Professor Mark Ferguson:

I wish to make one comment in respect of GM. As Professor Doohan has said, sometimes genetic manipulation is just about doing things that are natural but doing them faster and more precisely. It is important for people to understand that faster and more precisely is usually good. There are completely analogous situations in human medicine. For example, consider a committee talking about whether it was legitimate or should be legal to modify a fertilised human embryo to change the characteristics of the baby. One might imagine that some people would say this absolutely should not be done for characteristics such as height, eye colour or hair colour - if he or she had any hair - of the child. It would be a very different conversation in the case of parents who had a dominant mutation, which means it is always passed on, and which compromises the child. Examples would be some forms of muscular dystrophy or blindness. No matter what they do, if those parents want to have children, the child will always have that disability.

The only way we can prevent the child from having that disability, if the parents want to have their own children as opposed to adopting or some other option, is to change the gene such that the child is not disabled. It is a very different conversation with those individuals than it would be if we were talking about a change in the colour of a person's hair or his or her height. It is the same with respect to genetically modified, GM, crops. It is a more subtle debate about what we want to do. Professor Fiona Doohan made that point very clearly when she spoke about people doing something that they understand quite a good deal about and much more precisely. It is different from people doing something they do not understand but equally, perhaps it is even better than simply taking a blast approach where one changes everything and says it is "natural". I always tell people that cyanide is natural but it kills one. Therefore, natural does not necessarily mean that it is good. It is a probably a much more subtle debate. One of the great lessons - Professor Linda's Doyle's point was important in this context - is that we have lost the GM debate because it has all got into loaded situations where people take polarised views for whatever reason. It is important we have these discussions early on in order that we do not end up in that space and that people understand what is involved.

Similarly with data ownership and medicine, how much data does one own, or a Government own, or a company own? They are all good. We need a certain amount of collective data for public health but one needs individual data for oneself. One needs collective data for understanding how to manage the land in a particular area of Ireland and one also wants one's individual data to be able to best manage one's farm. Those two elements are not a case of either-or. One can have both but one needs to understand how it will go. That is an important issue for the future.

In terms of data ownership, the world is changing. Ten years or even five years ago, most data one needed to know to manage agriculture would have been collected by an organisation such as Teagasc and would have been owned and accessible by the Government. Now, most data we need to manage matters in the public sphere are owned by companies. Amazon knows much more about international trade than any Government does. The smart deployment of these technologies will mean that people know more. That is okay, there is nothing wrong with that; we just need to have a different regulatory system and a different approach to understanding what one can get for free, what one can get for oneself and what is legitimate for people to make money from. It is a different approach.