Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Oxford Martin School. My name's Charles Comfrey, I'm the director.
Before welcoming our speaker this evening, I also welcome Melanie Whelan, the chief executive of BBC.
And I can go over there and see CEO of Rotherham said research is very welcome at the school.
It's an enormous pleasure to welcome utterly, utterly later to the school autoline as a hugely distinguished plant molecular biologist.
She's director of the Sainsbury's lab at the University of Cambridge.
And I think is that the picture from your window that might have been utterly off office looks at over the botanic garden.
She's professor of plant development. She's active in a huge number of other things in the UK.
She's a fellow of the Royal Society, and she chairs the Royal Society's Policy Expert Advisory Committee.
She's a member of the Council for Science and Technology that directly advises the prime minister on those issues,
and as I said, she was made a dame in 2017. I think you're very welcome here.
Please come and give your talk. So thank you for the invitation, it's really a pleasure to be here.
I've been sort of going over in various ways what I wanted to talk about.
I was originally going to give a sort of very general implant, wonderful talk,
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.
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.
But I think now is actually an extraordinarily important moment to start thinking about it again in a in a different way.
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.
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.
I wrote this slide and then I found something almost exactly the same on the Martin School website.
Everybody pretty much agrees that what we need is this, you know, reliable, resilient supply of food that is safe,
obviously, and nutritious and affordable, and it's produced in a way that's environmentally sustainable.
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.
So very clear, everybody's. Pretty much can sign up to this thing.
And yet we are in a situation where many of the the issues that surround is common goals are highly contentious.
So how you go about achieving this is very unclear. And my area, which is plant genetics, is particularly contentious.
So what are the contributions for plant genetics to delivering these goals?
And they are particularly contentious in the context of of genetically modified crops and that the quality of the debate around GM.
In my opinion, is very poor and and highly polarised and not helpful.
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,
it's been interesting watching the discussion about the debate.
So generally speaking, I would say there are two hypotheses for why it is that GM is so controversial.
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,
despite the incredibly powerful evidence that it really has nothing to do with it.
So there are still many people of the view that GM is perceived as dangerous just because people don't understand what it is.
And if only we explained it to people and these people, whoever they may be, then everything will be fine.
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.
There is much better evidence that what's going on, you can frame it in various different ways.
I like to frame it in the context of social identity theory.
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
of characteristics that go completely against those goals that everybody agrees or could go.
So it's supposed to be a poor in the context of food safety.
It's supposed to be very poor in the context of quality across the food supply chain,
and it's supposed to be very poor in the context of its environmental sustainability.
And unfortunately for those of us working in in science, science has become associated with that whole package.
Profit driven nasty agriculture is science driven,
whereas the nice sort of agriculture is all about nature and the science like this stuff is terribly kind
of reductionist and and unsophisticated in a way where the nature stuff is all lovely and holistic.
And you see this very straightforwardly in supermarkets. If you label your food as natural, however incredibly unhealthy it might be.
If it's labelled natural, it will sell and it's lovely.
And then this is I'm very much like this advert for a particular sort of sauce, but it is very direct.
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,
this will only be about efficiency and all the rest of it, and it will taste horrible.
And OK, so this is obviously slightly jokey advert, but at the same time, it's it's an advert.
It's selling you food and it says science has nothing to do with this food because science would not create high quality food.
And then, you know, in this nature science dichotomy that the one is the loudest people is His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.
And these are quotes from a recent lecture he gave in 2011, which absolutely highlight this tension that is perceived to be going on.
We're told that science has all the answers that the depiction of science is kind of arrogant and and reductionist.
So they say when actually we should be thinking about nature, which is this much more lovely, holistic, complex, beautiful thing.
And we need to restore the balance between the reason of instinctive wisdom and this the
rational insights of scientific analysis as those two things were completely separate.
And you know, we need to show greater respect for the genius of nature's designs on this stuff.
As I say, you know, Prince Charles doesn't mean it's unusual that people go, Yes, we agree with Prince Charles.
But nonetheless, this this kind of narrative is very common in the entire debate,
and this is where this kind of idea of social identity comes into play.
So social identity theory was developed primarily by Henry TouchFLO, and it's about.
A very deeply held psychological mechanism for dealing with insecurity and feel of fear of the unknown and what you do is
you get together in an enquiry and you all tell each other how correct you are and how wonderful and support each other.
That's that's not too bad. But unfortunately, part of the whole thing requires that to be an outgroup.
So part of the bonding of the in-group is that we don't like those people over there who disagree with us.
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.
They support the people in their group.
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.
So the basis of these experiments. So you wind up with in-group favouritism and outgroup derogation and within Greek social influence,
which homogenised is both the the the opinions of the in-group, but also the opinions of the outgroup.
And then you have polarisation and that you can see incredibly clearly in the context of this science nature and
actually more broadly in the concept of science as a activity done by strange boffins in labs versus people,
and particularly if those scientists are kind of corporate and therefore profit driven,
you wind up with the in-group who these scientists who are, you know, feel embattled in their labs.
You think they're doing a good job trying to see the world pitted against the outgroup,
these people who seem to not like the job that they're trying to do.
So this is the in-group and outgroup, and the identity of these scientists is a wonderful, rational, knowledgeable, innovative people.
The identity of the people is that they're much more holistic and intuitive,
and the scientists don't like people because they think they're irrational and Luddite.
And the people don't like the scientists because they think they're so reductionist, robotic, arrogant people.
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.
And actually, I think it's that that contributes to the persistence of the deficit model because the scientists, the in-group,
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.
And so obviously, the difference between us is, I know this stuff.
You don't know this stuff. And if only I tell you this stuff, then you will change your mind.
And it's it's directly unhelpful to try to tackle this problem using this deficit model
because it precisely ramps up the very differences that this model kind of defines.
So, I mean, you can pass it out slightly differently in this science nature way.
And if you're in the science group, reductionism is a good thing. It's a helpful tool to help you understand the system.
You think you're fully rational, even though everybody knows that people are not fully rational and they shouldn't be
fully rational because that's actually problematic for creativity and things like that.
And scientists think they're terribly knowledgeable. And that is what kind of drives the arrogance.
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,
holistic understanding of what's going on.
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.
So somehow or other to get through this GM debate, we need to get through this false divide between science and nature.
And I think it's particularly powerful and particularly difficult in the context of genetics and in this case, climate genetics.
Because of the the the narratives that genetic, the geneticists have used to talk about their discipline over the years.
So I'm particularly, for example, in the context of this reductionist, holistic paradigm.
There is a. And narrative about genetics that it is highly reductionist, so if you go with some, you know, Wikipedia type definitions,
the practise of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of simple fundamental constituents,
especially when these are said to provide a sufficient explanation, there is a genetics narrative,
which is that the DNA is the blueprint of life is a sufficient explanation, even when it is obvious that it isn't.
And to me, as a geneticist, this holistic holism definition is exactly what genetics is about.
It's the theory that parts of a whole are intimately connected with that whole and that they cannot exist independently of the whole.
Then you can't understand without reference to the whole what's going on.
And for me, genetics, particularly developmental genetics, which is where I've worked entirely.
What's happening is an attempt to try to understand the relationship between things that you might call cults and the Oh,
it's and it's about that information flow between the levels of organisation in the system.
So one way you can think about that is in the context of the gene Typekit.
That's the sequence of of the DNA, which is happening at this kind of scale nanomoles, not a nanometre type scales.
And how that genotype relates to the phenotype, which is at the level of the whole organism, look like what is it doing?
Which in the context of the plant, I work on this in this kind of tens of centimetre scale.
And what we're trying to understand this is what these arrows are.
Genetics is about understanding precisely the relationship between the parts at different levels of organisation
is very difficult to say what the part is because always there's something smaller in something bigger.
So is it a part or is it a whole depends on which direction you're going?
And it's the dynamic interactions between those scales that's really resulting in this phenotype,
which is an emergent property of anything of the genotype and itself contributing to building the genotype of the next generation.
And this scales. This is. Actually, quite kind of phenomenally mind boggling.
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.
I mean, this is this is many, many orders of magnitude that we're trying to map across.
So to argue that genetics is reductionist when what you're trying to do is understand information
flow across those kinds of scales is is extraordinary and yet deep in the narrative of genetics.
Is this kind of deterministic, almost reductionist narrative which begins with, in some ways with Mendel, who is a hero because he really.
A put into place the tools with which we could start to understand the relationship between the genotype from the phenotype.
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,
which is starch branching enzyme. But probably what you did talk about was round and wrinkled peas and Mendel's first floor,
which says traits are governed by hereditary factors which exist in pairs.
So you one from your mother, one from your father that you inherited and they don't mix during your life,
but they segregate into your gametes, into the next generation.
So everybody's kind of familiar with this is the pot with the round and the wrinkled peas.
And if you cross a true breeding ground pea with a true breeding wrinkled pea, then the first generation are all round.
But in the second generation,
because of that independent separation of the of the gene you inherited from your mother in the junior inherited from your father.
You wind up with the famous three to one round two wrinkled ratios.
And so that relationship there between these hereditary factors, which immediately then sound like unitary parts,
which are a sufficient explanation if you want to put it in that way for a phenotype.
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.
But of course, now we know a lot more about what's going on, which is where starch branching enzyme comes into play.
This gene encodes starch branching enzyme and in the wrinkled pea, it's mutant, so it doesn't work.
So there is no gene for wrinkled. The gene for wrinkled is not having the gene for round.
That's important. And if you don't have that gene when you're trying to build your,
you fail to build your starch into more sugar, which is a building block of starch accumulates in the seed.
And if there's more sugar at the time that the siege is maturing, they have this higher osmotic potential.
So they suck up water and so that they are all kind of bougie, you say, growing with water.
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.
And you can draw a chain of events which looks very linear and maybe reductionist.
But if you don't have starch branching enzyme, you don't make the RNA, you don't make the protein.
Your starch synthesis is slowed, so you've got more sugar.
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.
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.
So again, although you can describe this in the very genes for reductionist way, this is what's happening.
It's it fits, in my view, much better into this whole ISM debate, but also do some arithmetic.
But this reductionist mystic has emerged in the way that we talk about genes we talk about genes for.
We talk about the idea that there is a gene it maps on to a phenotype and it's a one for one thing.
And it's it's a very deep feeling about anxiety.
I think about genetic determinism, which in my view,
is one of the reasons everyone's so excited about epigenetics because they view it as a kind of escape route from genetic determinism,
rather than as a mechanism whereby gene expression is controlled, which we knew about already, and that genes for idea has been amplified.
I think in the context of of the narrative around DNA sequencing.
So genes are made of DNA. People talk about DNA, as I said all the time as being the blueprint for life.
So if you had the sequence, you would be able to build the organism which you call out.
The sequence by itself does nothing. You have to put it into a cell.
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.
But this information is never naked, and you cannot build an organism out of a piece of DNA.
You have to have the machinery that decodes that and rebuilds the cells.
And so the blueprint analogies is that it contributes to this reductionist idea and it's problematic.
And it then is extended to a blueprint for life with genes along it, like beads on a string.
And you get this idea that genomes an amazingly fixed,
organised things that behave beautifully in a kind of Prince Charles Nature's design kind of way.
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,
who using mice and especially maize kernels was able.
You demonstrate effectively that there's bits of DNA that move about the genome is transposed by elements and you see them,
you see the effects of them everywhere in your goals and in Snapdragons.
Those patched particles of different colours are to do with bits of DNA,
of hopping in and out of the genes that are required to make the pigments that coloured pencils.
And so this instability in the genome is is very powerful and it's there.
And in fact, Kathy Martin a number of years ago showed that the original almost certainly the original round and
wrinkle mutation of Mendel was caused by the insertion of one of these transpersonal elements.
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.
So this tiny bit at the top here in the all of the DNA sequences of of the wheat genome,
the wheat is a hybrid of three different genomes, so it's actually got three genomes for abbey and genomes.
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.
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.
In practise, there are many mechanisms that keep them comparatively inactive, but nonetheless, the idea that you've got these beautiful,
well-designed genome genes organised in a lovely way on a string,
if it's nonsense and the way genomes work and the way they're organised is frankly a mess.
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.
This is kind of reductionist, rational thing is problematic and how it fits into the notion of how nature works.
It's a beautiful, holistic design that is behaving in this beautiful race.
That's also problematic that neither of these extremes, unsurprisingly, because extremes value are how things work.
Neither of them are useful ways to think about the space and as well as the transposons jumping about the genome.
Of course, there are many other mechanisms that are generating genetic variation within organisms, like when the DNA is copied, there are mistakes.
Here are the transpose elements. There are big rearrangements in the genome that happen, particularly during the formation of the gametes,
where bits of the crop, the chromosomes or paver to generate genetic variation.
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.
There are mistakes in that recombination process where the chromosomes was swapping over.
When your repair mechanisms are doing your best to hope this mess together, they don't always work properly and they can make mistakes.
And then, as I've described, there are actually hybridisation between species events, particularly in the plants,
and there are whole genome duplications where you fail to make a cameo, but you nonetheless make a plant.
And then there are also mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer where particularly microbes will,
which make a living out of sticking their bits of DNA into genomes of plants and indeed animals,
and then taking them back out again afterwards and then going and infecting another plant can move bits of DNA about between plants.
So this idea of the beautiful genetic machine doesn't work.
This is a. Not a very good way of encapsulating what's going on, but nonetheless,
somehow it works if you are sitting in a room with all the mess that they're in and
that kind of series of of mutational events that I talked about actually has driven.
That's what underpins evolution, which also is kind of alluded to in the Prince Charles quote that there's been
this kind of rigorous test of time over millions of years that is in theory,
selected out the lovely, beautiful ones. And it is true that evolution has happened.
This is true and that it's a mutation that underpins it and the difference between us.
Watson and Crick and Chimpanzee are a number of mutations that have arisen over time in starting with the
common ancestor of those two things and diverging along the the two lineages the chimpanzee and humans.
And it is also true that which of those mutations is has survived is at least in part,
although by no means in how determined by those that confer a successful phenotype on the organism.
And this is the survival of the fittest notion of Darwin with which we are all very familiar.
This is true. And so some of the quotes of Prince Charles, you might say then is in a in a good place.
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.
But that also provides a very important cornerstone, I think,
in the in the debate about the difference between the notion of science and nature as different ways of thinking about things.
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.
So nature is red in tooth and claw. If you're a plant,
it's not really the tooth and claw that so much of a problem as the slime and nasty
digestive enzymes or indeed of our teeth and claws or teeth at least also involved.
But nonetheless, you're a plant, particularly if you have to answer your rooted to the spot.
You are complete sitting duck for all kinds of things and say plants that have survived have
survived because they can defend themselves very strongly against all kinds of attacks.
So in the real world, plants are poisonous or spiny or tough.
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.
It only works if you forget the plants and living organisms that are fighting for their own existence and trying to defend themselves hotly.
And nobody says to their children, go into the woods and eat anything you can find.
It's natural, so it must be good for you. It doesn't happen.
And and that's I find it very interesting in some ways that this notion of nature is of a bounteous provider has
arisen in in the context of a of a narrative that's about respecting nature and not putting humans ahead of nature.
And yet, that narrative depends on the concept that humans are in some way ahead of nature.
And that link, I think, is a very important leap to close.
And fortunately for us, our ancestors over the last ten thousand years have noticed that natural plants are not very good for you.
And so Darwin, as well as his work on natural selection, did quite a lot of work on domestication.
So how you take an organism that has evolved under natural selection and chewed it through breeding to provide an organism
that has evolved through human selection to deliver properties that are actually much more appropriate for what we need.
So if you think about that in the context of a plant natural selection,
if you were a plant is about allocating the resources that you have available to you, the nutrients that you capture,
the photosynthesis that you do to minimise viable offspring,
your grandchildren in the face of stiff competition from other plants and from things that are trying to eat you.
So you are trying to collect as much resource as possible.
Invest it as far as you possibly can in your grandchildren, Wolf defending yourself from the opposition and to do this.
Plants have evolved with these complex multiscale regulars, regulatory systems that I alluded to,
and those systems deliver really flexible growth habit that's adaptable depending on the
environment in which the plant is growing and then all kinds of mechanisms to protect the plant,
particularly the seed, which is the children, the plants, children and quite often indigestible or poisonous.
They're also minimally resourced because that's a kind of bet hedging mechanism.
If you want to make as many things as possible, all of which have a good chance of surviving.
And your immobility also means that if you're not careful, all your children will will live in your house forever.
And it's a much better idea to try and disperse them so you would like the seed to be dispersed of the pond.
And that list of characteristics from the point of view of us wanting to get all food from plants is hopeless.
And so human selection, which is about the survival of your favourite,
is much more about allocation of the maximum amount of resource to the part that we want to eat,
which for most of the calories that we eat, is the seed in cereals.
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.
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.
So we've had to.
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.
So you wind up with crop plants and crop plants. Nothing to do with natural plants.
And they have less flexible growers, have it. They have this very lovely, digestible, nutritious said.
The seed is usually retained on the plant so that you can harvest it and it's maximally resourced.
And one of the most powerful illustrations of that is that this slide,
which you may well have seen before here is Tucson Tea, which is the closest living wild relative of maize.
There's still cross fertile, and here is maize, which has been produced as a result of the ingenious,
very industrious activities of mostly Central American farmers over the last eight thousand years.
This is natural. This is not natural. And whilst I work in the Sainsbury laboratory,
that is the product in many ways of the success of the supermarket chain and also obviously the vision of David Sainsbury.
I have to show this slide. Sainsbury's naturally sweet, sweet, cool.
This is definitely not naturally sweet, sweet corn.
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.
So this is unnaturally sweet, sweet corn.
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.
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,
and we use that variation to select out plants that do better than the natural plants that providing the food that we want.
And then we've very carefully mixed and matched the combinations of genetic variation that have arisen
to assemble these linked lines that we have now are way better than their closest living relatives,
providing the food that we want. And this then creates a problem for us.
And that problem is that if we want to add yet another new characteristic into that plant like a disease resistance characteristics,
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,
that you've assembled into one plant and you'd like to add a gene that you found in the wild
relative that gives the plant this resistance to the disease and you can cross them together.
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.
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.
You can cross it to the wild relative with some useful disease resistance.
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
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,
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.
And it's a lot of work and so on. People over the last 50 years ask themselves,
how can we increase the genetic diversity in these elite lines without having to do this mammoth crossing effort?
And we came up. We've come up with a variety of mechanisms. In the 1960s,
we started upping the rate of of of mutagenesis in these lines by deliberately antagonising them and treating the plants with
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.
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,
but it's less dramatic than having to cross in things from a wild relative.
And then more recently, we've developed these fancy techniques for adding genes from other species, be they plants or even not plants.
So you can Dillip to do what you might call deliberate horizontal gene transfer from another plant.
And more recently, we found ways to target specific genetic changes,
which are these rafted techniques that are going under the banner of genome editing.
So these are potentially very useful tools in the in the breeders toolbox for adding genetic diversity into these elite lines that we have.
These are very controversial approaches, and they are controversial because they are being rolled out in a narrative of science reductionist,
rational thing vs. nature, holistic, intuitive thing, and they are firmly placed in this science box.
And this science box is associated with profit driven agriculture,
which is in turn associated with nasty effects for environmental sustainability, poor food safety, all of these things.
And that's the problem. The problem is when you're trying to use these techniques in an environment where people's.
Identity as as good people who are in favour of environmental sustainability and equitable distribution
of benefits across the food supply chain are using GM as a badge that defines the group they don't like.
And at the same time, the scientist group are fixed in in in this their identity,
which is that they're knowledgeable and they know what to do and their rationalist and
those people over there are irrational and they're not behaving in a sensible way.
And so that the narrative on both sides of the fence of building the fence up moment by moment,
which is why we wind up with this kind of behaviour at some level.
And so the reason why we're back,
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
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.
And this has come to the fore again because with the arrival of genome editing crops,
the question has become which is an extraordinary indictment of the value of these laws or genome aged crops of GM or not.
Because if they are GM, we should do this. And if they are not GM, we should do that.
I find this extraordinary. But the method by which you've made your plant makes an enormous difference.
But what you've done to it makes very little difference at all. So the current law goes like this.
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.
And to get it onto the list, you have to prove that it's a new variety.
So it's distinct. It's not the same as what's out there already.
You have to prove, prove that it behaves itself across the field and through generations.
So it's uniform and it's stable. It behaves itself across generations.
And there are organisations that will do these so-called ducie tests for you and allow you to certify your crop.
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.
And that means that there has to be something about this new variety that makes it better than than the existing varieties,
and that's what you have to do to get your new varieties registered.
Now on the government website, it says there are additional rules for genetically modified plants,
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
using genetic modification and in the European Union now also using gene editing,
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.
Find straight into the field, if you did use those techniques is of of extra testing and the rest of it.
And that is because the EU law is explicitly balanced on this natural, unnatural, unnatural kind of dichotomy.
So the law says that any approach to crop genetic improvement,
but also certain genetic material in the way that does not occur naturally should be GM.
And that includes what one might call traditional GM, but also the European Court of Justice recent ruling.
Gene editing these new techniques because they would not occur naturally, whereas those random mutagenesis methods,
because they've been around for a long time, are in an exemption clause because they're considered to have a long safety record.
And there is now a massive rule going on following the European Court's ruling about
whether it was the right ruling with the genome editing should or shouldn't count.
And would there be a way possibly to get it into that exemption clause, or at least some of it into that exemption?
I think the entire focus of the debate is wrong, and I can understand, you know, why with that.
But. The law is based heavily on on these social identity paradigm,
where people who want this wonderful set of common goals that everybody agrees have
decided or have bought into the idea that the GM is in violation of these goals,
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
can't be trusted to deliver the goals that we all agree on and that natural is good.
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,
rather than based on actually achieving the goals and the fact that we've aligned the goals which we all agree on,
we have this thing that we don't agree on is extraordinary to my mind.
We should start with the thing that we all agree on and work forward from there,
rather than stop the thing that we will disagree on and work backward from there.
Because the legislation based on the thing that we disagree on on this natural unnatural
is in a totally inadequate really in delivering the outcomes that we all agree on.
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.
And if we're going to move forward with this debate,
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,
but doesn't require people to give up their identity.
That doesn't deny people that that their identity is people who really care about the environment,
about nature and about equity ability in the food supply chain, which is fine because we all agree on those things.
So we need to discuss these solutions to food security using a narrative that's about holism.
It's about intuition. It's about humanity. And it's about nature in some way.
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
GM because a huge proportion of what we need to do to deliver food security is not about GM.
GM is not the is not the thing on which the whole thing pivots.
We should be talking about the whole space. We should be talking about the requirement to reduce waste across the whole supply chain.
We should be talking about the the contribution of meat consumption to reducing food security.
We should be talking about all kinds of economic practises that we could introduce that would contribute to food security,
but also crucially to the sustainability of the system.
And yes, we can be talking about crop genetics as part of a whole raft of much more holistic interventions.
And the fact that we are talking endlessly about GM is actually an incredibly reductionist argument and
that people on the nature side of the of the of the line are also investing heavily in that argument.
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.
The second thing we can do is talk about nature in a more humble way.
So natural is only good for you. If you think that humans are the centre of the universe,
if you acknowledge that nature is much broader than humans and that plants also have an agenda,
then you move very rapidly and intuitively into a situation that acknowledges that natural is not good for you.
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,
arrogant way of talking about it, and we need to think about it more as an integrated system.
So again, this is an argument that that plays well with people who care about those things and we do care about these things.
And then we need to acknowledge as scientists that this kind of decision involves evidence from science.
But it is actually not a decision that is about rational choice.
It's a decision that is very heavily driven by values, and we as scientists are not good at that.
I've heard so many scientists saying we need to move to a law that's more rational and we don't.
We need to move to a law is more based on the values that people actually want to be delivered from the food system,
which is this list of things on which we can all agree. So I think we can shift the debate.
We can allow people to keep their identities as people who worry about the safety of the food chain and the the
sustainability of of our activities on this planet by replacing natural is good as a paradigm which doesn't work,
doesn't deliver the values that people say they hold for a more general statement that values really matter.
And this set of this list, identity defining factors, I think, is in this that most people could buy into.
And it's very clear that the current regulatory system does not address this list.
It addresses something altogether different because it's very heavily based on this natural is good paradigm.
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.
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,
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.
Now, obviously, the method by which you made it could have an impact on its safety,
for example, the unintended effects of whatever intervention it was that you made,
be that through conventional breeding or through the most fancy up-to-date technique you could possibly imagine.
But the primary issue is what the crop does and what it is, not how you made it.
And so you can imagine a system that that builds on our current registration system,
which is not quite the same as the regulatory system where we ask about distinct uniform and stable.
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.
And then we, for every single new variety, introduce a question about risk.
And based on the answer to an initial, fairly low level risk assessment,
we can then trigger tiered additional risk assessment methods of methods that would cover all new crops and therefore genuinely
deliver these kinds of common goals of environmental sustainability and safety because the current law simply doesn't do it.
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.
Which is scary, but I think also creates the opportunity to do things that are quite disruptive.
And this kind of approach is an approach that's a unifying approach.
It starts with common goals.
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.
So I think taking an approach to regulation in the food system that does that,
that starts with things that everybody can buy into is the way we need to move forward.
And I think we have the opportunity to do that, which we should seise. Thank you.
So I'd like to thank Autoline for a really fabulous talk. Just before we have questions to remind you that we are broadcast.
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.
We have a question in on the Isle of Wight if he could wait for the.
Thank you. Do you agree that it's bad enough chattering classes objecting to us producing GM crops in our own country?
But is it even worse than preventing Third World countries from getting a drought resistant crops and so on?
Vice President Mike Pence and prejudices around the world.
Absolutely, I think one of the the outcomes of the highly contentious debate in the developed world where we have enough food has
been to slow the deployment of whatever tools people in developing countries want to improve their agricultural systems,
and there are many and different approaches they could use. But my view is this is a tricky, complex problem.
It's a holistic type problem.
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.
Thank you. Question there. And thank you very much.
Nice. Good topic. I was thinking that this house, I believe Brexit, the whole situation.
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?
Because most of these are legally bound and non-disclosure agreements,
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.
Sometimes for people who get damaged by what they are doing to.
To bring some retribution for these companies is an estimate that I have a more robust regulatory system that controls patents that controls.
Either formal or informal controls, the way in which this thing are necessary to avoid a situation that is happening now,
which is people are taking things when they take extremes, they just fight each other.
If you are not or if you're if you're going to read, you are wrong.
In the case of a stronger regulation and political efforts to have signed this approach disclosure,
except that it is needed to try to bring the two sides together.
I think there are a number of very interesting points that you've made,
and I think it's certainly true that the the way that the landscape has been divided up has indeed made things worse.
So an example for that is that because GM is classified as a kind of different special thing,
it's actually the kind of patent protection you can get as a breeder or as a company on it is much more,
much more rigorous than the classic breeders rights protection, which allow people to continue to use your for your lines in breeding.
And that division has come about because of this definition of GM as a sort of different thing.
And so again, if we if we roll that out level the playing field and it was everything was regulated in the same way.
I think we would have more opportunities indeed to, you know, to to create a system that genuinely delivers what people want,
including proper scrutiny on the behaviour of companies that people are worried about.
Questions back a bit provocative. Thank you very much.
Excellent presentation. Do I understand you right that you're one of the few scientists in Oxford and Cambridge who actually
see an opportunity and Brexit by being able to break out of the GM restrict Europe GM regulations?
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.
There are a number of my colleagues who have expressed the view in the way that you've expressed it.
I've heard people more or less saying, Hooray, the silver lining is now we can have GM.
And to me, that is fundamentally the wrong way to go about it.
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,
of course, but these value judgements. And if that winds up not using very much GM, I'm I'm okay with that.
I'm not about yes, we have to have GM,
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,
affordable, nutritious food in a way that that is yeah,
it's robust and genuine rather than the current system, which simply doesn't even address those questions.
So I'm not sorry. I'm not willing to rise to your provocative challenge, but thank you for the question.
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.
I feel like, um, like I feel like a lot of the hesitancy that comes from people who are sceptical about science,
who are making these like nature versus science. Arguments, as you put it,
is from like recognising that the socio economic area that we live in make it
so that not everyone has access to these same like genetic tools are like,
these are expensive, like gene editing or gene gene sequencing facilities.
It might like historically that these like places like academic institutions and places where science, like with the capital as happens,
is done to profit, industrial agriculture and, for example, not like small farmers or not in an equitable way as you say it.
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,
just because of this difference, difference in access and difference in like products that result from these different techniques.
Not saying that, like intrinsically, there's something about those techniques that make one bad and one good,
but rather that just because of the society that we live in, this sort of like discrepancy exists.
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,
which is that the reason using GM in a in an agricultural in a crop breeding context is so
expensive is is the regulatory hurdles that you have to jump through to get your crop registered.
But actually, making the crop is really not that expensive anymore.
There's a lot of money invested in universities in understanding which genes you might want to to look at,
but that's mostly open access data that anybody can get ahold of.
And certainly a fairly widely available.
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.
But the techniques of genome editing and GM, they're not trivial,
but the kinds of countries that would be interested in developing crops for smallholder farmers and so on.
They they are perfectly capable of using those technologies. It's not they're not out of the realm of possibility.
And the hurdle at the moment is that, you know,
the reason it's mostly these big companies using the approaches is it's so expensive to get
the crops licenced because you have to jump through all of those those kinds of hurdles.
So I think the question of of cost is important, but it doesn't play out quite in the way that you suggest.
And a number of charities have invested quite heavily in trying to get particular applications out there,
and it costs a huge amount of money because of all the testing you have to do, which is unfortunate in many ways.
Question at the back there. And you mentioned that improving crop genetics is one of four ways towards food security.
I was just wondering whether you can illustrate with an example of some of the most kind of outstanding.
Crops or whatever tools or resources that are being considered currently, and so there are many things that we have to do anything,
Charles is one of the people who've thought very hard about what one might have to do to to improve
food security for many people in the audience could help and in the context of crop genetics to my.
So there are lots of things to say for GM.
Many of the kinds of things you can do with GM are things where it is a single gene that makes a big difference.
And there are quite a number of those things. But there are also traits like drought resistance,
where actually probably the most robust drought resistance is more likely to come out
of rather more complex multi gene assemblages and conventional breeding approaches,
or assisted micro assisted breeding approaches might be a better way to achieve those.
In the context of things you can definitely do now with GM, that will be super helpful.
Right up there is disease resistance because there are really well known,
really well understood genes that absolutely will convey resistance to serious pests
and pathogens that are out there that are spreading because of climate change issues.
And we really could deploy those pretty quickly if we had a different regulatory landscape.
And I know people who work in that disease resistant field are particularly frustrated by the difficulty in moving forward with that.
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.
Kenny, I'm going to ask you about genetics and particularly the this kind of reductionist, holistic dichotomy.
I hasten to add I'm not a geneticist, as you will probably be revealed in a moment.
But one of the kind of most compelling narratives which I've taken on board
around genetics is the Richard Dawkins selfish gene blind watchmaker analogy.
And that seemed to be very interesting because it demonstrates how you can create lots of diversity from very simple, deterministic rules.
But from what you've just said, that may actually be a corruption of our understanding.
It's certainly an extremely deterministic reductionist version is ultimately reductionist.
So is if we got the wrong end of the stick by reading Dawkins.
So one of this is there's a whole nother talk I could give about what you might call systems biology.
So, so biological systems are complex.
They involve information moving both up the levels of organisation and down the levels of organisation,
and they involve huge amounts of feedback driving those systems.
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.
And that's what is kind of rolled out infinitely many times in the in the life of a of a of an organism.
So and those feedbacks are really interesting,
and they're the things that generate a lot of the robustness that we've managed to achieve as organisms,
despite the fact that our genomes are so messy. And why is this relevant?
It's relevant because those concepts are actually quite difficult for people to deal with.
People really like linear narratives.
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.
And Dawkins is a master of taking complex issues and rolling them out into a very compelling linear narrative,
which is why he's such a good science communicator. But science, none of the things he's talking about a linear.
And so then you get from the same benefits of talking about them in this and very engaging way.
The misapprehension that things are deterministic in that sense and that the information is flowing always in that linear way was seen in feedbacks.
And it's that in the wider society, but it's also actually there in the in scientific community as well.
Moving people through into thinking in terms of of complex dynamical systems is difficult.
And to understand that you really have to to collaborate with mathematicians.
And it's a very exciting time to be doing biology precisely because we're at the phase when we have enough information about
the parts at various different scales to begin to understand how they work in these in these dynamical systems type modules.
The thing the organism cares about all those systems and their system level properties that the nature of the parts is almost irrelevant.
What you want is a way to, you know, grow root in that direction.
If there's nutrients over there, you don't care what the parts are. You care about the behaviour of the system.
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.
And we have to find ways as humble people to deal with those kinds of complexities because
all of the problems that we're trying to face in the world are problems of that sort.
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.
But if I might just defend Oxford Biology to my engineer friend at the end of that extraordinary graph you showed of the of
the wheat genome with 80 percent due to transpose elements that that's 80 percent or Kenzi and selfish genes going through.
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,
and one of the very interesting point she made was the difficulty was that the regulators and particularly the elected representatives,
were some 40 years behind the science, the current science because of the nature of they weren't specialists, in other words.
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,
you're talking about that, actually. A lot of the debaters and the regulators are way behind the real up to date science.
So I could there are a number of things I can say about that.
At some level that's a deficit model argument. If only those people knew it would be all right.
And so at some level, I would reject that.
The reason you go to that kind of regulation is not because you don't know the science, it's because you think.
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.
So that's the first thing. The second thing, I spend a fair amount of time on various kinds of science advice mechanisms.
And I I think there are good ways to get high quality science into government.
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,
you know, rolled out across society that I've just described is this desperate desire for
linearity for I do this and then this will happen and it will happen in a linear way.
So an awful lot of policymaking winds up asking the question, OK,
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?
That's made it effective over that. And when you're talking about these kinds of complex systems,
that's that linearity is not going to happen and you're going to have to be willing to risk or to to,
yeah, to believe the evidence that you've put together that this intervention will work.
But it will only work after you've waited for some amount of time for something critical to build up in the system.
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.
And and so the role of, again, this kind of complex system modelling in developing policy has become very important.
And that's where I find there's more difficulty is getting people to buy into that narrative because because the
linear narrative is so much more appealing and the desire to do something effective is is so kind of deep and,
you know, reasonably embedded in the system that you want to be able to demonstrate that that's working now.
And so a lot of these very human issues about the way people think and the way
they make decisions that we we kind of need to understand and work around.
And that's true for the people giving the advice as well as for the people who are needing to enact it.
I'm not sure how much time we've got the environmental movement has seems to have used science very strongly
and I wonder whether were there any lessons that you could see from this area that could be drawn from that?
I mean, obviously people don't trust industry, but they do seem to trust scientists in that in that setting.
And there's there's a narrative in the story. I wondered whether this compare and contrast the two, the two areas, perhaps.
Yeah, so. The environmental movement did use science.
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.
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.
People have come out of those organisations and are now campaigning rapidly for GM because they feel that the
environmental movement is potentially compromising itself by picking and choosing which evidence it likes.
And so, you know, the extent I'm not making climate change.
Exactly. Exactly so. So lots of it means that that that's exactly where the debate has happened.
Climate change, you know,
there are there are people over here who don't believe the evidence and the environmental movement is driving forward with that evidence.
But you can, you know, the tables are completely turned when it comes to various other technologies.
And I must say, I think it's, you know, a lot of what the environmental movement does is is common.
I mean, they they are powerfully motivated to drive these very important agendas forward that
really it's really important that climate change moves up the agenda in all kinds of ways,
and they're very effective at doing that. I I worry that there.
Need to keep that kind of community together, which is the nature is good, science is bad community,
even though they're using scientific evidence and it compromises their ability to make arguments
in other parts of the space where there's a clash between the the nature and the science.
And that could be seriously problematic because we need those strong environmental
campaigning organisations and we need their integrity to be absolutely robust.
And to me, it's not always clear currently that it is.
And a last question, Chris. Thanks. Thanks, Charles.
GM and gene editing are relatively new techniques that come with risks, and people are worried about those risks.
Has the science community itself been honest about those risks, either inside industry or outside industry?
And has it communicated that well enough so.
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.
So I think it's difficult to argue that the risks associated with the techniques themselves
are greater than the risks associated with a lot of conventional breeding approaches.
Inasmuch as you're introducing genetic change into this very messy genome, all the rest of it now,
the genes that you introduce or the genes that you change and the effects that those have.
Of course, and those need assessing,
but that's also true in the context of convention meetings so that the example I
like to use is there's been a huge amount of debates about herbicide tolerance,
which is one of the main GM traits out there.
And if you can have all kinds of discussions about whether it's a good trait or a bad trade.
But the general idea is you make your crop resistant to a weed killer. You can spray that he'd fill with weed killer.
The crop survives, the weeds die, and it's very helpful for weed control.
You can make herbicide resistant crops, single gene herbicide resistant crops using those techniques that are on the eve of a completely conventional
side or the mutagenesis side that don't involve any of the safety regulations and the risk assessments.
So you've got two types of single gene, herbicide tolerant crop.
One of them millions of hoops to jump through to get to into the field.
The other is in the field tomorrow, and there are risks associated with both of those things.
These risks are being assessed. These risks are not being assessed, and I think that's a problem.
I agree with you completely that all of us need to be as honest as we possibly can about risk.
But at the same time that that that the idea that there is risk associated with something new doesn't diminish
the fact that there is risks associated with something old and risk is got to be assessed relatively.
Is it more or less dangerous than what we're doing already? And that, I think, is a very important element.
And then on top of that, you've got your values. Is it going to help you deliver those common goals or not?
And those both of those things we need to ask in both of those contexts?
So just before thanking Autoline, let me tell you about the last in our series of talks, which is next week by Florian Freund.
And that's on the fifth next week, Thursday, and it's Brexit, agriculture and dietary risks in the UK.
So continuing with some of the things and offering grew up in Oxford and mother, father and brother are all mediaeval historians, I believe.
I think that we should be extremely grateful that Autoline has been a rebel since childhood and broke all
sorts of familial norms to become a scientist and and it was just simply wonderful thought this evening.
Many thanks indeed.