Is the media waking up to EU developments in genetic editing and GMO regulation?

Bristows has reported on the development of European and British approaches to the regulation of genetically edited organisms for some years. This excellent piece, by the Wired's Senior Science Writer, Matt Reynolds, brings Wired readers up to date with a matter that mainstream media has virtually ignored for years.

Like any other story about genetic regulation (the legal sort, not the regulation of genes through the effects of other genes), it gets political. The regulatory backstory to Matt's piece can be traced back to the post-war age of atomic gardening and, especially, to the discovery of recombinant DNA techniques in the 1970s. The tale runs through the fingers of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, emerging in a cluster of EU laws, most notably a Directive on releasing organisms produced by means of.... well, this is the problem, the one Matt unpacks so well in his piece: should an organism produced by genome editing be regulated in the same as one produced by recombinant techniques? What's the difference? Well, it comes down to this: recombinant organisms transfer DNA from another organism; edited ones don't. Different, huh? Of course, and that was pretty much the advice of Advocate General Bobek to the EU Court of Justice, which had been tasked with clarifying the position under the aforementioned Directive. Now, the Court almost invariably follows the advice of its AG, but in 2018 it decided not to. Indeed, it worked hard to argue that genome-edited organisms, which are undoubtedly produced by "mutagenesis" (the genes were changed, but no new ones were slotted in) did not fall under an unambiguous exemption for organisms produced by "mutagenesis". Since that decision, genome edited organisms in the EU have been regulated under exactly the same stringent conditions as the recombinant ones. Sound technical? Well, read Matt's article: genome editing may be a key technology in building climate change resilience and securing food security.

As the UK had not left the EU at the time, the judgment applied in Britain, too. It did, however, provide a useful opportunity to argue that the UK had done the right thing in leaving the Union, as it was now in the position of creating its own, more rational laws. Whatever the reality of doing so, the UK government invested its legislative opportunity with such political significance that UK news media failed to report on the fact that EU states, Council and Commission were also developing a response to the 2018 decision (more details on European responses here). Instead, UK media has tended to report (rather superficially in my view), UK government claims regarding its own, British, regulations, which it presents as unique and quite unlike those of its backward continent. It's therefore great to read Reynold's piece on these EU developments and, in particular, on the way the disastrous drought of 2022 is impacting sentiment towards edited organisms, a sentiment likely to play a significant role once the Commission's proposal is adopted for debate in the European Parliament in the second quarter of next year.

So, what about those UK plans? Well, the second reading of Britain's Precision Breeding Bill, which also seeks to accommodate genome editing of plants (and in some circumstances animals), has been deferred during the period of Parliamentary mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.  However, in advance of that debate, we have examined the Bill in a series of posts.  You can read the first one here "A sleight mistake: Magic goes wrong in the new Precision Breeding Bill".