Brave new world

All the food we eat contains genes - except inorganic or crystalline things like salt or sugar. Almost all of it has been genetically modified (including 'organic' produce) by natural selection over hundreds of thousands of years or by selective breeding over hundreds of years. Think how fussy we are about our favourite English apples - and how excited we get by a different vintage of wine or brew of beer!

Mankind has been intervening in plant and animal breeding for thousands of years. As the Bishop of Oxford reminded us recently, improving on what we find on earth is God's gift and expectation for man. He also endowed us, exclusively in creation, with notions of ethics and morality. So why all the fuss about genetically modified plants and animals?

We have no farm-scale (or even allotment-scale) GM trials in Wiltshire, so your intrepid representative recently journeyed to East Anglia to see for himself what it is all about. I am writing this on the train back to London.

There is no doubt in my mind that genetic modification has enormous potential for good, right around the world, for both mankind and the environment. What is new about GM technology is that whereas our ancestors intervened, as we continue to do, to cross strains of the same species to produce plants and animals with particular characteristics, we now have the knowledge and skills to take individual genes from one species and implant them in another. So, we can grow broccoli that inhibits breast cancer, use less weed killer and insecticide on crops and implant genes in animals that help us to understand (and hopefully cure) cystic fibrosis, motor neurone disease and even cancer.

The plants I found growing in Suffolk were not triffids! They had all the characteristics of everyday sugar beet. Their one extra gene protects them from damage by one common, cheap weed killer. To learn how, visit my website at www.robertkey.com where you can also vote on the issue.

What worries people is that there might be unknown long-term effects on 'natural' plant species if cross-pollination occurs in our English fields and hedgerows, because of drifting pollen or insect activity. I understand that concern. We do not yet know the answer, though of course you can never prove or disprove what may or may not happen in the future any more than you can prove there are fairies at the bottom of your garden. The best we can do is make scientific predictions. And that is what the GM crop trials are all about. Monitored independently, they are hugely significant and should run their course unhindered.

People who destroy scientific GM trials have less justification - and less credibility - than the wreckers who smashed the new textile machinery in nineteenth century Britain.
We should work with science, not against it. But just because something is possible, it should not necessarily be done. That is where ethics comes in. We all need to set aside our prejudices, listen to well-informed argument, weigh up independent scientific evidence and reach a mature judgment about a very great issue. But not yet - not until those trials have been evaluated. The story of Adam and Eve still has a lot to teach us.

ROBERT KEY MP