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.

Comments

Re:*Head asplodes*

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Idiots

[tsa]

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.

Re:Idiots

[Rick Schumann]

Consider this: Monsanto created GMO seeds that were protected Intellectual Property, then had to sue some farmers, in adjacent fields, who weren't purchasing them because cross polination had migrated the GMO genes into their crops. Also consider this: corporations spend many many millions of dollars developing GMO versions of plants, and since they aren't non-profits, they (and more to the point their investors and stockholders) expect timely return-on-investment -- therefore they'll rush things to market, much as Monsanto did, regardless of possible consequences. Pharmaceutical companies do this every day, having their legal departments weigh possible lawsuits due to bad reactions or death resulting from use of a drug against overall profitability. The difference here is that GMO crops are literally (as described above) the genie released from the bottle; once it's out in the wild, you're not getting it back, it's out there for good. So considering all the above, what makes you think that a profit-oriented company, armed with a device and method to allow them to modify the genes of pretty much anything, aren't going to rush something to market that may have unintended and disasterous long-term effects once it's out in Earth's biosphere? I personally used to worry about all the GMO crops that were being introduced but I don't waste the energy anymore because it's too late now, they're out there, and if in another 20 or 30 years we see some terrible unintended side-effect of the gene editing that causes a major disaster, then what are we to do? Meanwhile the EU is being smarter about it than our own legislators here in the U.S. have been (or less corrupted by corporate influences?) and are thinking about the possible long-term effects, and doing what they can to make it as safe as possible without totally stifling innovation. The fact that some bad actors in non-EU countries may do reckless things with the technology is irrelevant, and at best we can hope that there aren't scientists out there who are willing to be totally irresponsible and reckless with the technology themselves. It may all be for nothing but I applaud the EU for being careful where it counts.

Re:Idiots

[Tinsoldier314]

The case is widely cited or referenced by the anti-GM community in the context of a fear of a company claiming ownership of a farmer’s crop based on the inadvertent presence of GM pollen grain or seed.[25][26] "The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘...none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’" – in other words, the original presence of Monsanto seed on his land in 1997 was indeed inadvertent, but the crop in 1998 was entirely purposeful.[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If anyone wants more information on the case he's citing, it's well documented on wikipedia.

Re:*Head asplodes*

[fph il quozientatore]

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.

Shotgun surgery: okay; Scapels: no

[swillden]

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.

Re:*Head asplodes*

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Maze of circular logic

[jabuzz]

This is the issue. So the clueless judges are saying it's find to blast away with nuclear/chemical mutation with mass genomics screening till I get the mutation I want at great expense and I don't need to label it as GMO. Noting that unless I do a full DNA sequence I will almost certainly get a bunch of other unwanted edits.

However if I make exactly the same change using CRISPR/Cas9 ir CRISPER/Cpf1 then I have to label it GMO. That just defies common sense. Then again to expect Judges anywhere in the world to grasp what is going on is asking a lot. Well it's not really asking a lot, if they don't get it they should not be ruling on it. However the percentage of judges with any scientific training is very low.