Nobel laureates sharply stood up for GMOs: “Anti-scientific fear-mongering”

Scientists call for relaxation of genetic modification rules

An open letter from Nobel-winning scientists says European lawmakers must “stop fearmongering” and allow scientists to develop crops that can withstand the climate emergency.”

The EU must “cast back the darkness of anti-science fear-mongering” ahead of a key vote on gene editing, 34 Nobel laureates have said.

In an open letter seen by The Guardian and other European newspapers, the Nobel laureates demanded that lawmakers relax strict rules on genetic modification to allow for new techniques that target specific genes and edit their code. The technology could make crops more resistant to disease and more likely to survive extreme weather events, which are becoming more severe as the planet warms.

Scientists said the old methods of growing crops for years and decades took too long. “We don’t have that time in this era of climate emergency,” they argue.

The letter, sent to MEPs on Friday, was organized by WePlanet, an environmental non-profit that campaigns for technologies such as nuclear power, gene editing and cellular agriculture, and for the regeneration of much of Europe.

The letter’s more than 1,000 signatories range from leading biologists and geneticists, including scientists who won a Nobel Prize for their controversial discovery of Crispr, to renowned authors such as psychologist Steven Pinker and philosopher Peter Singer.

GMO advocates say the new rules could help farmers use fewer pesticides and fertilizers. Some plants that are difficult to propagate using conventional methods, such as fruit trees, grapevines and potatoes, use some of the most harmful pesticides in the EU, scientists say.

For the most part, environmental groups have fiercely opposed attempts to change the genetic code of plants and other organisms, raising concerns about their safety and the danger of changes with unintended consequences, writes The Guardian. Proponents of technology, especially high-tech technology, argue that such risks pale in comparison to the known dangers of biodiversity loss, the climate crisis and hunger. The European Food Safety Authority has found no new dangers from targeted gene editing in plants compared to conventional breeding.

But in 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that any plants produced by altering genes – targeted or not – are genetically modified organisms, which are subject to EU GMO rules. It said the risks to the environment and human health could not be established with certainty.

The European Commission has acknowledged that plants produced using new gene-editing techniques are GMOs, but wants to exempt them from existing safety rules that supporters of the technology call outdated and restrictive. Lawmakers on Parliament’s environment committee will vote on the plan on Wednesday.

A previous open letter signed by a small group of scientists in December, including molecular biologists and geneticists, many of whom work for nonprofit organizations, argued that the commission’s proposal should be “rejected or thoroughly reconsidered” because the safety of the environment and human health cannot be guaranteed. They called for all genome-edited plants to be subject to mandatory risk assessment on a case-by-case basis.