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Posts Tagged genetic modification

When is an experiment a ‘bungled’ experiment? Peter Griffin May 03

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I wasn’t in the sharpest frame of mind on Saturday morning after a big night on the town in Auckland with some journalist friends the previous night.

However I couldn’t help but notice the headline screaming out from the front page of the New Zealand Herald frontpage as I passed an inner-city dairy.

The headline was in green – a first for the New Zealand Herald as far as I know. It came with the following shocking sub heading and standfirst:

Source: New Zealand Herald

Source: New Zealand Herald

Hangover forgotten, I promptly bought a copy of the Herald and devoured the front page story, which indeed was a good scoop for environment reporter Eloise Gibson, who received some interesting material from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under the Official Information Act about genetic modification experiments Agresearch is carrying out. These transgenic experiments have already received a lot of public attention and involve putting human genetic material into cow cells to produce calves that have some human genetic traits.

As Gibson points out:

The scientists hoped that the genetic code, a human follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), would enable the cows that were produced to produce milk containing compounds that could be used as a human fertility treatment.

Under permits issued by the Environmental Risk Management Authority last month, AgResearch can put human genes into goats, sheep and cows for 20 years to see if the animals produce human proteins in their milk.

The proteins could eventually be used to treat human disorders.

Those couple of paragraphs sum up well the aims of the research. They come after an explanation of how three calves involved in a “bungled  experiment” at Agresearch’s Ruakura facility died after developing abnormally large ovaries.  The details are unpleasant – no one likes to hear about animals suffering and dying and the story will no doubt infuriate campaigners against animal testing.

Where’s the bungle here?

But what about the experiment was “bungled” or as One News put it on Saturday night, “botched”?

The Herald story goes on to reveal that the calves reared by Agresearch were, in the opinion of a MAF investigator “better cared for by vets at Ruakura than they would be on a standard dairy farm”. The state of the calves was reported to Agresearch’s animal ethics committee which told the company to monitor the calves. Agresearch was open with MAF about the problems the calves had developed. Agriculture Minister David Carter even got involved on hearing of the death of the calves and asked for information but was “satisfied with AgResearch’s response”.

So we have a case of cows dying in the course of genetic modification research, a result which scientists probably didn’t predict and were a bit puzzled by. But isn’t that the whole idea of an experiment? To test in a contained environment the effect of something that hasn’t been tried before. Isn’t that how numerous pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs and healthcare treatments have been tested in preparation for human consumption? How many lab rats, mice, dogs and pigs have died in the testing of the shampoo we use, the drugs we take, the food and drink we consume?

Were those deaths the result of bungled experiments? Possibly. But animals die in the course of animal testing. As Jim Suttie points out in the Herald article – such an occurrence is not a “big deal” and in fact is a foreseen outcome of some experiments. It sounds callous, but on the cutting edge of science, the whole idea is to find out what can and will go wrong in animals so it doesn’t go wrong in us.

Botched beat up?

There’s a valid story in the fact that calves died in the course of a GM experiment. It indeed raises again the vexed issue of animal testing and what society’s tolerance is for experimenting on animals.

Last month we saw both perspectives in this debate when animal testing opponents picketed the NZBIO conference in Auckland while inside, John Forman of the New Zealand Organisation for Rare Disorders argued passionately for  more animal testing to help tackle debilitating treat human disorders. But just because animals die in an experiment doesn’t mean that experiment was botched by the scientists involved. In fact, I haven’t seen anything in news reports to suggest the experiment was handled inappropriately or unprofessionally.

So did this story really deserve its front page lead status and unique green headline screaming “GM” in 72 point bold?

I don’t think so.

Sam Morgan on GM crops, conservation and broadband Peter Griffin Apr 12

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Wellington-based Trade Me founder, entrepreneur and philanthropist Sam Morgan sat down with me a few weeks ago to do an interview, the results of which ran in Idealog. Here’s the full, unedited version which expands on the work he is involved in in Africa.

What about this inclement Wellington weather? Is it tempting you to move to sunnier climes?

sam morganYeah.  It is actually. We might do that at some point, but we’ll stay in New Zealand. My wife’s family is in Nelson, so maybe we’ll move there.

Are you travelling much these days?

Yeah, not gratuitously. We had three months in Europe just as a family trip last year, and next week I’m at the TED conference in Long Beach. Then on the 1st of March I’m in Africa for three weeks, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya.

Let me guess, micro-financing business?

No, philanthropic kind of activities, mostly around yield improvements for small plot farmers and a really

interesting educational franchise model that a guy there is building up. The problem with education systems in those countries, is that they actually just don’t work.  You can build schools and staff them, but 25 percent of the teachers don’t turn up.  On spot checks half of them aren’t teaching, and you just don’t have the right incentives, because you don’t have the tax base to fund teachers, and put systems in place to make sure they work.

What’s the answer?

Private education is actually what works, franchise systems with scalable, typically scripted curricula.  Because you don’t have a depth of teachers there either, so you basically just get smart qualified graduates.

Franchising? Is this a not for profit venture?

That one is actually for profit, but we fund it out of my charitable foundation. If the guy who runs it goes from zero to doing a million kids, then it generates money, but we’re not really in it for the money.

And the struggling African farmers?

You hear about these people that are the bottom billion, the world’s most extreme poor. Well, 70 percent of them are rural farmers.  So if you can go in and double their yields, which is easy to do by teaching them seed spacing, and give them access to markets, and better hybridised seeds, and all those sorts of simple things, you can actually help them go from having zero discretionary income, to having a little bit.  And the first thing they buy is education and medicine.

Hillary Clinton’s science advisor Dr Nina Fedoroff was in the country recently and said to feed the bottom billion we need to get over our hang-ups about genetic modification.

Genetic modification has been happening ever since they started to cross breed seeds.  It’s just a question of whether you do it with cross-breeding, or radiation, whether you use a scalpel rather than a shotgun.  So I don’t really have a problem with it. But I do have an issue with farmers not being able to keep their seeds from season to season

Hopefully what would happen in that space is that the patents on genetically modified seeds wouldn’t be respected. In the same way we eventually got to a point where generics became the biggest part of the pharmaceutical industry, I think that as long as the developing countries are equally disrespectful of crop patents that makes sense.

So this venture in Africa, you’re actually funding farmers directly?

We support what is called the One Acre Fund. You have small plot farmers, typical family size of about six people, four children and two adults, typically farming staples, rain-fed crops. They give you seed,

training, and access to markets.

They take farmers from having a crop of say one tonne per hectare to three tone. They take the surplus tonne to create their own financial sustainability within their organisation. The farmer gets double the yield, and the organisation is sustaining and can grow.  We’ve been funding them for about 18 months, and they’ve grown from two thousand farming families to 17,000 farming families. They are targeting a hundred thousand farming families within three years.

Your philanthropy seems to have kicked up a gear. How many schemes like this do you support?

We’ve got oh, maybe 15 to 20 on the go at the moment. Another one we are talking to is franchising health clinics in India.  Their model is tele-medicine. They put a TV on the wall of rural clinics and link them with microwave broadband.

They’ll diagnose people by tele-link?

They connect typically to a call centre which is full of doctors, mostly female doctors, because the patients are mostly female and want female physicians, which are apparently quite difficult to find in India. They do the consultations via tele-link.

One country dearly in need of help at the moment is Haiti. Recovery there might be ripe for micro-financing type schemes.

That’s part of it. We support an organisation that works there called Partners in Health. They do rural health clinics. We fund them every year on a cycle and after the earthquake we asked if we should bring the payment forward. They said they’d received twenty five million dollars in the last eight days. So money is not the issue, making good use of it is. A lot was learnt from the response to the Boxing Day tsunami. They were sending in lots of milk powder, which was mixed with bad water people had available to them, which gave people disease and killed babies.

Back in the developed world, last year was a bit of a nightmare for many people. A lot of businesses went to the wall. How did you fair?

I certainly haven’t made any money in the last little couple of years, but I haven’t lost any either. Most of the businesses I’m involved with are reasonably early stage. But a lot of them had corporate sales models, and they basically were struggling to sell anything, because people were not buying.

You stepped in to save your investment in iVistra by taking control of the company.

It was a basket case.  We kept a few people, and we kept bits and pieces of technology. It is called Vizfleet now and we’ve a great team in there. We’ve reformulated the strategy around small medium enterprise dispatch software for mobile workforces. There’s a really big need for it. Every small company you go into has ten vans running around doing whatever – fixing bus stops, or collecting rubbish bins.

By and large you walk into their office and they’ve typically got the frazzled wife of the owner coordinating everything with Post-it notes. They don’t know where their commercial vehicles are. Getting a Sky dish installed is a classic.  It’s like “oh can you be home all weekend, or can you be home 9 to 5 every day this week, because we actually have no idea when we’ll turn up”. We’ve developed web-based software that relies on GPS in the vehicles to track their positions.

One of your other investments, the light-operated mouse and keyboard (Lomak), seemed like a great product, why do you think it didn’t take off?

The Lomak - Good idea, bad business

The Lomak - Good idea, bad business

Having a great product does not give you a license to have a great company. The sales just didn’t come.

The market is very difficult. It’s a subsidised control channel, a fragmented market, into a minority of the populace, people with severe disabilities typically.  And getting to those people is reasonably difficult, because you go through physicians, and so forth. So I think the whole supply chain for that market is just broken, so we just said well, you know, let’s cut our losses.

After three years of putting money in start-ups, you haven’t really had an exit yet.

No that’d be fair. I’m a big investor in Xero, which is public, and I can sell my shares and that on the market, I guess.

What has been the big lesson from all these investments

Go for people that are a bit more grown up. It’s too early if it’s just an idea, it’s too early if it’s just on Powerpoint.  It’s too early if you haven’t got your management team in place, roughly.  It’s too early if you haven’t got a couple of sales at least in order to understand your own unit economics, and channels, and how to get to market.

So it’s all about timing?

Get them late enough, but early enough!  Companies need money for ages.  I regularly say to people “look, you’re too early for us”.  They say “well, within a year we’re not going to need any more money”.  Its like “yeah, well whatever sunshine! I see guys like you all week long, and you will.  So come and see me in a year at which point you’ll be burning twice as much money, but you’ll be further along the curve”.

Is it just me, or has the Silicon Welly scene gone a bit quiet?

You’ve got kind of a bunch of entrepreneurs who are starting off in their own ventures. The law of numbers shows you that half of those are gonna fail. In the nicest possible way they are kind of two minute wonders.

The noise at least was based on a small number of people who were entrepreneurs themselves but weren’t cashed up.  So they kind of didn’t have the ability to actually do stuff long-term, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that had just kind of blown up a bit.

Xero is like a beacon of light for aspiring web entrepreneurs. It must have been good to see the founder of Xero’s rival MYOB come onboard and buy a large chunk of shares.

Absolutely so, you know he’s been great value as well.  Xero is a really well executed company.  They made the call to hire a lot of people ahead of the curve, and just do things right and do things well. Luckily, there’s enough cash in the bank to see it through to be successful.

One of the big buzzwords for the Government is “innovation”. Have you seen any action from them in this area?

I haven’t seen a hell of a lot from the Government. I think cost controls in government generally are probably a good thing. But moves like not mandating compacting fluorescent light bulbs in New Zealand, are a bit retarded. The people in charge of environmental policy are certainly not taking a leadership position.

There’s tentative talk about reintroducing an R&D tax credit, do you think that would help stimulate more innovation?

Not in the companies I’m involved with. It just changes allocation of capital.  That doesn’t do very much at all.

It looks as though owning investment property is soon going to be less attractive. Do you think Kiwis having the confidence to invest elsewhere, in New Zealand businesses or even in the stock market?

Fundamentally, no. I have this argument with my dad quite a bit. We agree that the allocation of capital into property is excessive and needs to be controlled.

I think actually central government has a role in protecting people from their own stupid selves.  And, you know stopping people investing wholesale in residential or commercial property over the odds, is sensible.  Because that has the ability to just be a complete bomb in New Zealand.

What we disagree on is whether there will suddenly be this reallocation of capital into other asset classes.  What I’ve seen of people who had their formative experience through the 1987 stock market crash, is that they don’t own equities.  So I think people have been scared off quite a lot of asset classes.

Your dad has some pretty strong ideas about tax as well – a 25 per cent flat tax rate being one part of his ‘big kahuna’ idea to shake-up the tax system.

It is quite hardcore, his manifesto, but very interesting. The amount of tax that people pay in different areas, is not fair.  The people that pay the most tax are working people. I was lucky enough to sell my company in a country with no capital gains, so I paid no tax on the sale of my company.  Now I’ve got no income effectively, because I don’t have a proper job, so the tax that I pay is minimal.  The tax I do pay, I throw money into my charitable foundation.  So while I can’t touch that money, it is for charitable purposes. I pay basically no tax.  And that’s not right, but what am I supposed to do?

Talking about property, in late 2008 you bought a high country sheep station near Wanaka, what’s your plans for that?

It is a big high country station. The plan is to keep the station intact, and run it as a farming unit, you know keep it in line with the pastoral farming heritage of the region. And on the flats, there are 26 lots which we are in the process of getting the housing platform locations confirmed for.

Feedlots in McKenzie Country. Good idea or not?

New Zealand is widely recognised as having a pastoral system, not a lot feed system.  I think muddying that message by having lot-fed cows is not good for our brand with dairy exports being a third of our, net exports, or whatever it is.

Our clean green image took a beating last year overseas.

Well I think it’s moving a bit beyond that.  I think, you know the full energy equation has been taken a little bit more into consideration.  And with a pastoral based system you have an extremely energy efficient system, because the sun grows the grass, the cows eat the grass, and then you chop their heads off and ship them.  Whereas when you’re applying lots of fertiliser to grow soya beans in Brazil, that you then ship to the UK to lot feed cows, the energy equation just doesn’t work.  So it’s, I think people are, certainly the smart buyers, the Waitroses of the world, are onto that. I think buy local is a big thing, I think the food miles argument is on shaky ground intellectually.

Your dad paid half a million dollars to climate scientists last year to research and present the arguments on climate change.  Do you think it was a good investment?

Gareth Morgan's book on climate change

Gareth Morgan's book on climate change

It certainly enlightened him. John Key said to me the other week that he had heard that the book was well regarded, and he had it on his to-do reading list for Christmas. If you can have influence at that level it is good because ultimately those issues need to be dealt with at a policy level. People are not going to change their selfish behaviours in a hurry.

There has certainly been a rise in scepticism around climate change.

I think there are aspects of it that are problematic, like carbon credit exchanges and all those sorts of things. They’re all a little bit like funny money still.  But we cannot continue to destroy our ecosystems.  What I don’t like about the climate change argument is that it takes all of the discussion around oceans, and soils, and air and water, off the table because it’s all about CO2.

Do you miss the buzz of running a company like Trade Me?

I probably miss the people more than anything. But there are a lot about those sorts of roles that are all heat and no light.

Next week I’m in the US at TED with all these smart cookies, and the week after that I’m in Africa, and last week I was at up in Hamilton holding a Kiwi and looking at their pest proof fencing technology, and that sort of stuff.  And before that I was down in Fiordland with DOC looking at what they’re doing with pest eradication and saving forests. I love the variety.

Trade Me produced some great entrepreneurs, Nigel Stanford, Rowan Simpson and the StarNow guys among them. Is it still a breeding ground for entrepreneurs who want to do web start-ups?

Yeah I think so. But if you join Trade Me today you’re in a 150 person organisation, and you’re in the middle of the dev team, or wherever.  You don’t have that same perspective, so it’s probably doesn’t continue to throw them out systematically.  It’s something that’s more a product of the early years.

Former Fairfax boss David Kirk had a rather unceremonious departure from the company last year. Did the newspaper group’s board really appreciate what he did in buying Trade Me?

I know that there’s certainly no regrets about that transaction. Trade Me is still a fast growing company relative to a newspaper that’s generating heaps of free cash that they can use to pay down their debts, so I’m sure they appreciate it.  But the debt had obviously somewhat accumulated in that period as well. I had dinner with David the other week in Sydney, and he’s good. He’s now the chairman of Hoyts in Australia, among other things.

Will the Apple iPad save the print media?

I think the fundamental problem they have is that there is just so much more media you’ve got access to.  And barriers to entry are very low, you don’t have to own a printing press or employ many journalists, if any. So I don’t think it’s fundamentally changing that.  It might provide them some additional revenue stream but who is going to buy a thousand dollar device and use that to read their newspaper?  They already do that with their computer. I don’t think it will turn up on the newspaper P&Ls in a hurry.

Your old nemesis from the Trade Me days Telecom is having a rough time with mobile network outages, being slammed for breaching the Fair Trading Act and losing market share to competitors.

When the mobile network went down, I got e-mails from Telecom about it every 3 or 4 hours giving me really good updates. But I’m on Vodafone!

You know, the country needs Telecom. They needed a bit of a shock, and they were given that, and I was all for throwing punches in that fight.  I think we need to lay off now, let them perform, but I think we probably need to get proper structural separation of Telecom.

But I was on the phone this morning to foreign countries for two or three hours. I used Skype, So Telecom have to innovate quickly.

What do we need to do to fix the internet in this country?

We need to solve the international bandwidth problem. We need a cable which is not based on price maximisation. I’m almost inclined to just do it myself. It’s maybe six hundred million dollars and I think, you know, you can make that happen.  You do a cost plus model, and you sell some bandwidth to the likes of TVNZ and Sky TV and Vodafone, big corporates.  You put a little cable across to Australia, so you get the Australian demand as well, and you’ve got a business there.

We could have unconstrained international bandwidth basically free within two years if we laid a cable.  It is not acceptable to go and stay in a hotel and be charged $30 for bandwidth overnight. Fibre to the home is great, but it only takes you to Auckland.  So unless Google is going to live in Auckland, then it’s kind of a waste of time.

You mentioned you’ve been on the road looking at DOC projects. Are you becoming a bit of a greenie

You know I was never really into the old conservation thing particularly, but every now and then you see a model in there which really works, and makes a lot of sense. I’ve been looking around at what the Department of Conservation is doing in New Zealand, at Maungatautari up in the Waikato.  So I kind of have an idea now, at least I know the difference between a Kakapo and a Kiwi bird. I didn’t before.

You go up to Maungatautari and you’re walking around in a forest with a perimeter fence that has been up for a few years.  The forest is completely different. You have shoots coming out of the ground, little rimu, and kauri, just little shoots.  You just don’t see these shoots in the forest in New Zealand.  And once those trees die, our forest is gone, because nothing is growing beneath the canopy level.  It’s all eaten. It’s kind of a bit of a ticking time bomb.

1080 use is still such a polarizing issue.

It is divisive but, you know all the data shows that if you want to save your forest, it works.

So would you chip in money to Government run conservation schemes?

Yes I would be happy to support that sort of thing. But you need to ask all the questions. Is the model right? Often what happens is that government money is there, and they have a bit of private money. If the private money is not there, the government money expands, but, you know, they have different objectives, or they’re at cross purposes. Private sector style models often work better at the innovation and the early stage sort of stuff.

So what’s this about you buying into a cattle farm in Brazil?

There’s a family up in the Waikato, the Wallis family, and they farm around ten thousand head dairy cattle up there, one of the biggest suppliers.  About 10 years ago Simon Wallis went to Brazil and has built, in those interim years, basically a New Zealand-based dairy model in Brazil.  So they’ve got New Zealand cows, and New Zealand farming practices, with Brazilians manning the milk stations.

The main thing about it is the productivity there is three times what it is in New Zealand. We are getting, 50 tonne of dry matter per hectare per year. The economics of dairying in New Zealand are just embarrassing by comparison.

So I think there are some quite interesting models out there where, the Icebreaker model of basically just having designers here and ownership here, and increasingly being in Portland.  I think we need to, be internationalising like that. It is an exciting kind of path for us to take.

GM ruling quashed in Court of Appeal – now what? Peter Griffin Mar 29

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The journal Nature features a report from Sydney-based New Zealander Branwen Morgan, looking at the implications of the New Zealand Court of Appeal move to quash an earlier High Court decision that saw Agresearch applications to undertake genetic modification research thrown out.

I blogged on the Court of Appeal case in February heading the article: Will Agresearch’s Court of Appeal bid pay off? The decision handed down last week (see the paper below) shows it clearly did pay off. It was obvious during the Court of Appeal hearing that the argument GE Free NZ had earlier scored a High Court win on the back of, was fundamentally flawed.

GE Free NZ was essentially saying that Agresearch’s applications to undertake GM research involving a range of different species were so generic and broad-ranging in scope that they shouldn’t even have been considered by the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA). That would mean that on receiving an application, ERMA would be required to rule straight away whether an application could be considered, effectively vetting applications before the substance of them would have the scientific ruler run over them.

It is like throwing out a submission to a poetry competition before it can be read because the entry  doesn’t appear to have enough stanzas.

It is an argument that the Court of Appeal judges saw little merit in. They concluded:

We accept that there is a real issue as to whether the generic nature of the applications means that they fail to comply with what appear to be relatively specific requirements in s 40(2). However, we also accept the submission made on behalf of
both AgResearch and ERMA that the determination of that issue is a matter requiring a degree of scientific knowledge and the application of that knowledge to the case at hand in circumstances where it will not be readily apparent to ERMA at
the time it accepts the application, and which will be difficult for a Court to evaluate in judicial review.

In our view, the essentially mechanical decision made by ERMA to accept and register the applications should be allowed to stand. ERMA should continue its process of assessment of the applications. We therefore allow the appeal and quash the orders
made in the High Court setting aside ERMA’s decision to accept the applications and directing ERMA to take no further steps towards hearing and asserting the applications.

The decision means ERMA is free to consider applications in the way it has been doing so – if the basic “mechanical” processes of lodging the applications are completed on the right forms with the right boxes ticked, ERMA will be obliged to look in further detail at an application. That sounds like common sense as lets face it, those applying to ERMA are generally organisations that have done their homework and are serious about undertaking serious research here. Bogus applications from crazy scientists therefore are likely to be spiked soon after being received even if they do make it onto the desk of whoever at ERMA is tasked with processing the applications.

So Agresearch is pretty much back where it was when the applications were first lodged in late 2008 and ERMA has the task of considering those four applications again. The outcome is as uncertain as it was first time around.  Agresearch is  no doubt frustrated about the delay the court action has caused. The Nature article certainly points to this:

Despite the recent Court of Appeal ruling in AgResearch’s favour, Barry Scott, head of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and former ERMA board member, says these sorts of legal challenges can stifle business development. Jimmy Suttie, science and technology general manager for AgResearch’s applied biotechnologies group, acknowledges this possibility. “The impact is twofold: it makes NZ companies themselves reluctant to invest and, because of the way the international media may view the actions of GE Free NZ, it can suggest that the anti-GM attitude in New Zealand is more extreme than it really is,” he says.

GE Free NZ is making noises about a Supreme Court bid to have the decision reversed. Surely it would be more productive to leave ERMA to actually look at the substance of the applications and decide for itself whether the applications are too general and vague in nature and even ask for more information if necessary? Isn’t that what the role of a regulator should be?

GM ryegrass – at least 7 years away from release Peter Griffin Mar 02

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The Royal Society’s dispassionate summary of the potential benefits and risks of planting crops of GM forage for farm animals to feed on makes for interesting reading, thought its lack of recommendations on a way forward for GM in New Zealand may leave you wondering what the message from science actually is.

At the Science Media Centre we held a briefing today for journalists, featuring three of the co-authors of the paper. You can listen back to their presentations and the Q&A with journalists at the end here. Bottom line is that the scientists believe that after 10 years of intensive farming of GM crops around the world – 143 million hectares of GM crops were planted last year alone – the overwhelming scientific evidence suggests that genetically modified crops are safe to grow and consume. But that hasn’t really seen industry and public perception of genetically modified organisms shift dramatically in favour of the technology being used.

Source: Pastoral Genomics

Source: Pastoral Genomics

As Lincoln University’s Caroline Saunders pointed out in her presentation, opposition to GM at an industry level is on the increase in the US and the European Union where the high-value premium sectors of the market are anti-GM, because animal meat reared on GM crops often sells for less. As an example given by Professor Saunders, she points to GM corn-fed beef going for eight per cent less than its non-GM equivalent.

Research also suggests that what consumers are willing to accept when it comes to GM is complex – if GM traits make food healthier or reduce the impact on the environment they are more accepting of it than if GM traits reduce prices. Some New Zealand research referenced by Professor Saunders suggests a fairly high level of rejection (40 – 45 per cent of those surveyed) of products with beneficial GM traits, say butter with less cholesterol or insect resistant sweetcorn. As such, whatever justifications scientists can put forward for genetically modified crops, in this case, GM forage crops, won’t necessarily hugely influence whether consumers are accepting of it.

There was much discussion in the briefing of the difference between cisgenic and transgenic modification, which guest blogger Jack Heinneman recently examined in a series on Sciblogs. Pastoral Genomics’ Dr Michael Dunbier outlined the reasons for pursuing research into GM forage crops (see his presentation below). One striking image he put up on his slide shows GM ryegrass engineered to be drought resistant. The plants are visibly much better off that those unmodified plants. But if many scientists are keen to get moving here on GM crops most are realistic that due to the issues mentioned above, a commercial release of a GM forage crop which could become the basis of feed for millions of cows and sheep, is still some way off. In Dr Dunbier’s estimation, the earliest commercialisation could be in 2017 – 2018.

An NZPA report on the briefing.

Morsel combat: the Listener on genetic modification Peter Griffin Jan 31

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The Listener out this weekend, features an interview with Dr Nina Fedoroff, who was in the country last week talking agricultural science and genetic modification and covers the other side of the GM argument with Green MP Sue Kedgley also featured.

It is worth a read, particularly the interesting side bar by writer David Lomas which points out that Kiwis are already eating GM food mostly without their knowledge but that GM isn’t really in demand here because we are not big producers of commodity crops like rice, corn and soy.

Sarah Barnett’s main piece expands on Fedoroff’s assertion that attitudes to GM food are changing:

The New Zealand Listener, Jan 30 2010

The New Zealand Listener, Jan 30 2010

I’m currently two-thirds into an exceptionally good book called Enough, which examines the causes of famine and food shortages in Africa and which is written by a couple of Wall Street Journal reporters.

I haven’t even got to discussion of genetically modified crops yet, but the overall impression so far is that the US and Europe, with lavish protectionism of its farmers, haphazard approaches to food aid and mixing of humanitarian assistance with geopolitical objectives has done the African continent considerable harm over the past few decades, while at the same time teaching African nations new farming techniques and shipping excess supplies of grain to feed Africans when crop fails.

It seems a large amount of the suffering and starvation endured by African nations could have been avoided had the Western world been more genuine about its efforts to really help Africa, rather than being seen to do so.With that sort of track record, you can understand why there’s a good deal of cynicism that GM crop technology, developed by the West, is the answer to hunger in Africa in the face of climate change – generated largely by those of us in rich countries.

I’ll post a full review of Enough in the next few days.

US to NZ: Get real about GM crops Peter Griffin Jan 29

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It was fairly predictable that Dr Nina Fedoroff’s comments about genetic modification during her visit to New Zealand this week would raise the hackles of anti-GM group GE Free NZ.

Nina Fedoroff - GM advocate

Nina Fedoroff - GM advocate

It was also ironic that Fedoroff, Hillary Clinton’s science and technology advisor, arrived just as GE Free New Zealand went back to court where Crown research institute AgResearch was seeking to overturn a decision that last year saw its applications to undertake GM research across a range of species withdrawn.

Fedoroff is an expert in plant genetics, author of a book on genetic modification and an unabashed advocate of the technology. This New York Times piece gives Federoff’s take on GM, which can be summed up with this quote from her:

“There’s almost no food that isn’t genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution.

“Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

“In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

“So a lot of modern plant strains were created by applying chemicals or radiation to cause mutations that improved the crop. That’s how plant breeding was done in the 20th century. The paradox is that now that we’ve invented techniques that introduce just one gene without disturbing the rest, some people think that’s terrible.”

Fedoroff’s presentation Rethinking Agriculture in a Changing Climate (see  a version of it below – minus the video clips) formed the basis of her public lecture at the University of Auckland on Wednesday and also forms the bones of her pro-GM justifications, which focus on food security and the challenges faced by the world of feeding more people using less arable land.

It is the “accelerating evolution” using genetic modification that has been such a touchy subject in New Zealand, and while it wasn’t top of the agenda as Fedoroff met some of the country’s top scientists in a series of high-level discussions, her message will certainly be getting sympathetic nods from scientists she has met this week who are extremely limited in the GM research they can do and who have been unable to get a commercial release of a GMO of any kind in New Zealand, after decades of effort. AgResearch chief executive Andrew West went as far this week as to suggest scientists have a moral obligation to pursue GM technology.

“If genetic modification can create more food from fewer inputs, I think we have a moral obligation to use it. With our current product mix, New Zealand can feed 17 million people,” Dr West said.

Fedoroff is well aware of the antipathy to GM in New Zealand. But she believes public sentiment on GM may shift as rising demand puts pressure on food prices. She told the Herald:

“Stay tuned … dug-in positions can change quite rapidly.”

Will Agresearch’s Court of Appeal bid pay off? Peter Griffin Jan 26

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[UPDATED: An ERMA spokesperson got in touch to clarify that ERMA isn't party to the appeal - "In the High Court, GE Free challenged ERMA’s right to receive the applications from AgResearch. AgResearch appealed the High Court decision, and we were in court yesterday to assist in any way we could and to seek clarification of ERMA’s powers under the Act."]

It was a decidedly slow day at Wellington’s cavernous Court of Appeal today.

Wellington's Court of Appeal which is hearing the GM application case

Wellington's Court of Appeal which is hearing the GM application case

The single case scheduled on the court noticeboard: GE Free NZ vs Agresearch and the Environmental Risk Assessment Authority.

In Court room 1, lawyers for Crown Research Institute Agresearch and ERMA, the Government body that vets applications for imports and trials of genetically modified organisms, aligned themselves on the left side of the court. Lawyers for GE Free New Zealand took their positions on the right.

If the few onlookers gathered to observe proceedings were expecting a legal argument on whether genetic modification trials should be allowed to go on in New Zealand, they’d have been pretty disappointed. What followed was a day of rather dry but occasionally vigorous and interesting legal discussion that focused on how the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act applies to ERMA’s process of receiving applications from organisations seeking to import or develop genetically modified material. Nevertheless, the outcome of the appeal could decide the direction and extent of genetic modification trials in New Zealand for the next few years. The stakes for everyone concerned are high.

Agresearch and ERMA are appealing a High Court ruling from last June which saw the anti-GM organisation GE Free successful in having withdrawn Agresearch’s applications to import genetically modified material and undertake GM trials in New Zealand on several species of animals. Justice Clifford ruled back then (see his full judgement at bottom) that:

…the applications are simply too generic to enable the risk assessment called for by HSNO to be meaningfully undertaken. In reaching this conclusion I have carefully considered whether I am trespassing on to a question which should be left to ERMA’s expertise. I have concluded that I have not.

In other words, Justice Clifford was saying that the scope of the GM applications, which according to NZPA sought approval for “laboratory testing of human and monkey cell lines and smaller species of GE laboratory animals, and the development of GE cows, buffalo, sheep, pigs, goats, llamas, alpacas, deer and horses”, was far too open-ended, the information contained in the applications, much too generic to allow a proper assessment of the risk it may pose to the country. His interpretation of the law is that given the lack of detail in the applications, they shouldn’t even be heard, which would have the effect of throwing out Agresearch’s applications before the substance of them has been looked at in any meaningful way by ERMA’s team of experts.

ERMA obviously took exception to its authority being undermined in this way, which is why it was part of that High Court case and is part of the appeal against the judgement.

Agresearch’s lawyers today outlined the intent of the applications in relation to cows, which is to undertake GM research and breeding to allow the production of high-value proteins in milk. They said that the applications were for “extraordinary small modifications”:

“The idea that some fantastic creature can be made as a result of these processes just doesn’t hold water.”

They argued also that the HSNO Act doesn’t specify that organisms have to be identified in a particular way in an application, nor where trials are proposed to be carried out. In effect, Agresearch’s lawyers are arguing that the CRI’s applications complied with the law and should have been processed and considered by ERMA.

ERMA’s lawyers suggested Justice Clifford’s judgement was inconsistent with a 2003 court ruling in the so-called Madge case, where a group calling itself Mothers Against Genetic Modification and headed by ex-Thomson Twins pop star, Alannah Currie, was unsuccessful in attempting to overturn an application approved by ERMA that allowed Agresearch to undertake GM trials that involved inserting human, rat, mouse and deer genes into cows. They said there was no legal requirement specified in the HSNO Act to assess whether an application to ERMA was valid. In effect, ERMA’s scientifically-qualified staff would do the analysis later in the process.

GE Free NZ’s lawyers for their part, suggested the applications were far too broad and slight on detail, indicating what species of host animals were intended to genetically modified but not what “source donor” animals would be used and where the material would be imported from.

They said that if the specific intentions of the GM research had been outlined in detail, such as a desire to find a way of reducing methane emissions from cattle, GE Free NZ may have been been more understanding about its applications.

“[They are] effectively saying Agresearch can go off on its own now and not come back,” said one lawyer of the applications.

It has been suggested to me by people in the scientific community that Agresearch’s applications were indeed broad in nature. There are valid reasons for that – Agresearch doesn’t know with certainty where the science is going to go in the coming years, so wants as broad a remit as possible to experiment. Applications can also be expensive to lodge and have investigated, so the broader you go in terms of species an application covers, the less cost incurred in going through the ERMA process. But was Agresearch too ambitious, especially given the anti-GM sentiment in New Zealand?

Crossing the line?

The three Court of Appeal judges presiding over the appeal had plenty of curly questions for the lawyers that illuminated the key points the case hinges on. Justice O’Regan seemed incredulous that Agresearch would lodge an application that was so generic and broad in nature.

“You don’t apply for building consent to build any kind of building,” he remarked.

Justice Chambers on the other hand thought it nonsensical that an application, that didn’t “flagrantly” contravene the HSNO Act,  would be thrown out before even being assessed by ERMA

“How can they decide the impact of an application on the environment without going through an assessment at an early stage?” He asked.

“The question is the time in the process that they make these assessments.”

The case raises several questions that will be important to be sorted out ahead of other applications to ERMA (which processes around 240 per year).

- As a matter of law, can an authority give legal approval for something that can’t be fully described?

- What must ERMA do to satisfy itself that it has a valid application?

- Is there a line that’s crossed when an application becomes too broad, and if so, where is the line?

From the legal discussion I witnessed this morning, it is hard to know which way the court will go. It seems that GE Free NZ has a good argument that the Agresearch applications were too broad, but Agresearch has a point in arguing that the applications shouldn’t be thrown out at such an early point in the process. ERMA would seem to have a compelling case that its scientists should have the opportunity to assess credible applications.

Court of Appeal judgements often overturn previous judgements, and there’s a chance of that happening here too. Agresearch last November lodged new submissions with ERMA for a narrower range of GM trials to conduct research “on goats, sheep and cows in containment at its Ruakura research facility”. Public submissions on those applications closed in December. So the CRI is pushing ahead in its bid to undertake GM research, albeit in a more cautious way. In that respect, maybe something constructive may indeed have come out of GE Free NZ’s win last year. But the pursuit of the appeal by Agresearch and ERMA suggests both organisations believe broader applications should be considered.

A Court of Appeal decision could be months away, though I understand the matter has been put into urgency so a judgement could be released in a matter of weeks.

GM probe: Minor transgressions…major implications Peter Griffin Dec 01

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It hasn’t been a great year for New Zealand’s genetic modification research efforts, even if viewed from a purely “PR” point of view.

Last December, the anti-GM environmental group the Soil & Health Association of New Zealand had a poke around Crop & Food’s GM brassica trial going on at the company’s campus at Lincoln near Christchurch and found a flowering kale plant where it shouldn’t have been. As a result of the ensuing investigation, the 10 year trial of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and forage kale was abandoned in February, around 2 years into its consent period. A lot of investment that ultimately came from us the tax payers, came to nothing.

Soil & Health’s Steffan Browning later told me the discovery was a bit of a fluke, but it showed that an unofficial, self-appointed watchdog was studying GM trials in New Zealand like a hawk, and quite rightly pointing out where containment wasn’t 100 per cent airtight.

Still it was a set-back for the scientific community’s efforts to progress GM research here. The perception is that the New Zealand public is incredibly wary of GM and a determined group of activists including Browning and his comrade-in-arms, Claire Bleakley of GE Free NZ, are determined to prevent the commercial release of GM organisms.

It means that any minor transgression in GM research is amplified by these groups, adding to the perception that GM is something we need to keep a lid on. So a second probe by MAF Biosecurity into a GM plant breach at Lincoln is pretty worrying news for scientists working in the field.

What third party?

On the face of it, this breach looks less serious – scientists approached by the Science Media Centre said the risk of these self-pollinating plants spreading quickly over large distances is low. But seedlings discovered by Plant & Food staff and tested by MAF were indeed found to have genetically modified “constructs”. That means they shouldn’t have been there.

Plant & Food’s chief executive Peter Landon-Lane told The Press:

“It is unclear how these seedlings came to be outside the facility as they do not match to any work Plant & Food Research has done. There is evidence suggesting they have come from a third party.”

So where did they come from? The arabidopsis plants analysed by MAF are very commonly used in genetic studies – a colleague at the SMC was working with them at university while completing her microbiology degree, so perhaps they originated from studies undertaken by researchers at Lincoln University, which shares a campus with Plant & Food.

There are other research campuses in the area, but its unlikely they are involved in GM research involving these types of plants.

Close the glasshouse door!

If the plants definitely do contain GM constructs, as subsequent testing will confirm, it will be important,  for the integrity of containment programmes underway at research institutions based at Lincoln and the rest of the country, to find out exactly where they came from and how they came to be growing outside of a containment facility.

A lot of containment facilities used in GM trials here and abroad are no more than glasshouses – the photo below is of a glasshouse at the John Innes Centre in the UK I visited earlier in the year where scientists are splicing genes from the snapdragon flower into tomatoes. Taking a tomato or some tomato seeds out of the glasshouse, we were told, would have constituted a breach of the rules and caused all sorts of hassle for the researchers, but overall, the approach to containment was fairly common sense. We could have carried material out on our shoes but the risk from that was obviously deemed low.

New Zealand faces stricter containment rules than other countries when it comes to GM trials. Given the intense scrutiny of the current trials underway here by environmental groups its paramount that the organisations involved uphold these high standards. If they don’t they face more serious knockbacks on the road to commercialising their research.

john innes glasshouse