Differentiated impacts of human interventions on nature

Abstract

Biotechnology describes a range of human activities in medicine, agriculture, and environmental management. One biotechnology in particular, gene technology, continues to evolve both in capacity and potential to benefit and harm society. The purpose of this article is to offer a policy bridge from unproductive descriptions of gene technology to useful methods for identifying sources of significant biological and socioeconomic risk in complex food systems. Farmers and the public could be voluntarily and involuntarily interacting with new techniques of genome editing and gene silencing in entirely new ways, limiting the usefulness of previous gene technology histories to predict safety. What we believe is a more consistent, verifiable, and practical approach is to identify the critical control points that emerge where the scale effects of a human activity diverge between risk and safety. These critical control points are where technical experts can collaborate with publics with different expertise to identify and manage the technology. The use of technical terminology describing biochemical-level phenomena discourages publics that are not technical experts from contesting the embedded cultural perspectives and uncertainty in “scientific” concepts and prejudice the risk discourse by ignoring other issues of significance to society. From our perspective as gene technologists, we confront the use of pseudo-scale language in risk discourse and propose an escape path from clashes over whether risks that arise spontaneously (from nature) can be perfectly mimicked by gene technology to a discussion on how to best control the risks created by human activity. Scale is conceptually implicit and explicit in gene technology regulation, but there is no agreement about what scales are most useful to managing risk and social expectations. Both differentiated governance (risk-tiered) and responsible research and innovation models could accommodate the critical control points mechanism that we describe.

Gene editing of livestock

“…It is beyond the scope of this article to address whether gene editing is likely to generate new risk dynamics of a kind not recognized in current regulation. Heinemann et al (2021) have argued convincingly that the biochemical imaginaries that underpin extant regulatory practices and cultures rely on a narrow conception of risk-as actual or potential biological harm-that downplay the potential scalable outcomes of their use.…”

The need for assessment of risks arising from interactions between NGT organisms from an EU perspective

“…Large-scale releases undoubtedly increase the likelihood of direct or indirect effects from interactions between the NGT organisms. Therefore, the need to risk assess the interactions between NGT organisms may be much more crucial in comparison to previous applications of genetic engineering [see also 76]. In this context, the development of risk scenarios can help to generate plausible hypotheses (problem formulation) and guide the steps in risk assessment [see 4].…”

Beyond the Genome: Genetically Modified Crops in Africa and the Implications for Genome Editing

“…In other words, while CRISPR is often described as transgene‐free, and therefore inherently distinct from GM technology, the fact that gene‐edited crops may contain small pieces of foreign DNA or whole transgenes makes this narrative misleading (Ho, 2020). The effort to distinguish genome‐edited organisms from GM crops, due to the claimed absence of transgenes, is a goal‐oriented discursive strategy deployed by stakeholders who find it expedient to highlight technical differences between the two technologies rather than acknowledge their similarities, or overlaps between them (Heinemann et al., 2021).…”

“…With earlier techniques of genetic modification, a scientist could excise DNA at precise locations to be assembled into a cassette, but then had no control over where the cassette was inserted into the target organism (which is one important reason why only a tiny percentage of transformed plants were functional). Genome editing with CRISPR is certainly more precise than older techniques in terms of where in the genome it makes cuts, but it can also have a wide range of unintended ‘off‐target’ effects including accidental insertions, deletions and mutations: ‘For all the ease with which the wildly popular CRISPR–Cas9 genome‐editing tool alters genomes, it's still somewhat clunky and prone to errors and unintended effects’ (Ledford, 2019: 464; Heinemann et al., 2021; see also Ely et al., 2021; Mahfouz et al., 2014).…”