TUESDAY 20 APRIL 1999

SIR ROBERT MAY, MRS H FLEMING and MR T COLES

  81.  Good morning, thank you for sparing the time to come along to see us today. As you know, we are concentrating very much on how the Government is organising itself to deal with this very important and topical question of GMOs. We are very glad to have a copy of the paper which you produced in February, which I enjoyed very much, particularly your first sentence, "I think my views are shades of grey rather than the crisp black and white which characterises far too much of the debate".[1] We shall hope to crisp up your grey a bit during the course of this session. Thank you very much indeed for that. Is there anything you would like to say by way of any short opening statement before we actually begin to question you and your colleagues?
  (Sir Robert May)  Thank you; if I may very briefly. Firstly I should like to thank you for letting my colleagues sit here with me. I have brought the mores of academe into my Office and I do think of it as a group. Also it is good training for when they get to be permanent secretary. Secondly, at the risk of appearing narcissistic, I thought I would take about a minute to say something about myself because some of your questions will, I am sure, lead us but one's own experience colours one's view of things. I am by training a physicist. In the late 1960s as a rather precocious theoretical physics professor, I became interested in the formation of social responsibility for science in Australia and that led me to find out what I was being concerned about, which led me into ecology and I have, for the last 25 years or so at Princeton, Oxford and Imperial, been an ecological researcher with primary focus on causes and consequences of biological diversity. It is one of the few areas of my job where I often, though not always, have a sense that I know at first hand what I am talking about. The only thing I would say by way of amplification of the essay which you have is that I attempted in it to make a very crude and necessarily overlapping taxonomic division of the kinds of concerns which I and other people had about GM crops and GM things in the food/agriculture area in general. One is food safety which we are not talking about today as I understand it. The other two are areas we will talk about today, one being the concern that genes, organisms, produced by GM techniques rather than conventional breeding techniques, may get out into other crops or escape into the countryside with possible effects. Both what is the possibility of that happening and why should we worry about it? Then the third category, which has nothing to do with safety but is one which concerns me greatly, is the degree to which this technology will further accelerate existing trends in the countryside which impoverish it. We shall be talking about the second and third of those.

Chairman:  We want to concentrate at least on the environmental impact, although obviously we do not exclude anything in sessions of this kind if they come up and are relevant. We do want to start with the risks of adverse environmental impact.

  82.  I suppose this question really sums up the whole of the public's fear. What do you think are the main risks to the environment from GM crops?
  (Sir Robert May)  I lead off by repeating myself and saying let me first speak to the question of risks in the sense of novel kinds of superweeds, spreading insecticide and antibiotic resistance or other kinds of outcomes which you would conventionally define as a risk. Then let me under a separate heading, after we have discussed that, talk about the different kinds of questions associated with accelerating agricultural trends which are increasingly in the direction of realising the millennial old dream of agriculture of producing crops which no-one shares with us. This is bad news for the creatures and other plants in the countryside who would like to share with us. I see them as two different things. Firstly, under the heading of worries about risks as risks, the main set of questions one wants to ask is what are the chances that these newly produced organisms will either escape and spread into the wider countryside or, more importantly, exchange genes with other species in the countryside, or, for that matter, have effects up the food chain by transferring, having an effect on things which eat them, or for that matter by introducing some novel component into complicated ecosystems, alter them by so doing. There is a set of questions which needs to be addressed under that heading and we and other countries have regulatory machinery for doing that. I see the questions as hierarchical. The first one is: how far does the pollen, or other material which could take the crop away from where it is meant to be, create hybrids with other things? How far does it spread? In creating hybrids are they likely to be successful in the wider countryside? Ultimately the question is: are we going to create more weed problems? That is one category of question. There is a set of others, but that is one which is centre frame and I would try very briefly to say the following about that. First of all, for those questions there is to my mind little which is essentially new about GM crops versus non-GM crops. Almost anything we eat today is something which would be unrecognisable by its early wilder relatives and that is the last 50 years of seeing more developments in that than the last 1,000. We do know that yes, pollen is spread in the wind, by other creatures; it depends a bit on the system which does it, so there are questions of how far the spread falls off. It falls off rapidly with distance but how? When it does create hybrids, often they are infertile but sometimes they are not. What are the kinds of things we need to be more alert for where we are going to create viable hybrids? Ultimately and most importantly are we going to produce things which not only are viable but in fact which are weeds, perhaps even superweeds? That is what the regulatory machinery is aimed at looking at and that is a set of questions which has been in centre frame and much discussed since the 1970s when the technology was first born. When the technology was first born in the 1970s, you will recall there was a voluntary moratorium on the part of the science community to deal with the same kinds of worries we are hearing again today. There was a big conference at Asilomar and then there was a very conservative and precautionary set of rules and all the sorts of conjectured fears that we hear today and things began to move forward. The first demonstration of rooting up a crop as a protest was in the 1970s with the strawberries in California. By this time something like 25,000 field studies of single sites have been done. The US regulatory analogue of ACRE has about 3,000 trials, some on multiple sites. Broadly—and I should be happy to amplify—one has not yet found something which looks like a serious problem, which is not to say we do not have to be continually precautionary and apprehensive. At the heart of it is the fact that most crops are wimps, most of the things which we govern. Our problem is helping them survive because they have been engineered, not genetically by one specific targeted gene but engineered over a long time, but particularly over the last 50 years, by natural selection to give us grain or whatever which has tended to diminish other competitive abilities. I could expand on that.

  83.  I am slightly alarmed that you say—I paraphrase—that no very serious potential problem has been uncovered. I am not an expert on this at all and you are, but it rather alarms me that you would say that.
  (Sir Robert May)  Careless use of words. There is not an example. Were there a telling anecdote, then it would have been a centrepiece of concern to people and you would all have heard of it. I am not aware of an example of an actual superweed problem or a problem of transfer of antibiotic resistance marker genes, to my mind a foolish thing to have used as a marker gene, though understandable at the time. It is something we shall see less and less of in the future. It is not to say—here I am being grey ... At the heart of this is a really deep ecological problem. What are the characteristics of a successful invader? What is it which made rhododendrons such a terrible nuisance, or, you may say if you like rhododendrons, such an added decoration to the south coast part. I blush to say it but that is still a very ill understood question and it is at the heart of understanding the basic evolutionary questions about speciation. What is the balance of gene flow against selection which creates species? There are many unanswered questions here and what one needs to do therefore is case by case. However, it is against a background. There was a very interesting study many years ago by a chap called Baker who laid down what he had defined as some of the essential characteristics of a weed. You do not have to have all of them to be a really pestilential weed but he identified some 13 characteristics. I even wrote a little article about it myself back in the 1970s and the Asilomar days on the world's worst weeds and made a catalogue of a dozen or so of the world's worst weeds and asked what their characteristics were. They tend to have 10 or 11 of these characteristics which make a weed. Kathleen Keiller and other people have looked at UK plants. The average UK plant has something like seven of these characteristics. If it did not have any it would not be here. Crop plants on average have about five and that is perhaps arcane but it is trying to quantify the difference between weeds, average plants and the real wimpiness of crops. That does not mean that you must not be continually alert case by case that you might do something silly.

  84.  May I take you back to the shades of grey and the crisp black and white on this whole aspect of gene escapes? It is the very shades of grey which certainly concern me and have concerned me so far. You say, "If such escapes occurred, are they likely to cause problems? In the case of `superweeds', I think not". That is grey, is it not? Then you say, "... they would be resistant to a restricted range of herbicides, and could if needed be zapped with alternatives". Then you balance it again. You say, "Even so, neither the industry nor the public wants such transiently superweeds". They do not, do they? That is why, frankly, is it not, that there is such public concern, almost bordering on hysteria which can be very, very easily whipped up? In this very crucial area people actually do want a crisp black and white. Can you tell me, perhaps percentagewise, not in shades of grey but in black and white, how significant the risks of environmentally damaging gene escape are?
  (Sir Robert May)  You have to understand that I have spent my life as a scientist. The fact that I am in this area of science reflects my own concerns for the world I live in and which I want for the future. I bring to that an analytic approach which does not sit comfortably with everybody. Just as Truman said "Give me a one-handed economist", there is great need. Most really good scientists are not just two-handed but they are more like Kali, they are many-handed and I am very reluctant, even though the Office I am in at the moment may be one where occasionally one may wish to try to engage in the level that most people mean by "is it safe?". Those people think it is safe. You probably thought it was safe travelling in here this morning. You probably thought it was safe walking down the cigarette smoke filled corridor to get to this room. That was the danger you were exposed to this morning in my view. I am therefore reluctant to say to you that I am certain there is no risk. What I do say, however, is that the whole notion that herbicide tolerance will create a superweed is itself to my mind a rather peculiar concept because it is a superiority which is one-dimensional in the sense that it only confers a benefit in the presence of a herbicide. In most cases—and there are studies which show this—it carries a cost which means in the absence of the herbicide the thing does not do as well, but you cannot count on that because there are exceptions to that. You are not going to get from me, I am afraid, a thing which says I am certain about anything.

  85.  May I just press you on that? Would you not say that it is true, is it not, that the whole GMO business is such a revolution really that the general public really do want some certainty? How would you answer the fact that for example English Nature are taking a much more concerned attitude towards it? They are concerned over gene escape and modification of native species, particularly grasses. There is English Nature saying yes, there is uncertainty, but we are weighing in the black side of it; no, we are not happy. You are saying there is uncertainty but you might get that if you cross the road.
  (Sir Robert May)  I have said it badly. What I am trying to say, if you want a one sentence sound bite, is that I have no worries about GM technology producing superweeds any more than I have worried about ordinary crop breeding producing superweeds, which on the whole is a more likely way to produce a superweed. At the same time I think it is something which should be kept very carefully in the frame. The moment you keep it in the frame and have case by case studies you are connoting that you are not. If you are absolutely certain, you could dismantle the regulatory apparatus. Now you come to why English Nature are concerned. It is fair to say, though I cannot speak for English Nature, that English Nature's main concern, which is one I share, is to do with what we have not yet spoken about which is the changing shape of the countryside rather than a disaster from producing as it were a new rhododendron. We need to know more about the processes whereby things spread and there is endless room for learning more about that. However, at the same time I am not worried about the consequences of the spread of either naturally or artificially produced by conventional means with its scattershot approach that in producing new varieties reshuffles about one tenth of the genome. I am worried about that if anything more than about the targeted one gene in it, but one needs to have a regulatory apparatus which looks at things carefully one by one both for reassurance purposes and just to be on the safe side.

  86.  Can you tell us any other concerns you have? What other potential direct environmental impacts could there be from the release of GMOs? We talked about superweeds. There must be others.
  (Sir Robert May)  The using of marker genes, antibiotic resistance things, although there is an understandable technical reason for why it was done at the time, was unfortunate and I welcome the later advances which are going to see us move away from that, at a very low level. Nonetheless there is an incredible worry that this could be one more small drop in the large bucket which is accelerating the evolution of antibiotic resistance. If you are an evolutionary biologist you recognise that you are always working in a changing world against a moving target so anything we produce will always provoke resistance to it. The question is whether you do it slower or faster. The question for antibiotic resistance more generally is how pressing the need is to do everything we can to slow it down or whether new advances in medicine will help us beat this problem and stay ahead like the Red Queen of the changing world. A precautionary approach is, not knowing the answer to that question, to do everything we can to retard the evolution of antibiotic resistance. That task, to my mind one of the least concerning but nonetheless it is something one ought to do, is to be concerned for this and thus the UK Government, for the application in Spain to plant GM maize which had a corn borer resistance gene, which we had no problem with but we did have a problem with the fact that it had an antibiotic resistance marker and we voted against it in common with a few other countries and it was not approved. There is another category of thing. It does not concern me much but I think we should take that attitude. Then there are yet others we could go into. Veering into food safety kinds of things but not exactly, some of the potential benefits of this are simply to make more nutritious foods. There are aspects of that which you have to be careful of lest you get people overdosing, like on something akin to vitamin B6 but in a way which lends itself to a less emotional defence of it.

  87.  I should just like to put on the record that I am much, much more concerned personally about antibiotic resistance than superweeds. I do not think that has fully come out before.
  (Sir Robert May)  May I just say on the record that I agree with you on this problem. I am much more concerned about antibiotic resistance than I am about anything to do with GM things and therefore I am concerned at this tiny corner of it but this is a very tiny corner of that large problem.

  88.  Do you sign up to the precautionary principle?
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes, but now we will immediately have a discussion on what we mean by that.

  89.  Perhaps you will tell me. Let me try to push you. Do you believe we are applying the precautionary principle in respect of the development of GMOs?
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes, I would regard the rather ill-presented series of statements I just made, about not being absolutely sure but being not worried but not 100 per cent. certain that there is nothing to worry about and therefore we should have a carefully scrutinised regulatory process which we continue to scrutinise carefully, as being an application of the precautionary principle. I regard our attitude to climate change, in which we have been one of the most effective countries in the world, as a force for what I regard as sensible, as a clear application of the precautionary principle. In the face of uncertainty, although the indications are that there is an anthropogenic problem, we have been a staunch advocate for acting now because it is easier than trying to act later when you are more certain. I do not see the precautionary principle in the form it is sometimes presented as saying if I can invent any credible worry then I cannot do it. If I applied that then I would not be here today because I would not have gone out of the front door.

  90.  Are you applying in your mind the precautionary principle in respect of climate change in the same way in which it is being applied in respect of GMO development?
  (Sir Robert May)  Yes.

  91.  The precautionary principle has not worked, has it, because we have antibiotics used as marker genes which you yourself condemned?
  (Sir Robert May)  That is an interesting way of putting it. At the time when people thought of putting these in as marker genes part of the reason for putting in marker genes was technical and part of it was precautionary so that you would always be able to identify what happened. We keep talking about this as though it happened yesterday. The history of this is really very fascinating because—if I may digress for a moment—at the birth of this technology the discussions we are having now were had in just such sometimes hyped up emotional environment in the north and west coast of the United States immediately after Asilomar and it was my job at Princeton to chair the group which dealt with the townspeople. I led the university into putting townspeople on a university committee for the first time and I can remember all of that. At that time there was no concern in Britain. Now we have a curious inversion which is itself an interesting thing to talk about. At that time people were not worried about antibiotic resistance. This was 20 years ago, remember, and it did not loom as it did now. The precautionary principle does not mean, it cannot mean, having tomorrow's knowledge today. It has to mean taking a best guess at what worries are but you cannot blame people in the 1970s for not seeing that this was going to be a problem.

  92.  However, you said a moment ago that there were "a lot of unanswered questions". That was the direct phrase which you used.
  (Sir Robert May)  That is what I say in common with any good scientist. Anybody who tells you they have absolute certainty about everything and they know everything about it is not someone to be trusted. It is a difficult line to take in a world which wants someone to give you absolute certainty. There will always be unanswered questions.

  93.  You mentioned risk. May I ask you to elaborate on that slightly. There is the risk that something might go wrong and then there is the scale of the disaster in an extreme situation of something which might go wrong. Something could go wrong and it would not be very serious and there might be a very small chance that it would go wrong. On the other hand, even if it did go wrong there is a one in a million chance the consequences could be devastating. Are you assessing both risk and hazard as it were?
  (Sir Robert May)  Not in quantitative terms. The question you just put is an absolutely central one. In so far as there are worries here, the worries are not that the average event is going to be a risk, that numerical classification I gave you, weeds, average plants, crops, is just an average statement. The apprehension is for the highly unlikely event, for the outlier, and that is why I believe we need a regulatory regime which looks at things not in terms of broad generalities but case by case. The American analogue of ACRE, the Advisory Committee on Releases, which has been operating much longer and has given some 3,000 approvals of field trials, looks at things and the basic thing it is trying to do is to try to make sure that the regulated article, that is the word, the GM thing, is unlikely to pose a greater plant pest risk than the unmodified plant from which it was derived. Implementing that statement is necessarily case by case, with a continual alertness to the thing which might be the curious outlier.

  94.  You mentioned your view—and I hope I quote you accurately; it was a very startling statement to me—that there was no difference between GM crops and non-GM crops in terms of GM crop development and conventional plant breeding; that was the comparison you were drawing. I have to say that is different from what the Food Safety Minister, Jeff Rooker, has said. I do not have the exact quote but he said that he accepts it is a different league. He accepts that perhaps in nature you would not have a gene from a rat inserted in a potato and therefore it is a different situation. Would you like to respond to that?
  (Sir Robert May)  Thank you for asking me that. In the attempt not to be excessively long-winded, even as I said it I realised this was too much of an over-simplification. If you look at the relevant paragraphs in the good essay, what I said fairly near the beginning was that my view is this. The ordinary tomato you buy in the supermarket has had naturally engineered into it by breeding a degree of pathogen resistance. In order to do that people, over time and in a quite deliberate way, have brought in other varieties, relatives of the tomato on the shelf, so closer to it on the evolutionary tree, but in order to bring in the couple of genes they want they brought in about 2,000 of the 20,000 genes in the tomato with it. On the one hand it is not the same. On the one hand conventional methods bring in much more stuff where you do not know what you are doing. On the other hand is the very targeted thing which enables you to focus on what you have done. So it is in a sense a help for what I kept saying: you have to look at things case by case so you have to ask what exactly we are trying to do. In that sense it is if anything safer but on the other hand you can bring things from further away on the evolutionary tree. Even that then—and you will find a parenthetic piece of pedantry in the essay which says one discovers that things are not all as different as we think of them as being. You can put for example a gene from a mouse which says make an eye and you can put that into a fruit fly, into the place where the fruit fly makes an eye and it will make you a perfectly good fruit fly. Generalities about it being far away and therefore dangerous are a little glib. My refined statement would be that in some respects GM technology gives you more need to be carefully looking at what you are doing. You can focus on what it is but you can be doing different things. If I were worried about producing a superweed or something like that, I would on the whole be more worried about the reshuffling of the genome. If I worried about the real outlier, then I would really be more focused on the GM crop.

  95.  I think we could both agree that changing agricultural practices during the last three decades or thereabouts, grubbing up the hedgerows, larger fields, increased use of fertilisers and agrochemicals in general, increased mechanisation on the farm, have had a very significant effect on the biodiversity. We discussed this with English Nature last week. We could agree on that, could we not?
  (Sir Robert May)  Absolutely.

  96.  My point is that the introduction of GM crops, if they are allowed on a commercial basis, particularly where herbicide and pesticide resistant crops are concerned, will again alter the agricultural practices. Do you think the direct effects caused by that are probably more significant than the direct effects which Mrs Brinton has just discussed with you like gene escape?
  (Sir Robert May)  In contrast to what I said earlier, I share these concerns entirely. If I may slightly rephrase what you said, whether or not the changes we can make with GM agriculture will on the whole, as I think they may, have the potential for being beneficial, slathering fewer chemicals round the countryside and so on, whether or not that can become true, that is not the intention. The intention is to take one more notch up in realising the dream of agriculture from its birth of growing crops which no-one eats but us. In the Middle Ages we only used to eat about one seed in three; we lost one third to pests and one third was for seed corn. Today we still lose about one third, but we are getting better and better. As we get better and better, it has the inevitable corollary that we can document it very accurately in dramatic declines in bird populations and although the evidence is less definitive I have little doubt that it has similar impact on the underlying invertebrate fauna and often, as many of you know better than I, changing agricultural practices' impact on wild flowers and meadows. I have two thoughts here: firstly, whether the GM technology itself detail by detail is inherently going to be even worse, which I doubt, its aim, as long as it is purely directed by the industrial and agricultural industry, will be in the direction, understandably, pardonably, laudably even, of growing crops which no-one eats but us and that is bad news for the rest of the countryside. I hope that this particular moment will prompt us to do something which I would have wished and WWF and the Joint Nature Conservancy Council and a variety of media I have tried to urge for several years. I hope it will prompt us to discuss these issues which are not issues of safety but are political, social issues of the kind of world we want to live in and I hope we will find new mechanisms which will work against the perversities of the Common Agriculture Policy, which will acknowledge we have torn out one quarter of the hedgerows between 1984 and 1990 and even as we replace them we are still doing silly things. We are often buying the cheapest seed which comes from Poland. Well-intentioned people wanting to promote wild flowers are scattering geographically inappropriate packets of wild flower seeds. We should have a wiser and more sensible view of reconciling a competitive, efficient agriculture and the advantages that has for using perhaps less land with headlands, hedgerows, more designated areas, what you will, which will mean that we do not move more and more to a yet more "silent spring".

  97.  My difficulty is as follows. I agree with what you have said but if we are looking at sustainable agriculture to leave a better land for our children in the future and our grandchildren, where is the point which we really ought to be regulating? The whole point about this investigation is to determine whether the Government and the European Parliament have in place adequate regulations to protect us from the introduction of GM crops if we are going to introduce them again on a commercial scale. Do we regulate at the point of that introduction, or do we regulate at the sustainable agriculture level? This is my difficulty. People are crying out for increased regulations on GM crops but I do not see that as the fundamental point, bearing in mind what I said at the beginning of our discussion.
  (Sir Robert May)  I should emphasise that I am offering you a personal view now and not necessarily a Government line. It is one of the problems of the Government, having appointed me Chief Scientific Adviser, but that is my problem not your problem. That is why I tried to distinguish at the beginning and maybe the distinction is clearer in my mind than it is in other people's but it is a helpful distinction. The reaction of the EU or any Government agency is to look at regulatory things to make sure that no harm is being done to people, no specific harm of the kind we are talking about. It is much more difficult to get hold of machinery to ask questions about the kind of world you want to live in. My hope is that we will increasingly move to asking those questions about the world we want to live in, about whether retrospectively you cannot put in legislation not to grub out hedgerows as just one index of it, but I wish we had had it. That is what I want us to do, but that does not have the implication for any sort of slowing down of the UK being a player in the creation of a new wave of agricultural technological advance. The reason I feel that is partly because I do not think it is a sensible option anyhow and secondly because the new methods, if they are developed with a view to what is good for the Third World and what is good for the environment, have the potential to cure many of the problems of the current high intensity fossil fuel subsidised agriculture. But that is not going to happen if the driving force is purely industry and farmers regulated for safety. Ultimately I do not believe what was good for General Motors was good for the United States and I do not believe what is good for Monsanto is good for the world, but that does not mean that I am against the new agricultural revolution.

  98.  May I just pin you down on two very technical things so that we understand them before we proceed? The first has already been referred to and that is the marker gene. For those of us who might not understand science and technology adequately, could you just explain to us why the marker genes were introduced and why those specific marker genes were introduced and what kind of research might be going on currently which would lead to better marker genes in the future?
  (Sir Robert May)  You are asking a deeply embarrassing question because I cannot actually give you a statement with first-hand confidence. Subject to correction—I am tempted to say Mrs Fleming will explain this—in broad outline marker genes are put in partly so that you know where the bit you genetically modified, the cells you genetically modified, are so you can follow them and you want something you can easily identify because often the thing you wanted to put in was not something which was easy to find so you put with it a marker.
  (Mrs Fleming)  The use of markers is essentially a research tool. Researchers use markers as they are developing a product so that they can spot which of the products they have modified have the right modification in and which have not. For example, the organisms will be grown on plates which have an antibiotic on them and only the organisms will grow which are resistant to the antibiotic. Essentially it is a research tool.

  99.  Is there a better way of doing that research to avoid the antibiotic resistance marker gene?
  (Mrs Fleming)  There are other ways of putting in markers. For example, herbicide resistance is actually used as a marker during research. It is possible to engineer out changes which have been made like antibiotic resistance or herbicide resistance at a later stage in the development, but researchers are looking at different ways of using markers.
  (Sir Robert May)  It was not done purely so that you could keep track of it in the field, though that too. It was done so you could keep track of it in the laboratory. It was used because it was the easiest technology available at the time, but in principle what you want is something which has no other effect, which just says, "Hey. I'm here". There was not to hand such a technology at the time but there is a deliberate effort these days to try to find some sort of marker gene which simply says, "Hey. I'm in this dish but not in that dish".