The EU must “reject the darkness of anti-science scaremongers” ahead of a key vote on gene editing, 34 Nobel laureates have said.
In a open letter shared with the Guardian and other European newspapers, the laureates demanded that lawmakers relax strict rules on genetic modification to accept new techniques that target specific genes and modify their code. The technology could make crops more resistant to disease and more likely to survive extreme weather events that are becoming more violent as the planet warms.
The scientists said old methods of breeding crops over years and decades were taking too long. “We do not have this time in an era of climate emergency,” they wrote.
The letter sent to MEPs on Friday was organized by WePlanet, an environmental non-profit organization that campaigns for technologies such as nuclear power, gene editing and cellular agriculture, as well as most of Europe. The more than 1,000 signatories to the letter range from leading biologists and geneticists – including the scientists who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the Crispr “genetic scissors” at the heart of the debate – to well-known authors such as the psychologist Steven Pinker and philosopher Peter Sanger.
Supporters say the new rules could help farmers use less pesticides and less fertiliser. Some plants that are difficult to breed conventionally – such as fruit trees, vines and potatoes – use some of the most harmful pesticides in the EU, the scientists said.
For the most part, environmental groups have fiercely opposed efforts to alter the genetic code of plants and other organisms, expressing fears about their safety and the danger of changes with unintended consequences. Proponents of the technologies, especially highly targeted technologies, have argued that such risks pale in comparison to the known dangers of biodiversity loss, the climate crisis and hunger. The European Food Safety Authority found no new hazards from targeted gene editing in plants compared to conventional breeding.
But in 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that any plants made by altering genes – whether targeted or not – are genetically modified organisms that fall under the EU’s GMO rules. It said the risks to the environment and human health could not be determined with certainty.
The European Commission has accepted that plants made with new methods of gene editing are GMOs, but wants to exempt them from existing safety rules, which supporters of the technology say are outdated and restrictive. Lawmakers in parliament’s environment committee will vote on his plan on Wednesday.
A previous open letter signed in December by a smaller group of scientists – including molecular biologists and geneticists, many of whom work for nonprofits – argued that the commission’s proposal should be “rejected or extensively revised” because of the safety of the environment and human health cannot be guaranteed. They called for all gene-edited plants to be subjected to a mandatory risk assessment on a case-by-case basis.
