Dr. Patrick Harrison:

Yes. There have been great changes in clinical gene editing. I remember the first studies being published 16 or 17 years ago, which piqued my interest in this field. Something that is interesting is the way that CRISPR is used in the medical sense compared with how it is being discussed in the food sense. If the committee approaches the EU about this, it is important that it be clear about all the different things that CRISPR can do. It can make small deletions and change individual base pairs, but it can do much more sophisticated things that we need to do to treat some of these horrible diseases. That is not necessarily what people are proposing in respect of food, though. The things that we are trying to do in cells for patients would be more similar to what could be regarded as GMOs. One of the main differences in humans is that we use somatic gene therapy – we treat a person and he or she cannot pass it on. The exact opposite is the case in the food industry where we have to produce lots of seeds so that we can produce more crops.

If we are having an honest conversation, then CRISPR can do all sorts of things. We need it for medicine and my colleagues are using specific aspects of it for gene modification in crops.

That is a very different thing.