Abstracts, Papers &

Resources

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Concepts and strategies of organic plant breeding in light of novel breeding techniques

Nuijten E et al

Publication date: 23/12/2016

In this paper, we describe the development of a set of guiding principles for the evaluation of breeding techniques by the organic sector over time. The worldwide standards of organic agriculture (OA) do not allow genetic engineering (GE) or any products derived from genetic engineering. The standards in OA are an expression of the underlying principles of health, ecology, fairness and care. The derived norms are process and not product oriented. As breeding is considered part of the process in agriculture, GE is not a neutral tool for the organic sector. The incompatibility between OA and GE is analyzed, including the “novel breeding techniques”. Instead, alternative breeding approaches are pursued based on the norms and values of organic agriculture not only on the technical level but also on the social and organizational level by including other value chain players and consumers. The status and future perspectives of the alternative directions for organic breeding are described and discussed.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

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 & RegulationPlant & Animal Breeding

Should organic agriculture maintain its opposition to GM? New techniques writing the same old story

Wickson F, et al

Publication date: 28/10/2016

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Biotechnology is diversifying rapidly through the development and application of new approaches to genome editing and ongoing research into synthetic biology.

Proponents of biotechnology are enthusiastic about these new developments and have recently begun calling for environmental movements to abandon their campaigns against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and for organic agriculture to reconsider its exclusion of Genetic Modification (GM).

In this article, we begin by describing the diversity of practices that cluster under both the terms GM and organic and show that although there is a clash of different cultures of agriculture at stake, there is also a spectrum of practices existing between these two poles.

Having established the terms of the debate, we then go on to analyse whether the organic movement should reconsider its position on GM in light of new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs), using the criteria highlighted as important by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) in their 2016 draft revised position on GMOs.

Through this analysis, we suggest that given the in-context-trajectory of biotechnology development, the continued narrow framing of agricultural problems and the ongoing exclusion of important socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions, the organic movement is justified in maintaining its opposition to GM in the face of NPBTs.

Link goes to full text and .pdf options.

Resource type: Web page URL

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

Sustainability

The need to respect nature and its limits challenges society and conservation science

Jean-Louis Martin, Virginie Maris and Daniel S Simberloff

Publication date: 31/05/2016

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The need to mitigate human impacts on species and natural systems has made conservation science a major multidisciplinary discipline. Society and conservation science have tried unsuccessfully to resolve this need within the growth paradigm. We show that its resolution increasingly demands profound shifts in societal values. The aim of this paper is to identify the nature of these necessary shifts and to explore how they define future paths for conservation science.

Increasing human population interacts with local and global environments to deplete biodiversity and resources humans depend on, thus challenging societal values centered on growth and relying on technology to mitigate environmental stress. Although the need to address the environmental crisis, central to conservation science, generated greener versions of the growth paradigm, we need fundamental shifts in values that ensure transition from a growth-centered society to one acknowledging biophysical limits and centered on human well-being and biodiversity conservation. We discuss the role conservation science can play in this transformation, which poses ethical challenges and obstacles.

The authors analyze how conservation and economics can achieve better consonance, the extent to which technology should be part of the solution, and difficulties the “new conservation science” has generated. An expanded ambition for conservation science should reconcile day-to-day action within the current context with uncompromising, explicit advocacy for radical transitions in core attitudes and processes that govern our interactions with the biosphere. A widening of its focus to understand better the interconnectedness between human well-being and acknowledgment of the limits of an ecologically functional and diverse planet will need to integrate ecological and social sciences better. Although ecology can highlight limits to growth and consequences of ignoring them, social sciences are necessary to diagnose societal mechanisms at work, how to correct them, and potential drivers of social change.

Resource type: Web page URL

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

Legislation & RegulationPlant & Animal Breeding

New plant breeding techniques – ethical considerations

Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH)

Publication date: 01/03/2016

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Even before the advent of modern genetic engineering, to many people it was important whether a plant was created “naturally” (usually under-stood as “using conventional cross-breeding techniques”) or “artificially” (usually understood as “genetically engineered or altered in a non-natural way”).

Put simplistically, “natural” is associated with “better” and “artificial” with “worse”, or vice versa, depending on the viewpoint. Regardless of the connotations given to “natural” and “artificial”, these notions involve moral evaluations. Although often implicit only, such evaluations have an influence on the risk assessment of NPBTs.

This report critically considers this differentiation and its implicit effect on the discussion of risk as well as other urgent issues around NPBTs.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

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