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Citizen StakeholdersScience & Technology

Not just about “the science” – science education and attitudes to genetically modified foods among women in Australia

Heather J Bray & Rachel A Ankeny

Publication date: 08/02/2017

Previous studies investigating attitudes to genetically modified (GM) foods suggest a correlation between negative attitudes and low levels of science education, both of which are associated with women.

In a qualitative focus group study of Australian women with diverse levels of education, we found attitudes to GM foods were part of a complex process of making “good” food decisions, which included other factors such as locally produced, fresh/natural, healthy and nutritious, and convenient. Women involved in GM crop development and those with health science training differed in how they used evidence to categorize GM foods.

Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how GM food, and the role of science and technology in food production and consumption more broadly, is understood and discussed amongst diverse “publics” and across different “sciences,” and to research related to deepening public engagement at the intersection of science and values.

Resource type: Web page URL

Science & Technology

Post Note – Genome editing

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (UK)

Publication date: 23/11/2016

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Genome editing techniques enable the targeted modification of DNA sequences within living cells. They have potential uses in biomedical research, human therapy, agriculture and to help control vector-borne diseases. This POSTnote covers current and future uses of genome editing, how it is regulated and the potential concerns that it raises.

Website has link to full report.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Legislation & RegulationScience & Technology

Why Frankenstein is a great science policy guide for the guture

Joey Eschrich

Publication date: 27/10/2016

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Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old fable explores the tension between scientific creativity and social responsibility.

It is a nuanced exploration of scientific ethics and the dynamic between scientific creativity and social responsibility. The novel isn’t a straightforward warning to stop innovating; it is a cautionary tale. The dangers aren’t so much about what we do, but how we go about doing it.

Shelley’s narrative urges us to be good caretakers of the new things we bring into the world, whether they’re ideas or works of art or gadgets or synthetic beings. The novel cautions us that human creativity begets things of great power, and dramatizes what happens when a creator significantly shirks his responsibility.

We’re still grappling with these same issues of creativity and responsibility—even if our scientific knowledge and technological sophistication are far more advanced today than in Shelley’s early 19th century. In an age of obviously Frankensteinian breakthroughs in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, we’ve already answered the simpler question—we’re being hubristic, in some sense, playing with the forces of life and death. What remains is the deeper lesson at the heart of Frankenstein: That the thrill of discovery is just the beginning of a creator’s work.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & Technology

Genome-editing – an ethical view

Nuffield Council on Bioethics

Publication date: 30/09/2016

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It seems as though genome editing is everywhere. In a relatively short time, particularly since the emergence of the CRISPR-Cas9 system in 2012, techniques for making precisely targeted
alterations to DNA sequences in living cells have not only preoccupied life science journals, but have also featured in mainstream news. They have been implicated in stories of revolutionary
medical advance and genetically altered food, and in the business pages, where the battle over the intellectual property rights to the underlying technology, and the prospects of companies
developing genome editing treatments and products, have been matters of continual intrigue and speculation.

While the scientific merits are overt, the practical and ethical significance of these recent developments is far harder to discern. While the use of genome editing techniques has spread
across biological research, including microorganisms, plants, animals and human cells, the extent to which the potential applications can be understood in relation to prevailing norms and managed through existing governance measures has not been extensively examined. As a rapidly established (though continually developing) research technique, one that is at the foundation of diverse emerging biotechnologies, there is concern that genome editing science and innovation are moving ahead of public understanding and policy.

The Nuffield Council’s terms of reference charge it “to identify and define ethical questions raised by recent advances in biological and medical research in order to respond to, and to anticipate, public concern.” In 2015, convinced that genome editing had the potential to raise such questions, the Council agreed to undertake a programme of work and established an interdisciplinary working group to gather evidence and to deliberate in relation to these matters. The present publication is the output of the first stage of this work. It addresses conceptual and descriptive issues regarding genome editing and identifies the key ethical questions that arise.

Web page has links to the full report.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Organic farmers are not anti-science but genetic engineers often are

Elizabeth Henderson

Publication date: 24/05/2016

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At one of the public brainstorming sessions for the New York Organic Action Plan, an organic farmer made an impassioned plea for support for “independent science” and told us that with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we will need genetic engineering to prevent starvation.

I would like to examine these words carefully to decipher what they mean, how those words are used by this farmer and by others, and suggest how the movement for locally grown organic food in this country should respond.

What is the meaning of ‘independent science’? As co-chair of the Policy Committee for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), I have been an active participant in the coalition that is campaigning to pass GMO labeling legislation in NY State. In this capacity, I have spoken at public meetings, to the press and on radio interviews. A question that I have heard from proponents of biotechnology is “why do you organic farmers oppose science, like the climate deniers?”

The first time I heard this, I was startled and felt defensive. Had I ever opposed science? I searched back through things I had written and reviewed all the policy resolutions the members of NOFA-NY had passed over the years. I found a few places where I criticized reductionist science and defended “indigenous knowledge” (that is things like composting and crop rotations that people who practice a craft know and pass on to their children that has not been proven by research at a university). But nowhere could I find any statement opposing science.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Legislation & RegulationScience & Technology

Broadening the lens for the governance of emerging technologies: care ethics and agricultural biotechnology

Christopher Preston and Fern Wickson

Publication date: 01/05/2016

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In this paper the authors argue that insights from feminist perspectives, particularly in the form of an ethics of care, have a number of advantages when used as a lens through which to consider questions relevant to the governance of emerging technologies.

They highlight how an emphasis on central themes of importance in feminist theory and care ethics such as relationality, contextuality, dependence, power, affect, and narrative can shine a light on a number of salient issues that are typically missed by the dominant and largely consequentialist risk assessment frame.

They argue that the care ethics lens is a better fit when technologies are understood not simply as devices designed to create a certain end experience for a user but as transformative systems that smuggle in numerous social and political interests. The advantages of these care ethics themes for emerging technologies are illustrated through a detailed consideration of agricultural biotechnology. They show how the feminist care ethics lens might have anticipated the very questions that have proved themselves to be the sticking points for this technology.

They therefore suggest that applying a care ethics lens can significantly broaden the frame of appraisal processes used for the governance of emerging technologies and usefully grant legitimacy to questions and concerns that are prominent in public discourse but typically left out of practices of risk assessment.

Resource type: Web page URL

Citizen StakeholdersPlant & Animal BreedingScience & Technology

New gene-editing techniques could transform food crops – or die on the vine

Stephen S Hall

Publication date: 01/03/2016

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The CRISPR revolution may be having its most profound – and least publicized – effect in agriculture. By the fall of 2015 about 50 scientific papers had been published reporting uses of CRISPR in gene-edited plants, and there are preliminary signs that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies that assesses genetically modified agricultural products, does not think all gene-edited crops require the same regulatory attention as “traditional” genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. With that regulatory door even slightly ajar, companies are racing to get gene-edited crops into the fields and, ultimately, into the food supply.

Will consumers agree? Or will they see CRISPR crops as the latest iteration of Frankenfood—a genetic distortion of nature in which foreign (and agribusiness-friendly) DNA is muscled into a species, with unpredictable health or environmental consequences? Because CRISPR is only now being applied to food crops, the question has not yet surfaced for the public, but it will soon.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Citizen StakeholdersLegislation & RegulationPlant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Opinion: The complex nature of GMOs calls for a new conversation

Maywa Montenegro

Publication date: 07/10/2015

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What are the conditions under which GMOs might work more effectively? Can they be compatible with the needs of farmers, eaters and their communities, not only with the aims of corporations and biotech scientists?

We can start by broadening the conversation around human health to include social science and natural science perspectives, and encompassing the ripple effects of technologies packaged with GMOs. we can open the floor to engaged citizens and laborers across the food system. We also need better regulatory oversight. We can bring GM research and development into the public sphere.

A nonreductionist evaluation of GMOs can push us toward thinking about effects at multiple scales and time spans. Such an evaluation can get us to think deeply about who benefits from technologies, who controls their availability and access, and who makes such decisions. We get to think about the entanglements of politics, the media and public interest in shaping scientific validity and “consensus.”

In short, we are invited to think socially and ecologically — indeed agroecologically — about the utility and value of engineered seeds. “If GMOs can survive such scrutiny and emerge as a beneficial tool, ” writes the author “I’m certainly not anti-GMO”.

Resource type: Web page URL

Citizen StakeholdersLegislation & RegulationScience & Technology

Conflicting values in the GM food crop debate

RC Jennings

Publication date: 15/09/2015

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The debate over GM food crops has been going on since the 1990s. The debate ranges over a wide spectrum of issues, which can be grouped under three main headings. First, and of most immediate concern, is the debate over the possible effect of GM foods on human health. Second is the debate over the impact of GM crops on the environment. And last is the socio-economic impact of GM agriculture.

This paper addresses the first debate, the possible health hazards of GM foods, and why it has not yet been resolved. The impact of GM crops on the environment is now well known – the rise and spread of “superweeds”, weeds resistant to herbicides, is well documented [1-3] and the engineering of resistance to even stronger herbicides is well underway with the US EPA approval of plant varieties that are tolerant of the herbicides 2,4-D [4] and approval imminent for the use of dicamba in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready XTend crop system [5].

The socio-economic debate is mainly concerned with the role of the agro-chemical industry in developing nations. This is still an open debate. On the one hand, critics of GM crops worry that the agrochemical industry will exploit the land and labour resources of developing nations, while advocates of GM crops believe that the technology can make a positive contribution to food production in these countries.

It is important to note that many advocates of GM crops are motivated by the possible benefits that GM technology may bring to humanity, and especially to the hungry people in the developing world. Other advocates, in the commercial world, are motivated by the profits that GM technology may bring to farmers and, of course, to their own industry.

This paper will provide a careful analysis of a debate over the safety of GM crops and food that took place in 1999, a debate that marks the turning point in popular attitude towards GM technology. The values underlying these two different sources of GM advocacy will be identified in that analysis. Their role in the shift from an open and reasoned debate over the science of GM to an ongoing, and often emotional, attempt to silence the critics of GM technology will be discussed. This will show how and why many advocates of GM are entirely opposed to any research that indicates possible hazards of GM crops and food.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Seeing GMOs from a systems perspective: the need for comparative cartographies of agri/cultures for sustainability assessment

Herrero A, et al

Publication date: 20/08/2015

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Over the past twenty years, agricultural biotechnologies have generated chronically unresolved political controversies. The standard tool of risk assessment has proven to be highly limited in its ability to address the panoply of concerns that exist about these hybrid techno/organisms. It has also failed to account for both the conceptual and material networks of relations agricultural biotechnologies require, create and/or perform.

This paper takes as a starting point that agricultural biotechnologies cannot be usefully assessed as isolated technological entities but need to be evaluated within the context of the broader socio-ecological system that they embody and engender.

The paper then explores, compares and contrasts some of the methodological tools available for advancing this systems-based perspective. The article concludes by outlining a new synthesis approach of comparative cartographies of agri/cultures generated through multi-sited ethnographic case-studies, which is proposed as a way to generate system maps and enable the comparison of genetically modified (GM) food with both conventional and alternative agri-food networks for sustainability assessment.

The paper aims to make a unique theoretical and methodological contribution by advancing a systems-based approach to conceptualising and assessing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and proposing a synthesised methodology for mapping networks of relations across different agri/cultures.

Link goes to full text and .pdf options.

Resource type: Web page URL