Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice announced its ruling to regulate plants, created with gene-editing, with the same set of ultra-strict rules as it does the GMOs. To put it simply – no genetically improved crop using gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR, would be allowed on the fields or markets of the European Union for the foreseeable future. Chemistry World has a very good overview of the potential consequences of this decision here.
Despite what some of you, my readers, might have expected (especially those who know me personally), this will not be a blog post where I defend, educate or science-splain genetic modifications, their forms, benefits and drawbacks. Plenty of people before me had done that and I will include throughout the text some useful links if you are new to the techniques or are unsure of the differences between them, or why these differences are important. This NIH webpage for example, has a decent scientific intro with even more links to detailed research.
The surprised scientist
The goal of this post is to try and understand why, AGAIN, we – the scientists, lost the battle to a cause we were unanimously supporting and ended up AGAIN being caught by surprise by this defeat.
Many expert scientist have expressed their frustration regarding the ECJ’s decision, using a variety of strong words and scientific passion to oppose and argue with it post-factum. Opinions were rich in qualifiers like “unscientific”, “retrograde” and “ignorant”, generally with surprised undertones.
My question to my fellow experts is how come did we end up surprised by this decision? Haven’t we learned anything about how to talk to the various sides of this debate since the last time when we had it for GMOs? I for one was unsatisfied to hear about the decision. However, I was anything but surprised. And here is why:
The unscientific scientists
In the debate leading up to the decision of the European Court, we, the scientists, did, for the most part, exactly what we did the last time around in the debate leading up to the decision to restrict GMOs in the European Union. And I am using the word “debate” here very frivolously. The discussion consisted of:
– activists destroying research trial fields, paid for essentially by the taxes of the very consumers they were pretending to be protecting,
– various groups of protesters with very human concerns about safety and completely misplaced trust shouting nonsensical obscenities at scientists and
– scientists hiding in labs or teaching biology and ecology over and over again to the public, when all they needed to show was their human side very much concerned about public safety and health.
My real frustration of this court ruling came from the fact that while scientists employed exactly the same techniques for communication and outreach as we did before with the GMOs “debate”, we for some reason expected now a different outcome. This, being the most unscientific approach conceivable, is what truly puzzled me.
The first thing we learn in college or grad school when planning experiments is – if you perform the same experiment over and over again without changing the approach, you will be getting the same result. And yet, we failed to see how this time around we ended up using the same tools our GMO-predecessors did, but expected a different outcome.
The disconnected scientist
Others also expressed opinions. The industry is naturally furious – they were hoping that the gene-edited crops will be their way into Europe with improved varieties of crops, while their other productions lines of GMOs would be making a difference elsewhere in the world.
The farmers were also unhappy. Not only they wouldn’t get to benefit from some of the advantages gene-edited crops could provide, but their classically bred varieties will have to compete for the food producers contracts with advanced biotech crops which as an ingredient in foods are partially allowed on the European market.
I, personally, fail to see how can funding bodies in Europe could possibly be happy about this situation. Various research grants were and will continue to be given to labs around Europe to conduct scientific studies on gene-editing, while for the time being, it will not be leading to any practical solution available to the European citizens. Will funding such research in the EU become a black hole for money – a lot goes in and nothing comes out, or will it lead to a drain of discoveries, patents and IPs to more science-evidence accepting countries?
It seems that no-one really knew what to make of gene-editing. The push for a decision due to its rapid development and growing interest lead us to throw away the baby with the bath water, as we usually do when legislation should be science based, but it ends up not being so.
We talked to the western consumer about values of GMOs which were of importance for the farmers in the developing world. Back then and even today, the western consumer has a fleeting care of the farmer in the developing world.
We talked to western consumers about values of GMOs of importance for the suppliers and retailers. The consumer already thought food companies were already making much money off of them.
We talked to the consumers as if they were an uneducated mob or did not talk to them at all. And when there was a debate often the scientists would blurt out “oh you don’t have a scientific degree, that’s why you don’t understand the point I’m making”. Newsflash – if the public we are conversing with does not understand our point – that’s our fault, not the public’s. We were clearly using the wrong ways and tools for communication and were not making our point clear for the audience we were facing. In any form of communication this is considered disrespectful.
Disconnected world
It is not only the scientist who were completely disconnected from the opinions of others. While scientists were teaching the publics science, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) conducted a survey, according to which people are considerably less phased by gene-editing food than GMOs or pesticides and other potential food “contaminants” for that matter.
When a scientific governmental entity fails to efficiently inform the policy makers on both the science and the public opinion on a specific topic, is it a surprise that the legislators then completely ignore those facts and opinions for the benefit of scare-lobbyists?
At the same time activists seem to have completely ignored the fact that a prohibitive decision in the EU would not affect only the EU (they seem to be decisively doing their own same mistakes too). The legislation on gene-editing in Europe will probably have a significant knock-on effect on the farmers and agricultural practices in developing areas which trade predominantly with the EU – such as Africa. This article on Wired.com explains quite well how and why. It is the second time in biotech human history when agri-related non-scientifically-based legislation of the privileged first world has negative effect on the developing world (here’s another article from the Guardian, outlining some of the previous cases). The question we ought to ask ourselves is “How long will we continue being selfish in taking decisions which are not only ours to take?”.
The bottom-line is, that this decision of the ECJ made the majority of the people unhappy and it was not in any way based on scientific evidence and facts. Some already ask – will it also close the doors for therapies based in gene-editing? After all – plenty of medication allowed on the European market is made with the help of or entirely by genetically modified organisms and the patients don’t seem to mind that as long as the medication is helping them. Will gene-editing make its way to medical care but be kept away from our agriculture? This sort of duality seems plausible. I guess we ought to wait and see… Or rather – do our homework and work out the ways to talk WITH the different publics so next time a scientific breakthrough comes around it doesn’t suffer the same faith, while the rest of the world keeps developing solutions for our problems.
I would not like to discuss in this post the objective reasons why scientists communicated (or failed to do so) the way we did. I am consciously choosing to do this omission in order to hopefully set an example by how reviewing and accepting own flaws and previous mistakes can be a constructive mechanisms for all sides of the debate on biotech-agriculture to turn the page and start the conversation anew, without the burden of old grudges and prejudices.
