BBCThere’s nothing new about genetic engineering. By cross-breeding plants and animals, our Stone Age ancestors realised they could boost the amount of food they produced.Modern genetics has enabled scientists to do much more: to make precise, targeted changes to the DNA of organisms in a lab. And that, they claim, will lead to new, more productive, disease-resistant crops and animals.The science is still in its infancy, but gene-edited foods are already on the shelves in Japan: tomatoes rich in a chemical that supposedly promotes calmness; red sea bream with extra edible flesh; and puffer fish that grow more quickly.In the US, too, firms are developing heat-resistant cattle, pit-less cherries and seedless blackberries.Supporters of the technology say it could reduce animal diseases and suffering and lead to the use of fewer antibiotics. They also believe it could tackle climate change by lowering emissions of the greenhouse gas methane – produced by livestock such as cows, goats and deer when their stomachs are breaking down hard fibres like grass for digestion.But opponents say gene editing is still not proven to be safe and that they remain concerned about the implications for animal welfare.Now a law permitting gene-edited food to be sold in the UK has been paused and some British scientists warn they could be overtaken by other countries.The new Labour government has pledged closer alignment with the European Union, particularly on regulations that might affect trade. And currently, the EU has much stricter rules around the commercial sale of gene-edited and genetically modified crops.The EU set stringent regulations on genetically modified (GM) crops decades ago because of safety concerns and public opposition to the technology. Gene-edited crops are covered by the same regulations.But to scientists, the terms “gene editing” and “GM” refer to different things. GM, a much older technology, involves adding new genes to plants and animals to make them more productive or disease-resistant. Sometimes these new genes were from entirely different species – for example, a cotton plant with a scorpion gene to make it taste unpleasant to insects. By contrast, gene editing involves making more precise changes to the plant or the animal’s DNA. These changes are often quite small ones, which involve editing sections of the DNA into a form that, its advocates say, could be produced through natural means like traditional cross-breeding, only much faster.Dashed hopesAlong with the US and China, the UK is among the countries that lead the world in gene editing. Last year the previous government passed the Precision Breeding Act, which paved the way for the commercial sale of gene-edited food in England.At the time, many scientists working in the field were overjoyed.“I thought: ‘Great, this is going to uncork a whole area of activity in the public and private sector’ and we could build an entrepreneurial community for gene editing in the UK,” says Prof Jonathan Napier of Rothamsted Research, a government agricultural research institute in Harpenden.But he says his hopes were soon dashed.For the law to come into effect, secondary legislation was require …
