --> 01:03:10,630
Moving people through into thinking in terms of of complex dynamical systems is difficult.

544
01:03:10,630 --> 01:03:15,300
And to understand that you really have to to collaborate with mathematicians.

545
01:03:15,300 --> 01:03:22,450
And it's a very exciting time to be doing biology precisely because we're at the phase when we have enough information about

546
01:03:22,450 --> 01:03:30,370
the parts at various different scales to begin to understand how they work in these in these dynamical systems type modules.

547
01:03:30,370 --> 01:03:38,590
The thing the organism cares about all those systems and their system level properties that the nature of the parts is almost irrelevant.

548
01:03:38,590 --> 01:03:42,670
What you want is a way to, you know, grow root in that direction.

549
01:03:42,670 --> 01:03:47,860
If there's nutrients over there, you don't care what the parts are. You care about the behaviour of the system.

550
01:03:47,860 --> 01:03:56,430
And it's it's the same problem of parts and holes and how they relate to one another playing out in very different contexts.

551
01:03:56,430 --> 01:04:03,340
And we have to find ways as humble people to deal with those kinds of complexities because

552
01:04:03,340 --> 01:04:07,600
all of the problems that we're trying to face in the world are problems of that sort.

553
01:04:07,600 --> 01:04:16,210
And there's a lot of interesting work going on in government on on how you use the more systems approach to address some of these tricky problems.

554
01:04:16,210 --> 01:04:23,650
But if I might just defend Oxford Biology to my engineer friend at the end of that extraordinary graph you showed of the of

555
01:04:23,650 --> 01:04:32,500
the wheat genome with 80 percent due to transpose elements that that's 80 percent or Kenzi and selfish genes going through.

556
01:04:32,500 --> 01:04:42,490
You know, there's a question that, yes, we we had a very interesting talk some months ago in this room by a senior government adviser, an economist,

557
01:04:42,490 --> 01:04:49,690
and one of the very interesting point she made was the difficulty was that the regulators and particularly the elected representatives,

558
01:04:49,690 --> 01:04:58,330
were some 40 years behind the science, the current science because of the nature of they weren't specialists, in other words.

559
01:04:58,330 --> 01:05:06,670
I'm wondering whether you feel that that might be a problem when it comes to the kind of regulation and more to the point public debate,

560
01:05:06,670 --> 01:05:17,860
you're talking about that, actually. A lot of the debaters and the regulators are way behind the real up to date science.

561
01:05:17,860 --> 01:05:23,780
So I could there are a number of things I can say about that.

562
01:05:23,780 --> 01:05:28,750
At some level that's a deficit model argument. If only those people knew it would be all right.

563
01:05:28,750 --> 01:05:33,070
And so at some level, I would reject that.

564
01:05:33,070 --> 01:05:40,520
The reason you go to that kind of regulation is not because you don't know the science, it's because you think.

565
01:05:40,520 --> 01:05:52,370
Natural is good, which is different, and that's underpinned by a kind of different rationale really than than I need to know the detailed science.

566
01:05:52,370 --> 01:06:00,140
So that's the first thing. The second thing, I spend a fair amount of time on various kinds of science advice mechanisms.

567
01:06:00,140 --> 01:06:05,540
And I I think there are good ways to get high quality science into government.

568
01:06:05,540 --> 01:06:13,610
The thing that is frustrating that I think is beginning to move with these ideas about system thinking and government is another thing that is,

569
01:06:13,610 --> 01:06:19,670
you know, rolled out across society that I've just described is this desperate desire for

570
01:06:19,670 --> 01:06:25,040
linearity for I do this and then this will happen and it will happen in a linear way.

571
01:06:25,040 --> 01:06:29,240
So an awful lot of policymaking winds up asking the question, OK,

572
01:06:29,240 --> 01:06:35,690
what will the intervention be and how will I measure whether it's been effective and how will I demonstrate that is my intervention here?

573
01:06:35,690 --> 01:06:42,650
That's made it effective over that. And when you're talking about these kinds of complex systems,

574
01:06:42,650 --> 01:06:50,990
that's that linearity is not going to happen and you're going to have to be willing to risk or to to,

575
01:06:50,990 --> 01:06:55,520
yeah, to believe the evidence that you've put together that this intervention will work.

576
01:06:55,520 --> 01:07:00,170
But it will only work after you've waited for some amount of time for something critical to build up in the system.

577
01:07:00,170 --> 01:07:06,830
And then there'll be a tipping point in the work suddenly. And so you'll have to wait for several years while nothing happens patiently.

578
01:07:06,830 --> 01:07:16,520
And and so the role of, again, this kind of complex system modelling in developing policy has become very important.

579
01:07:16,520 --> 01:07:25,430
And that's where I find there's more difficulty is getting people to buy into that narrative because because the

580
01:07:25,430 --> 01:07:34,430
linear narrative is so much more appealing and the desire to do something effective is is so kind of deep and,

581
01:07:34,430 --> 01:07:40,220
you know, reasonably embedded in the system that you want to be able to demonstrate that that's working now.

582
01:07:40,220 --> 01:07:46,940
And so a lot of these very human issues about the way people think and the way

583
01:07:46,940 --> 01:07:50,720
they make decisions that we we kind of need to understand and work around.

584
01:07:50,720 --> 01:07:58,500
And that's true for the people giving the advice as well as for the people who are needing to enact it.

585
01:07:58,500 --> 01:08:05,320
I'm not sure how much time we've got the environmental movement has seems to have used science very strongly

586
01:08:05,320 --> 01:08:10,090
and I wonder whether were there any lessons that you could see from this area that could be drawn from that?

587
01:08:10,090 --> 01:08:15,310
I mean, obviously people don't trust industry, but they do seem to trust scientists in that in that setting.

588
01:08:15,310 --> 01:08:24,020
And there's there's a narrative in the story. I wondered whether this compare and contrast the two, the two areas, perhaps.

589
01:08:24,020 --> 01:08:32,730
Yeah, so. The environmental movement did use science.

590
01:08:32,730 --> 01:08:43,230
They they tend to use it in a way that suits them, rather than necessarily in a way that takes into account all the evidence.

591
01:08:43,230 --> 01:08:53,310
So there are powerful actors in the environmental movement that are still campaigning against things like GM and of an outcome of that as being.

592
01:08:53,310 --> 01:08:59,280
People have come out of those organisations and are now campaigning rapidly for GM because they feel that the

593
01:08:59,280 --> 01:09:06,480
environmental movement is potentially compromising itself by picking and choosing which evidence it likes.

594
01:09:06,480 --> 01:09:14,940
And so, you know, the extent I'm not making climate change.

595
01:09:14,940 --> 01:09:21,810
Exactly. Exactly so. So lots of it means that that that's exactly where the debate has happened.

596
01:09:21,810 --> 01:09:23,700
Climate change, you know,

597
01:09:23,700 --> 01:09:30,210
there are there are people over here who don't believe the evidence and the environmental movement is driving forward with that evidence.

598
01:09:30,210 --> 01:09:35,760
But you can, you know, the tables are completely turned when it comes to various other technologies.

599
01:09:35,760 --> 01:09:44,880
And I must say, I think it's, you know, a lot of what the environmental movement does is is common.

600
01:09:44,880 --> 01:09:50,490
I mean, they they are powerfully motivated to drive these very important agendas forward that

601
01:09:50,490 --> 01:09:56,430
really it's really important that climate change moves up the agenda in all kinds of ways,

602
01:09:56,430 --> 01:10:06,270
and they're very effective at doing that. I I worry that there.

603
01:10:06,270 --> 01:10:12,780
Need to keep that kind of community together, which is the nature is good, science is bad community,

604
01:10:12,780 --> 01:10:20,310
even though they're using scientific evidence and it compromises their ability to make arguments

605
01:10:20,310 --> 01:10:25,380
in other parts of the space where there's a clash between the the nature and the science.

606
01:10:25,380 --> 01:10:29,820
And that could be seriously problematic because we need those strong environmental

607
01:10:29,820 --> 01:10:34,260
campaigning organisations and we need their integrity to be absolutely robust.

608
01:10:34,260 --> 01:10:38,880
And to me, it's not always clear currently that it is.

609
01:10:38,880 --> 01:10:42,510
And a last question, Chris. Thanks. Thanks, Charles.

610
01:10:42,510 --> 01:10:51,900
GM and gene editing are relatively new techniques that come with risks, and people are worried about those risks.

611
01:10:51,900 --> 01:10:59,760
Has the science community itself been honest about those risks, either inside industry or outside industry?

612
01:10:59,760 --> 01:11:06,850
And has it communicated that well enough so.

613
01:11:06,850 --> 01:11:19,480
Anything new comes with risks, but actually, and I think old quite often also has risks that are not that are kind of taken as as part of the scenery.

614
01:11:19,480 --> 01:11:28,360
So I think it's difficult to argue that the risks associated with the techniques themselves

615
01:11:28,360 --> 01:11:36,070
are greater than the risks associated with a lot of conventional breeding approaches.

616
01:11:36,070 --> 01:11:42,550
Inasmuch as you're introducing genetic change into this very messy genome, all the rest of it now,

617
01:11:42,550 --> 01:11:48,140
the genes that you introduce or the genes that you change and the effects that those have.

618
01:11:48,140 --> 01:11:51,920
Of course, and those need assessing,

619
01:11:51,920 --> 01:11:56,630
but that's also true in the context of convention meetings so that the example I

620
01:11:56,630 --> 01:12:01,730
like to use is there's been a huge amount of debates about herbicide tolerance,

621
01:12:01,730 --> 01:12:05,600
which is one of the main GM traits out there.

622
01:12:05,600 --> 01:12:11,120
And if you can have all kinds of discussions about whether it's a good trait or a bad trade.

623
01:12:11,120 --> 01:12:17,240
But the general idea is you make your crop resistant to a weed killer. You can spray that he'd fill with weed killer.

624
01:12:17,240 --> 01:12:21,890
The crop survives, the weeds die, and it's very helpful for weed control.

625
01:12:21,890 --> 01:12:31,490
You can make herbicide resistant crops, single gene herbicide resistant crops using those techniques that are on the eve of a completely conventional

626
01:12:31,490 --> 01:12:37,340
side or the mutagenesis side that don't involve any of the safety regulations and the risk assessments.

627
01:12:37,340 --> 01:12:41,420
So you've got two types of single gene, herbicide tolerant crop.

628
01:12:41,420 --> 01:12:44,540
One of them millions of hoops to jump through to get to into the field.

629
01:12:44,540 --> 01:12:51,110
The other is in the field tomorrow, and there are risks associated with both of those things.

630
01:12:51,110 --> 01:12:57,260
These risks are being assessed. These risks are not being assessed, and I think that's a problem.

631
01:12:57,260 --> 01:13:06,110
I agree with you completely that all of us need to be as honest as we possibly can about risk.

632
01:13:06,110 --> 01:13:16,220
But at the same time that that that the idea that there is risk associated with something new doesn't diminish

633
01:13:16,220 --> 01:13:21,320
the fact that there is risks associated with something old and risk is got to be assessed relatively.

634
01:13:21,320 --> 01:13:28,130
Is it more or less dangerous than what we're doing already? And that, I think, is a very important element.

635
01:13:28,130 --> 01:13:34,760
And then on top of that, you've got your values. Is it going to help you deliver those common goals or not?

636
01:13:34,760 --> 01:13:39,320
And those both of those things we need to ask in both of those contexts?

637
01:13:39,320 --> 01:13:46,880
So just before thanking Autoline, let me tell you about the last in our series of talks, which is next week by Florian Freund.

638
01:13:46,880 --> 01:13:53,990
And that's on the fifth next week, Thursday, and it's Brexit, agriculture and dietary risks in the UK.

639
01:13:53,990 --> 01:14:04,400
So continuing with some of the things and offering grew up in Oxford and mother, father and brother are all mediaeval historians, I believe.

640
01:14:04,400 --> 01:14:10,640
I think that we should be extremely grateful that Autoline has been a rebel since childhood and broke all

641
01:14:10,640 --> 01:14:15,590
sorts of familial norms to become a scientist and and it was just simply wonderful thought this evening.

642
01:14:15,590 --> 01:14:32,209
Many thanks indeed.