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European Court Ruling Raises Hurdles For CRISPR Crops (sciencemag.org)
Okian Warrior shares a report from Science Magazine: Hopes for an easier regulatory road for genetic engineering in European agriculture were dashed by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In a closely watched decision, the court ruled that plants created with new gene-editing techniques that don't involve transferring genes between organisms -- such as CRISPR -- must go through the same lengthy approval process as traditional transgenic plants. Many researchers had argued that regulators should take a lighter touch when evaluating products created with the new technologies, but environmental groups and their allies successfully argued that they should be subject to the same EU rules that apply to other genetically modified organisms.
The case focused on crops that have been made resistant to herbicides without transferring genes from other species. The French government had passed a law exempting these new gene-edited crops from regulation under the European Union's directive on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which requires an assessment of risks to health and the environment, as well as labeling, tracking, and monitoring of the products. Confederation Paysanne, a French union in Bagnolet representing small farms, and eight other groups, sued and charged that the plants modified with gene-editing techniques should be regulated under the GMO directive, because they could cause significant harm. The court decided that gene-editing techniques are covered by the GMO directive because they "alter the genetic material of an organism in a way that does not occur naturally." (The court exempted conventional mutagenesis -- the unnatural use of chemicals or radiation to create mutations for plant breeding -- because it has "a long safety record.") It also said the new gene-editing techniques have risks that could be similar to those of transgenic engineering.
The case focused on crops that have been made resistant to herbicides without transferring genes from other species. The French government had passed a law exempting these new gene-edited crops from regulation under the European Union's directive on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which requires an assessment of risks to health and the environment, as well as labeling, tracking, and monitoring of the products. Confederation Paysanne, a French union in Bagnolet representing small farms, and eight other groups, sued and charged that the plants modified with gene-editing techniques should be regulated under the GMO directive, because they could cause significant harm. The court decided that gene-editing techniques are covered by the GMO directive because they "alter the genetic material of an organism in a way that does not occur naturally." (The court exempted conventional mutagenesis -- the unnatural use of chemicals or radiation to create mutations for plant breeding -- because it has "a long safety record.") It also said the new gene-editing techniques have risks that could be similar to those of transgenic engineering.
“To classify gene-edited crops as GMOs and equivalent to transgenic crops is completely incorrect by any scientific definition,” said Nick Talbot, a molecular geneticist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “Precise modern gene-editing technologies allow accurate, predictable changes to be made in a genome.” http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Translation:
"No, no, no, no. It's not a new number. It's--it's--it's just a changed number. See? It's not different. It's the same, just...changed."
Survey says:
"A genetically modified organism (GMO) is any organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques (i.e., a genetically engineered organism)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The question was not about the precision of the modification. It was about it being modified. You've altered the genetic material, it means you've modified it! Hand back your degree.
The court exempted conventional mutagenesis -- the unnatural use of chemicals or radiation to create mutations for plant breeding -- because it has "a long safety record."
Maybe it's just because I've played so much Fallout, but I'll take genetically edited food over irradiated food any day....cutting out genes (and as the summary says, not adding genes-especially genes from other organisms)has to be inherently safer than dosing what's destined to be our food with radiation.
If the radiation is to create mutations in the seed, then that is not the same as irradiating your food. They're merely trying to increase the rate of mutations in hope that some are positive mutations.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I think this decision is simply idiotic. Gene editing will happen anyway anywhere on the planet and people will get rich from it. If I were the EU I'd make sure this happened within my places of jurisdiction so we benefit from it. We missed the gene editing boat in the 1990s due to a similar decision, and now we do it again. Unbelievable. This decision is clearly made to please the public who have no idea what genetic modification means, other than that it's 'scary' and 'unnatural.' This is not the way to do politics. Often what people want is not what is good for the people.
-- Cheers!
Firstly, they're not talking about irradiating the food that ends up on your plate. They're talking about using radiation to increase natural mutation rates in the process of developing new strains. Crops subsequently grown from those strains are in no way "irradiated".
Secondly, there are lots of different kinds of radiation. Sunlight is radiation, and it is mutagenic, hence skin cancer if you don't cover up. It's highly unlikely that they are using the kind of radiation that leaves things radioactive for this kind of thing, they'll be using gamma rays or weak x-rays. All your looking for is a mutation rate a few times higher than would occur naturally in sunlight, and the plants would at no stage be radioactive.
Oh no... it's the future.
True. Nevertheless, I still find it safer to eat food with one precisely crafted modification, rather than food that has gone through random mutations, including possibly dangerous unintended ones.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
This decision makes no sense. First, there's a ridiculous amount of respect given to "natural" processes, as though they're anything other than purely random. But the really dumb part is considering targeted, controlled editing to be more dangerous than dousing plants in mutagenic chemicals and/or radiation in order to accelerate selective breeding. In the former case, we may not have a perfect understanding of what the change is going to do, but in the latter case we have no idea what the changes even are, we just know that there are orders of magnitude more of them than normal.
It's like deciding that it's safer to do an appendectomy with a shotgun than with a scalpel.
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rather than food that has gone through random mutations
Every single thing you eat has random mutations, whether from background radiation, cosmic rays, viruses, errors during mitosis/meiosis, etc.
What the Europeans are doing is technophobic nonsense, with no basis in science. The courts should not be used to enforce superstitions.
rather than food that has gone through random mutations
Every single thing you eat has random mutations, whether from background radiation, cosmic rays, viruses, errors during mitosis/meiosis, etc.
What the Europeans are doing is technophobic nonsense, with no basis in science. The courts should not be used to enforce superstitions.
I think there is definitely an irrational fear of GMO food in Europe; however, some caution is needed- when you're doing some of the things you're doing with CRISPR you're bypassing what would take, in some cases, millions of generations of selective breeding, to get a gene in place that doesn't naturally exist anywhere in that species.
There needs to be some common sense and oversight, to make sure, for example, pesticide resistance in a crop doesn't get crossed with a wild relative of the crop and spread to a wild population of an undesirable plant.
Yeah, that could happen with selective breeding too... but there would be many-many between generations where you'd probably catch that first.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Irradiating dead organisms to preserve food is totally safe, and if we weren’t such gibbering idiots when the R-word is mentioned would eliminate the salmonella recalls we seem to be getting weekly now. But that is not the kind of irradiation this article is talking about.
One of the standard techniques for inducing mutations in agricultural breeding is to blast crops with gamma radiation from a Cobalt-60 source. The label Luddites who won’t let us use modern genetic engineering techniques accept this as a form of conventional hybridization.