The plan to ease restrictions on genetic modification in New Zealand promises advances everywhere from food production to human health.
GE-free: it’s one of our national traits. We’ve been hesitant about DNA tinkering, and our legislation has been restrictive to match. But now the National Party’s campaign promise to ease those restrictions is being followed with action.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Judith Collins, the Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology, have announced that a bill to ease restrictions on genetic modification and gene editing will go to Parliament by the end of the year. The sticking point is not using gene technologies in laboratories – that is already common – but field testing and commercialising the products.
Most scientists favour an overhaul, but they have also called for widespread public engagement on the topic. Such calls have come from the Royal Society, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser, the Productivity Commission and Science NZ, which represents crown-owned science organisations. Yet the public engagement, it seems, will be only through submissions to the select committee considering the bill.
Several scientists told the Listener they wanted more engagement. One is Richard Newcomb, Plant & Food Research’s chief scientist. “It deserves another public discussion because the technology has changed. It’s such a big thing that I think it warrants that. We were pushing for more public debate, but it’s on a timetable.”
Newcomb remembers protests and hīkoi against genetic modification. In 1999, a 92,000-person petition prompted the most serious response available to the government: a royal commission. The resulting legislation was sufficiently stringent that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have since been limited to labs, containment facilities and small field trials – none have been grown commercially. All gene technology research needs approval from the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA).
But new technology is spurring innovation. It’s known casually as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) , and compared with older ways of modifying genomes, it’s cheaper, easier, more precise and more adaptable. Along with other “new breeding technologies”, it can change a DNA sequence, or insert or remove DNA. Newcomb says when no foreign DNA is added, the changes can be identical to those that happen naturally, such as in response to the sun’s UV rays or when mistakes happen during normal DNA replication.
Plant & Food Research scientists have used CRISPR to understand the genes involved in flowering and fruit quality, and it can be used to create new plant cultivars. Traditional breeding has produced everything from sweetcorn that doesn’t break teeth to gold kiwifruit, but it’s slow. “Breeding cycles are long – from go to whoa it can be over 20 years, whereas with gene editing we can cut that down to a single generation to make a change,” says Newcomb.
Speed, he predicts, will become vital. “With a changing climate and increasing average temperatures, we’re going to lose winter chill, and it’s throwing more pests and diseases at us with changed wind direction from the tropics. We will need to be able to deploy solutions quickly.” A gene for early flowering fruit trees holds particular promise to rapidly develop cultivars, reducing a breeding round from one every five years to potentially multiple per year.
Aussie rules
The proposed legislation – revealed so far in summary only – is modelled on Australia’s. It proposes a one-person gene technology regulator within the EPA, supported by an office plus technical and Māori advisory groups. There would be a hierarchy of permissiveness, the highest involving public consultation. Another category would be unregulated by the legislation if it “involves minimal risks or it cannot be distinguished from those achievable by conventional breeding techniques”, according to a media briefing paper. This means such products would be exempt from being labelled as genetically altered, which Food Standards Australia New Zealand is also currently proposing.
In Australia, products are regulated as conventional foods if no novel DNA remains in the genome. This is often called gene editing, whereas genetic modification refers to inserting foreign DNA. But the words are used variably.
“We’re of the opinion that with new gene editing technology using CRISPR, because of its higher level of precision, with changes that mirror those found in nature, it’s much lower risk,” says Newcomb, “and that the level of regulation needs to be lower commensurate with that.
“However, it’s important we have the broader conversation about how use of the technology sits within New Zealand’s unique cultural setting, not just whether it’s scientifically or economically beneficial.”
Gene technology products are not currently banned here, and almost no applications to the EPA or its predecessor to develop genetically modified organisms in containment have been declined. But the hurdles to take them out of containment are considered onerous enough to constitute a ban. Applicants must convince the EPA that the GMO is safe and that they’ve consulted sufficiently.
“It comes down to ‘we might not get approval but still have to spend the money,’” says Newcomb. “The costs can balloon out as more questions get asked, so it’s difficult to put a budget together that will stand the test of time.”
Farming benefits
AgResearch and its commercial partners are applying under existing rules to run a contained outdoor trial of ryegrass containing a gene-edited endophyte. Endophytes live inside ryegrass and release substances that can deter pests and improve ryegrass growth, but they can also cause ryegrass staggers in livestock. The new versions are expected to provide greater plant protection and less livestock harm.
John Caradus, chief executive of AgResearch commercial subsidiary Grasslanz, is pleased the proposed rules would open a more affordable pathway. “Otherwise it’s just the big guys like Monsanto that ran the show in the 1990s.” He’s referring to the agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology companies that developed most of the world’s current GM crops: soybean, cotton, corn and canola that withstand glyphosate spraying and/or repel insect attack.
These crops require less tilling and insecticide, and there’s little evidence of direct harm. They grow over millions of hectares – 94% of the United States’ vast soybean croplands are GMOs, mostly for animal feed. But glyphosate overuse has led to glyphosate-resistant weeds, and some insects have become resistant to the plants’ defence.
Caradus hopes GM will be used here for loftier aims than pure economic gain, and he doesn’t want herbicide resistance prioritised. “I hope we’ll have targets focused on greenhouse gas emissions, nitrous oxide, nitrogen input to waterways – surely these will be near the top of the list for using these technologies.” No targets have been named, but it is proposed that ministers can “signal expectations to the regulator”.
Grasslanz has other modified pasture crops, too: ryegrass that stores extra lipids, and clover with extra tannins. It was probably these Judith Collins referred to when she wrote in The Post in March that GM has “been proven to combat major issues facing the primary sector, including the ability to … lower livestock emissions by up to 30%”.
It is hoped the crops will reduce emissions, but “proven” is a strong word. After some 14 years in development, they have not met the mouth of an animal, let alone its rumen, where methane is produced. “The best tests we have are in vitro rumen tests,” says Caradus, describing an artificial rumen. “Until we’ve done animal testing, we don’t know.”
That starts this spring. New Zealand lambs held in containment will eat the high-lipid ryegrass. Caradus hopes Australia’s gene regulator will allow it to be grown then fed there, too. It allowed the clover to grow, but only under cover so bees couldn’t spread its pollen. “They’re still pretty fussy, as they should be,” he says.
Fast-growing trees
Forestry research institute Scion is also tackling emissions with gene technologies. One approach is fast-growing trees, says Alec Foster, the crown agency’s bioproducts and packaging lead. “That can shorten the forestry rotation by as much as half, so the trees capture more carbon using less land.”
Scion is also targeting wilding conifers. “If we can make our trees sterile it would prevent unwanted spread,” says Foster. “We have the only field trial in New Zealand, but as soon as the cones show, we have to destroy the plants. We want to be able to grow the tree to full maturity so we can test all aspects, like wood properties.”
Under the proposed regulations, gene-edited conifers could be field-tested and released without the gene regulator’s approval, but genetically modified versions could not. The field trial trees are currently fenced and guarded because in 2012, anti-GM protestors felled Scion’s GM trees. Foster understands people are concerned about the technology. “There’s scope for a lot more conversation. There are concerns, and we need to address those, and it needs to be factual.”
He thinks there’s been a double standard, because some techniques that induce haphazard mutations are considered conventional breeding. “Take the red-fleshed grapefruits. They were created in the 1970s by using radiation.” Radiation breeding has also produced blackcurrants, highly productive rice, premium barley for whiskey, and disease-resistant cocoa and nashi.
“It’s like saying you can use a chainsaw but not a scalpel. It’s absurd we can use a practice that makes hundreds of thousands of mutations, but we can’t make a precise edit.”
Overselling
The word “precise” bothers University of Canterbury professor of molecular biology Jack Heinemann. He’s concerned that deregulating gene editing removes obligations to check for changes inadvertently made to other parts of the genome.
“There are new gene-modifying tools, but I emphasise that they’re efficient, not precise,” he says. “Precise is one of the marketing words. In a given unit of time, you’re more likely to get the result you wanted, but it doesn’t prevent off-target effects. It can also be more efficient where you don’t want it to be efficient. You really need to know that it did what you thought it would do, and only what you thought it would.”
Heinemann wrote in a recent paper that the molecule that guides the “scissors” that edit a target DNA sequence “may interact with unintended sequences if given enough time or if in excess concentration”. That could be particularly problematic outside reputable labs; home CRISPR kits are available online, and Heinemann says products are being tested that ferry gene-editing tools into outdoor crops via drones, irrigation water, fumigants or fertiliser.
He says fears of New Zealand being left behind are unfounded. “People oversell how far other countries have gone.” Some countries have entirely deregulated gene editing, but not England, the EU, China or India, where they fall under lighter-touch regulation than GMOs (or soon will do).
Heinemann thinks people also overestimate how much GM has changed things. “The US is the iconic example of near deregulation, but innovation hasn’t happened. There have been thousands of field trials and most never go to market. We’ve had 40 years of being able to use this technology, but it’s not commonplace apart from for insecticide production or herbicide resistance.”
Most of the 11 GM food types approved for sale here are modified for those traits, plus there are products made using GM microbes, mainly infant formula enzymes. They are labelled only if they contain DNA from another species and comprise more than 1% of a food item. GM animal feed goes unlabelled, and it can and does enter the country if it’s processed so it can’t grow into plants.
Heinemann is more relaxed about gene technologies in medicine (see “CRISPR Health, page 28) and precision fermentation, in which “designer microbes” in fermentation vats produce complex molecules. “That’s nothing new. We’ve had E coli producing insulin for a long time.” But he says it still needs a regulated process to check for potential harm. Europe’s tough GM rules have long exempted modified microbes, but it checks their products are safe to consume.
Here, more than a dozen organisations work on precision fermentation, including Scion. Another is dairy disruptor Daisy Lab, which this year was permitted to move from lab to pilot scale. Its microbes contain a cow gene that produces the main whey protein of milk, with an estimated small fraction of cows’ carbon footprint.
Daisy Lab co-founder and chief scientific officer Nikki Freed thinks its process poses negligible risk. “We use a ‘generally recognised as safe’ organism to produce a protein consumed by billions of people. We sequence the final genome to ensure the changes we’ve made are the only changes that have been introduced.”
The microbes die outside the warm vats and are filtered out of the whey protein. She says it would be difficult from a cost perspective for the company to operate at commercial scale under current containment rules, and eased regulations would mean its expansion will be possible in New Zealand.
Daisy Lab’s facility in Parnell, Auckland, was previously home to LanzaTech, which fits brewery-type vats onto industrial carbon emitters such as steel mills. Inside the vats, GM microbes consume carbon and produce ethanol, which is turned into aviation fuel and goods such as clothing and packaging. LanzaTech is now headquartered in Chicago, partly because of New Zealand’s regulatory barriers. It listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange last year.
Infertile pests
Back home, we have a pest problem. A possible solution is gene drives, in which GM pest animals are released to breed with wild versions. Their modification spreads a genetic change that soon makes subsequent generations infertile or all male.
Other than limited mosquito trials overseas, gene drives remain in labs. The University of Otago is hosting a project to look at their feasibility with wasps, but science leader Peter Dearden says it’s very challenging. “Nobody’s ever put a piece of DNA into a wasp.”
It’s increasingly apparent, he says, that gene drives won’t eradicate pests. “It will cause suppression at best. We’re doing the research to see if this is viable at all. And if the answer is that it isn’t viable or it isn’t safe or it isn’t acceptable, then that’s a good answer.”
Alongside that research, Dearden is collaborating with Amanda Black (Tūhoe, Whakatōhea, Whānau-ā-Apanui) to look deeply at gene drives’ social and cultural acceptability, and to figure out what responsible governance could look like. Black directs Bioprotection Aotearoa and belongs to a Māori focus group advising the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) on the new legislation. “We have the Treaty of Waitangi and Māori voices have to be at the centre of this,” she says.
Black’s wary of being “talked at” by government during consultation. She says Māori can easily see it as a them-and-us situation and don’t feel their voices will be heard and acted on. “A lot of the conversations and discussions [around gene technologies] have been funnelling towards social acceptability, and then you’re kind of predetermining an outcome. The research we’ve kicked off is different to that.”
Maui Hudson (Whakatōhea, Ruahine and Te Māhurehure) has researched Māori perspectives on gene editing. He’s also part of the technical group advising MBIE and directs the University of Waikato’s Te Kotahi Research Institute. He co-authored a recent Nature paper that included a survey of Māori and non-Māori. More Māori were opposed than non-Māori.
“My reflection is that people are more familiar with these topics now, so they’re not as scary, but for the most part they’re not really comfortable with it. Things that make them more comfortable are more participation and control about what’s taking place. It’s about appropriate use.”
He’s in favour of a legislation update as it hasn’t been flexible enough. But a big question, he says, is who decides what uses are appropriate. “Is it expert- or community-led? Will it create opportunities for better consultation in future?”
Hudson says Māori are prepared to entertain commercial uses if they have a degree of control, but they are wary of unequal benefits. “Māori communities feel like the benefits accrue in a different direction but the risks accrue in their direction. And if commercial uses are freed up, well, okay, if there’s no risk, you take on the liability.”
Non-gmo advantage
Jon Carapiet, of GE-Free NZ, echoes that sentiment. “If you have enabling legislation, there needs to be a polluter-pays result. If you’re going to do it, you have to be liable for the risk.”
Carapiet’s background is in market research. He says non-GMO foods are forecast to soar in popularity. One prediction is for compounded annual growth of nearly 12% to 2032, with reports that environmentally conscious consumers will pay more for them. Exporters including Lewis Road Creamery and Fonterra subsidiary NZ Milk Products trade on their non-GMO status.
There’s no New Zealand-specific non-GMO market forecast, but people asked this year whether they supported using gene technologies to produce food in New Zealand were split roughly equally between “support”, “oppose” and “unsure”. Support was stronger for pest and disease resistance.
Carapiet says the majority of people, including nearly 80% of US and UK consumers, want gene-edited food to be labelled.
The Green Party maintains a “precautionary and evidence-based” stance towards gene technology. Its agriculture and food safety spokesperson, Steve Abel, says a wide-ranging and robust public discussion about developments in gene editing and related technologies is needed before changes to the current regulatory framework are considered.
To read Part II of the Listener’s Releasing the Genie feature, go here. In Part II, science writer Andrea Graves looks at how gene editing could help to combat diseases with a genetic components, from cancer to autoimmune conditions.