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These podcasts are recordings from the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice lecture series 2023/24, 2022/23, 2021/22 and 2020/21, a visiting lecture series coordinated by Professor of Development Studies, Professor James Putzel and Dr Laura Mann.
The Cutting Edge series provides students and guests with fascinating insights into the practical world of international development. Renowned guest lecturers share their expertise and invite discussion on an exciting range of issues, from climate change policy, to pressing humanitarian crises. In 2020, the series took place online, enabling us to host fantastic speakers from around the world and to stream the lectures on YouTube, opening them up to a global audience. Now we are back in person but still recording the sessions to share with our global audience.
So welcome everybody. I'm James Putzel, Professor of Development Studies at the LSE.
And this is the last of this year's cutting edge issues in development thinking and practice. Series.
We've had a great series. And we have a fantastic speaker today. To kind of wrap up the series.
For for for this academic year. The topic, here, which is looking at the, gene.
Revolution and its impact on on communities and farmers and welfare. It's absolutely. A central controversial topic.
And Ron Herring who is Professor Emeritus. At Cornell University. P has undertaken many years now of research.
On first GMO. And then genetic editing in agriculture. I's worked mainly on South Asia through his career in fields of agrarian political economy.
And a growing reform. In fact, When I started my Ph. D. Research, his book was pivotal to me.
Which is which was the book land to the tiller the political economy of agrarian reform in South Asian absolute classic anybody wants to work on reform topics even today should be reading that book.
Ron has worked on political ecology and development and social conflicts around science and genetic engineering.
I can remember one occasion when he stood up in front of a big big audience and I think it was in the Netherlands.
Via Campusina was there. And Ron was talking to the results of research. There was a lot of heckling going on.
He had mi support. And but he you know he's a man who has a scholar who has Absolutely, Anchorage is work in empirical research.
So. There's several articles that he's published on the topic in the review of agrarian studies.
And a paper with the international consortium on applied bio economy. And in the annual review of resource economics.
He has a book transgenetics and the poor biotechnology in development studies. And so, you know, this we're going, we're going to hear around a rendition of his account of this debate and this crucial strategic issue.
Now we couldn't have somebody better to respond. Ron will speak for a maximum of about 50 min, get 50 if possible.
And then I'm inviting Anika, who is assistant professor. Of geography now at Sunni Buffalo we're happy that we're not keeping them up late he was at Ashoka in Delhi until recently.
His interest spans science and technology, democratic politics and development geography. He has published a book titled Genetically Modified Democracy, Transgenetic Crops.
In contemporary India, published by Yale University Press just 2 years ago. Along with, you know, both of these gentlemen have incredible CVs and awards of various kinds.
And I just wanted to mention that along with. Chitra and Gadha Choudary.
He's he's co-directed. Seed Stories, a documentary film.
Highlighting issues of indigenous agroecology. Heirloom seeds and agrarian change. In the eastern ghast.
This documentary preview that the Kolkata People's Film Festival and has also been selected.
For the Chennai International Hume Festival. So, you know, welcome, Annika.
We couldn't have a better interlocutor. And what we would like you to do is, you know, after listening to to Ron.
To provide about a 10 min. Response but then to engage fully in the QA along with Ron.
So, without further ado. If you bear with me a moment. I had my own technical challenges today.
So Ron, take it away,
Okay, so we have we have a picture of a crab, at the beginning for all the same page.
Thank you, James. So this is an impossibly, broad topic. And when I complained about that to James, he said, well, I chose it.
I don't quite remember it that way because what I chose was too esoteric or something, but this is what we're looking at.
And what I want to say is that the The future of this species on the planet depends on interactive effects of science.
State science and state politics. And history. Demonstrate the tensions and contradictions in these interactions, which mediate the effect of technical progress.
And in our time, a climate change is the dominant of these. And if we're talking about social justice and global futures and particularly rural welfare, we have to talk about agriculture first.
And the concomitant changes that are affecting livelihoods in the rural, rural areas of the south.
Just topical point this incredible mess at the American border right now, hundreds of thousands of people lined up trying to escape places that are riddled with a lot of different problems but one of which is climate change.
They can't make a living on small farms in Central America. And they're fleeing to the north hoping to get other kinds of work that's happening all over the world.
So rural poor getting this right means we will improve prospect for social justice and we might have ways in which bioscience could enhance the prospects of that.
Population. James Pozzle mentioned land reform, of course. Land reform was supposed to do just that, and in most of the world.
Largely failed to do just that.
Okay. So, summer of 2,016, the first authenticated meal, having crispered food served up in Sweden.
The meal was, with crispy fried vegetables. Served on genetically endured cabbage.
Go on, on campus. Now this is an important. Caveat to everything I have to say. Note that the first one came in a European country and it was served on campus grown on campus by a scientist on that campus.
This is this is a completely different model of technical change than that which is often portrayed in the media as being dominated by huge corporations and private licensing.
So this is this is open meal.
So Sweden looked at this plant and said, okay, it's not a GMO. That is, there is nothing added to the genome.
Of this this particular cabbage. But this is in Europe, so the German agriculture ministry immediately says, yes, this is exactly what we need.
But the French environment ministry says, no, no way this is a GMO. We're not going to have it in Europe.
So that's the basis of the conflict.
If it's not a GMO, then what is it and what is the GMO?
What we've found historically is that the GMO has been an astonishingly astonishingly effective.
Mobilizational device, for people all over the world. It's been used as a symbol of big business, pro business media, news sites had sold out leftist populars, wiki sites.
This is biotech genocide, Monsanto collaborators, Nazi Legacy of Science.
Now this is not a joke. They'll not see legacy of science, a justification for murder was based on bizarre ethnic science that tried to prove a master race.
We also have feeding that dialogue all over the world was the seeds of suicide. The the conference James Puts talked about in fact, Vanden Shiva was supposed to be on that panel and she didn't show up.
But, the idea of seeds killing farmers, farmers being driven to their death. Buy cotton seeds with one extra gene out of 20,000.
It's extraordinary story, but it did take the world by storm in many ways. You can find this virtually everywhere.
Now, Interestingly enough, in 2,008, Then Prince, now King Charles, stated in New Delhi that he blamed GMOs BT cotton for farmer suicides and he went on to talk about the ways in which this is destroying the rural economy.
So this is a meme that has spread very widely, very quickly, and was mobilized for people who supported the rural poor.
This is the same theme of biotech genocide, but we've added an element here.
We not only have bodies, but we have the the ultimate killing machine is roundup. Roundup is is a plant control mechanism that is much much less much less toxic than many of the alternatives like atrazine widely used.
It's, it's not water soluble. It decays in sunshine. And I have some in my garage.
Nobody likes Plant killers, but weeds are competitors with field crops and everybody who farms has some need for getting rid of the competition.
So how are crops genetically modified? There is traditional beat breeding and I'll show you a picture of that in just a minute.
Then we have mutagenesis which comes out of Japanese experiments to save pear trees.
Which is basically you blast the genome of a plant with radioactivity. Which the Japanese had just recently been horrified by.
If you haven't seen the film Return of Godzilla or Godzilla Minus One should see it.
So the the radiation, it changes the genome. It scrambles the genome, causes mutations.
Some of those mutations may work out, some mutations don't work out. The ones that are helpful are bred, then they've come the basis of new plants.
This becomes important now because these genetically modified plants by mutagenesis have been grandfathered in the EU to not be considered as GMOs.
Now that we have gene editing as an alternative. Explain that in a moment. But just to to see what we have here, we don't know what genes are affected.
We only pick plants that look like they have express genes that work. We don't know about the genes that don't work.
RNA eye interference and transgenics both of these involve specific genes. We go to specific genes and change them in one way or another.
Perhaps add a gene. Now both of these are tightly regulated. The mutagenic plants are not GMOs.
The RNA interference plants and and the transgenic plants. Are called GMOs, tightly regulated all over the world.
Now we have gene editing. And gene editing overcomes the imprecision and negative effects of both mutagenesis and transgenics.
There's, a paper showing that the, transcript comic errors in transgenic plants are much higher than those, much lower than those in mutagenic plants.
In other words, transgenesis seems to be a somewhat safer way to deal with plants than mutagenesis which blasts the entire genome.
And then finally there's gene editing which does not attack the entire genome but rather with some precision.
Cuts and splices to add bits and pieces of DNA.
Okay, so this is, this is Tioscente, the genetic ancestor of, of Mays, 7,000 years ago.
Inedible by the way. And now this is, this is maize. This is a transformation that took place through selection and breeding.
Hundreds of generations of selection and breeding until we end up with maize that now has these edible characteristics.
So this is the. The way that, Gene editing works and this is a really clever thing.
You see this little? Cas 9 enzyme and the guide RNA. The enzyme is a defense mechanism evolved in bacteria.
The bacteria evolved this to deal with viruses because viruses are the main enemy of bacteria.
Other than I don't know hand wash or something but bacteria have been fighting a battle with viruses for millions and millions of years.
And this particular mechanism that they evolved. Has a recognition mechanism, and, and then it has a mechanism to cut.
The the DNA where the virus is infiltrated. So it cuts and then repairs.
Oh, okay. So, right, so there's a cleavage you cut, you can replace that section of DNA.
Or you could just cut it out. So if it's a bad bit of DNA, you get rid of it.
This is another way of looking at it. There's a CRISPR molecule. It has guide RNA that tells it where it's supposed to go.
It finds the place in the sequence. And cuts it. And that gives us a Next slide, please.
This is a, this is just a picture of the same thing with. The sort of more humanized version of you taking bits and pieces of DNA out, replacing them, you search.
Cut and edit and that's what CRISPR does.
Oh, okay. So, going back to the original question. Was Sweden right or Germany or France?
How would we know?
So. Acceptable innovation depends on regulatory state science, but State Science is National. But biology respects no ephemeral lines on maps.
There is no global state. So nation states under constant threat from both populism, which opposes both state and science.
And this is exacerbated in what has been called since 2,016 Oxford Dictionaries word of the year.
Post-truth era. When the idea of any fundamental mess messaging network to establish truth has been undermined by global discourse in the post truth.
Okay. And I so here's the point. Right. So, so we think about utility and disutilities and state science.
In the nineteenth century, electricity was protested everywhere and with good reason, there are risk in electricity. There's no question about that.
There were also risk from burning things in your house in lanterns. Chicago fire was evidently caused by one of these.
So the question was, what do we do about the state science that tells us what's safe and what's not safe.
Right, so that brings the. The question of
Utility versus. Possibility of hazard. This is a critical point.
I'm sorry that just to screw up here on my this new machine. So If you ask yourself, your cell phone has clear utility.
None of us could live without them. I suppose. But then again, this study says the cell phone radiation can cause tumors, brain tumors, and there are many parents that will not lift their children use cell phones precisely because of this evidence.
But that's an individual decision in a way.
Increasingly I think it is increasing we find that populism says regular passengers like us can fly the plane rather than the pilots and that's something that gained a lot of support in this particular cabin of an aircraft.
And this is increasingly what we find certainly in the United States. We had vaccine denialism. We had pictures of the attorney, the surgeon general, the United States being hung in effigy.
All over the United States, 22% of the people in this country do not believe in the results of the last election.
And so there's a tremendous, Opposition now to evolution to the idea that we have a history of slavery.
These things are being deleted from textbooks in many states. So the the populist influence of sort of The authorities don't know what they're talking about and we the people.
Have the correct answers, we just have to mobilize and overcome. This rigid state science that has been imposed upon us.
This is vaccines and of course they were opposed. Greatly for good reason at the time because there were a lot of problems with vaccines.
Next slide. But here's the catastrophe in the United States now. The argument that autism is caused by vaccinations for common childhood diseases, which began with a fake scientist in London who was later, later exported to the colonies for his foul deeds.
This myth of Vaccinations causing autism. Has created a tremendous industry in alternative treatments of autism, which is all fake.
Absolutely fake. But vaccination rates in the United States have been falling. We've had measles epidemics which we did not have before.
And then we're having this question of of People not requiring vaccination to go to school in many states or relaxing vaccination requirements.
And this is led by the kind of anti-vax activism, which started with the, the autism.
Fake news. Interestingly enough, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who is running perhaps a third party quest to become President United States is one of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement.
And and has been very effective at getting people who are writing about vaccines. Fired from their jobs by attacking them through public media.
And attacking them through lawsuits.
So it's just nearly vulnerable. Because it has epistemological commitment to tentative conclusions.
Limited findings, subject to revision. So people demand, that, It be settled for them, but science always says more evidence could overturn what we believe now.
A single mammalian bone in the Silurian period. Would cause us to overthrow the theory of evolution.
We have to go back and start over. It's a powerful theory. That can be powerfully disconfirmed.
So we have commitment to tentative conclusions as opposed to certainty. If you're burning field trials of GMO crops or you believe in creation science as many people do.
Then there is no evidence that could possibly change your opinion on these things. And science is expensive. And scientists are not disinterested.
They do have a material interest in what they do. And then scientists disagree. The inevitability of fringes and we will always have those.
We should be on if CRISPR like technologies escape. Good, excellent. So with all of these difficulties that I've mentioned about public knowledge, populism, attacks on the regulatory state.
If we overcome those as a species and because science is natural is national, but The world is not national, there are no boundaries.
What might there be?
Okay. I gave you a source in the pricey that I sent. For the, some of the sources on biofuels bioplastics by remediation.
All of these are now in process. Of making bioplastics out of that is degradable plastics we're now working on it's being done in many parts of the world now on bacteria that are able to digest plastic bottles and and make compounds of them which can be recycled through nature.
We're working on people working all over the world on efficient water use. Nitrogen fixation in plants so that we can use less topical application of fertilizers.
Invasive species, and we'll get to that in a moment. And food waste, tremendous amounts of food waste in the world.
And there are ways of preventing the degradation of food by microorganisms by engineering the components of our food system.
So they're all of these are in process. A lot of research is being done. You can Google any one of them and sort of see what sorts of possibilities there are.
Okay, we're able to put biosensors in plants that can tell that can tell scientists like by checking remotely whether they are infected with something whether they are moisture deficient or whatever so there's biosensing as a major contribution to agriculture.
Next slide. Japan did the first. Gm edited tomato, which has, a production of GABA with the tomato.
They're genetics. Generic tomatoes consume less water.
And increase bio nutrients. And then finally, there a number of other vegetables.
Number of vegetables being worked on around the world which are working out in many cases and in many cases are still in test trials.
Okay.Gene therapy.
This has now been successful. We have a therapy for sickle cell disease, sickle cell anemia.
I mentioned this because The people subject to sickle cell anemia in the United States are primarily black, black, black Americans who grew up in African societies historically.
In areas with high malaria. Infestations. It was helpful to have sickle cells.
They were part of the. Body's response to sickle cell. To mosquitoes carrying malaria over the centuries.
In the new world that was not nearly so useful and the descendants of Americans of slaves that were brought over by the Americans have been especially affected by sickle cell anaemia, which is a terrible, terrible disease.
We now have the possibility of gene therapy. Which stem cells are corrected, by beta goblin gene.
And transfer to viral vectors. Transportation of the corrected stem cells back to the patient. That actually has worked.
It's tremendously expensive. But previously we had no cure at all for sickle cell anemia.
As our one of our favorite guy we just went from malaria the eightys a jypties mosquito which carries dungy fever yellow fever chicken gunga zika and perhaps equine encephalitis this particular mosquito, is now being, attacked via, transgenic mosquitoes that change the ratio of
males to females in whole populations using gene drives. Now, there's an explanation of this in the paper that I that I posted on your sort of notes for the lecture.
This some This particular mosquito. There's an immediate reaction if we can't mess with the ecology by changing the genetics of a part of the ecology.
I mean, we may not like these mosquitoes, but after all they are part of our ecosystem and we can't really mess with that without risking a great deal.
Well, it turns out that the eightys Egyptian mosquitoes you might see from its name is not native to any of our ecosystems.
This is an old world species. A gypsy gives you a hint on that. It's come to the new world via transportation of various goods and people across the continents and has has created an enormous mess in this country because in the Western Hemisphere because we don't have adequate responses.
And that's where we have gene drives that's explained in the heft run and hearing paper on driving the ratio of female mosquitoes down relative to males and female mosquitoes of the only ones.
That bite human beings. Okay, so. I'll just end with Nina Federer.
Presidential address to the, the association for zen and of science. She is scared to death of forces driving science into a dark era.
I think that there is good evidence that is true. And the crises facing us come faster and faster.
We're going to need new crops, getting new responses to new diseases, and none of this is going to happen with the kind of apparatus we have either.
With the politicization of science, the weakness of state science, or with our current scientific methods. So if we're going to survive as a species.
We're going to need a great deal more of technological information. Better politics and more effective states.
And then final slide.
This is a tribute to Anika, who's written a beautiful piece about the Brindel controversy in India.
So these are these are kids loving their.
Ron, thank you very much.
Okay.
Okay, okay. Thank you very much. This is, thank you very much for this opportunity. This is I'm really excited about being here.
And of course, It's both. A pleasure and intimidating to be speaking right after wrong.
As James said in the way beginning, Ron has taught students of ingredients studies so much.
And his insistence on taking farmers, decision making. Farmers choices seriously and looping it back to questions of science and politics is really a both standard in the in the.
No, since I have only 10 min, I'm going to restrict my remarks to certain, you know, 2.
More areas of disagreement with Rome than areas of agreement. Just to spawn an interesting question conversation thereafter.
So let me start by saying that.
You know, Jack Klopenberg notices, makes an observation in his, outstanding book first, the seed.
That the promise of genetic approaches of course, Jack is at that point of, Jack is talking about recombinant.
Not genome editing in his book. But nonetheless, I think he has. So he observes that biotechnologists are far more gung-ho.
About what. Genetic approaches can do for agriculture than plant breeders. And I made this observation because I actually do not think that a straight line can be drawn from the wild grass to maize.
To herbicides, toll and maize, and then per genome. The question is not which is riskier or which is less risky.
The I would simply like to state. That compared to plant breeding. Which which also has risks and mutagenesis has its own risks.
The risks in the case of recombinant DNA I'm genome editing are different.
Secondly, I make this observation about plant breeding versus
What biotechnology say about these technologies to point out that there is a very sharp division even among the sciences as far as so I do not think it's it's I think one can make a mistake in jumping too quickly.
From looking at what biologists say. To, you know, the activism around these crops. Forgetting that biology is one among many sciences and therefore and no one's and no particular body of science has a monopoly on that on on the truth of these technologies.
In fact, in my own field work, I one of I interviewed a very serious senior plant breeder in India.
Who, who gave me this metaphor? He said plant breeders have to think about designing a car.
Biotechnologists make, you know, worry about a particular screw and then make statements about the entire car.
He went on to say that I find the promise I find recombinant DNA technology. Not particularly relevant for the kind of crops I'm making.
And I and in any case, you know, I have to think about the whole crop rather than particular genes.
So, now you know, you don't have to take me at my word and you don't have to take Ron at the word I would just like to say.
That there is a sizeable debate within the sciences as far as the risks and uncertainties of these technologies go.
And some of the most marginal voices in the debate are actually of those scientists who take a systems complex systems view of these topics.
So I have ecologists in mind. And ecologist in particular have raised certain have raised a lot of caution about going you know about translating straight from you know changes at the genetic at the genome level.
2 statements about what happens once these crops are growing in dynamic ecologies. Ecologists have powerfully argued that You have to take a complex systems approach.
In which case biotechnology which is a sub branch of biology which is one among various sciences which feeds into agricultural sciences is hardly the last word.
Now let me switch gears in the interest of time and make a few broader observations which since this, this seminar is about cutting its issues in development.
Do we have just emerged it's not even been to 3 years since a devastating global pandemic which is very much linked to capital intensive models of agriculture, transnational finance flows, and environment destruction.
During the pandemic we in India saw the largest mobilization by farmers in independent India. As we speak right now, there's another mobilization.
And which is being, you know, fairly violently suppressed. And now this this this farm movement of 2,021 was a was pro the proximate triggers the 3 farm laws.
Today the demand the top demand is for support prices slow prices but they have also raised urgent questions of access to land.
There are also questions about Indigenous land rights. And there are even demands. Not in the top 5, but you know if you look.
At the articulation coming on the street. There are also demands about breaking strangleholds of caste and patriarchal farming, sorry, power.
Ecologically inappropriate models of agriculture and justice in food systems. My question to all of you is that which of these big problems Oh, whether it is pandemic vulnerability.
Oh, I should also mention that recently there's a paper which confirms what anthropologists have been seeing for decades.
That green revolution varieties have lower nutrition than air loan varieties and the nutrition quotient of these varieties are steadily declining.
Again, you know, this is an observation that, that so many Marina Velker has made in the context of Indonesia, Akel Bukka has made Vasavi has air rascal he has made in the context of India and you know Ron said and I can see why he says that you know science is tentative at the same time in history.
There is a continuity about you know, green revolution. Recommendant DNA, not genome editing, making very confident promises and shutting down the kind of concerns that are coming from the field.
So my question is which of these problems whether it is declining nutrition Sorry, which of these problems, whether it is pandemic vulnerability, technology induced unemployment?
Ecological sustainability, which of these are addressed by You know, even partially in BT cotton, BT, eggplant, GM mustered to take 3 biotech crops on which India has seen the most debate and all for that matter genome-edited crops.
So my broader comment is that We cannot be approaching the question of biotechnology and development. From the biotechnology side of things or genome technologies side of things.
We have to ask because that would mean asking what can developmental needs do for biotechnology rather than the converse question, which is what are the developmental needs.
And then prioritizing which technology can most Reasonably and in a most cost-effective manner, meet those.
So to start from the promises and perils of genomics would be to implicitly ask what development can do for biotechnology.
Now no doubt biotechnology can offer some and I'm using the word biotechnology loosely to include genome editing.
No doubt, genome editing can offer some important developmental outcomes. But do it, but that may not be the only pathway to those outcomes.
Nor might genomics be the most cost economical from the perspective of at least public spending pathway to those goods.
Starting from the development side of the relationship. Requires debate and participation. Across the access of inequality that marks public life.
It also requires an acknowledgement that other fields of science may be better equipped. For the context, certainly of the global south, but even global mouth.
For instance, nutrition, public health, plant breeding, and systems ecology. For these reasons, I would suggest that we have to raise the question of democratization.
I appreciate that questions of democratization can slip into a wholesale rejection of scientific epistemology.
But that is one end of the spectrum. I am more interested in make on a democratized discussion on democratizing the discussion, which is always an unfinished project, which is always, you know, imperfect.
Off setting the agenda of priority setting in science and technology. From which will emerge the agenda for sciences.
This is life for me. I think you know the old problems of development have not gone away. And I agree absolutely with Ron that the new problems of climate change climate catastrophe has only got added to the mix.
So therefore, I would. Once again, I would end by saying. That.
We have to start from what are our developmental outcomes and And that again, you know, you and I cannot settle.
There has to be a democratized or democratized, at least we have to attempt a democratization of that conversation.
And then come to the agenda for science and technology rather than saying that here's something which can do wonders.
And let's see what problems it can solve.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you very much, Anything. And Ron, do you want to go straight to the students questions or would you like?
A brief reply, first.
Okay, brief reply. I agree with all of Anika's larger systemic issues.
The problem is that none of those larger. Systemic issues like the quality of democratic society and so on and so forth.
None of those solve concrete problems that are crises. Let me give you one example, just one example.
The first recombinant DNA, pharmaceutical was insulin. We were running out of the guts of pigs and cows to be scraped to make human insulin and the our DNA that was created one little snip into the DNA we now have insulin available without killing pigs and cows and scraping their innards, which itself was not a sanitary process, it was not a
safe process, but that's what we did until, 1,972 when recombinant DNA made insulin that had a single insertion from a genetic engineering approach.
So I just want to say that there there are problems that are not solvable by improving the quality of democracy or rethinking development or any of those things, but they're very concrete problems.
People die of diabetes. In huge numbers. In fact, the whole subcontinent is especially prone to diabetic conditions.
So it's it's not a question of solving every problem with a snip in a gene, it is that there are some problems that can be solved with only a snip in a gene.
For example, the the problem with sickle cell anemia, the United States, which which was horrific disease for so long.
And now there is a cure for and the same thing could be said of so many things we've developed vaccines for and without those vaccines we wouldn't have survived the pandemic.
Even though our president told people they could take a How do you warming medicine? I know you want me to shop.
Hello.
I'll stop. But the science in this country. Overcame the political nonsense that came out of the White House and the right wing.
Thanks, Ron. Let's, do we have questions in the room, Laura?
Okay. So path.
Yes, we do have one question. Hopefully more coming. Oh, Jeremy is coming down and you ask his question and Max as well.
That's great. If he stands more or less where you are. And then the speakers can see him.
How many? I think it's back.
Yeah, come, come and look this way. Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Raise this blank. Yeah, can you hear me? Bye. So I guess my question is What, as you said before, biology is not respect, any state.
Cultural line boundaries. What is or can be done about cross-pollination where it's not wanted, especially, as some of these.
You know, variations will streamline, as agriculture continually has, different varieties of crops into the most marketable form.
What can be done for peoples and cultures who don't want to engage with GMO cross-pollination.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Another question?
Yes.
Hello, it's quite a broad question. Just kind of, I guess it's interesting to have some sort of consensus or conclusion maybe.
Is is gene editing a solution to agricultural productivity to feeding the world or not?
Good question. Is there a third question in the room?
Okay. Not for now. Maybe we can start with those 2.
Okay.
Right.
Genes are gonna flow. There was, there is a technology that was called the Terminator and much of the world was worked up against the Terminator's international protest against the Terminator and the object of it was to prevent cross-pollination.
That patent was not owned by Monsanto, as everybody said. It was owned by the USDA and a small cotton company.
Free Monsanto. You could, in fact, in theory, stop across pollination. I'm not sure that it has any important effects because the GMO is an ideational concept.
So a farmer that does not want a GMO, it's hard to say what he would do in Germany and France they have very strict limits of geography so you can you can isolate areas that are growing transgenic crops from areas that are not growing transgenic crops.
That's possible. And I think in rich countries, where you don't care about food prices and you don't care very much about.
Land scarcity. I think these are these are reasonable kinds of solutions. I don't think this is a feasible solution where people have 2 acre crops, 3 acre, 3 acres of land, 5 acres of land.
It doesn't seem very feasible to me. So if an extra gene shows up in one of their crops.
I think that that is just one of the externalities of having multiple people growing multiple crops in multiple areas.
Yeah. Do you want her comment on that?
Certainly. Okay, I'm I'm also going to respond a little bit to Ron's response.
Okay.
Which is yes, there may be problems which can only be solved by You know sniping, but sorry, snipping the gene, but in human in recombinant DNA insulin is a much more of a black boxed product.
Than exactly the question of cross pollination, you know, gene flows and all that you get when you have.
Plants growing into ecology. Not if pandemic kills, so does unemployment, so does mannutrition.
I, you know, we have to remember that for food food is a much broader category. Than rice wheat maize and the handful of 6 or 7 crops in which you have GMOs.
Of which, you know, of course one of them is like cotton, which only is, you know, as a food crop, it's only as an edible oil, you know, in some areas of the world.
It's crushed into a. So when you are talking about food actually we have to recognize that This model of capital intensive agriculture has produced low prices.
And cheapened food in only a handful of main cereal crops and industrialized meets in there are other kinds of food items which are as culturally important which are actually scarce and very expensive.
So again, my submission to all of do in response to Ron is that
You know, there has been excellent research, emerging research in the field of agri ecology. Which does not need gene genetic tinkering.
It works with biodiversity. It tries to keep the seeds in the hands of farmers. And it works with highly productive polyculture systems.
And You know, if we are talking about feeding the world and if we are talking about. Let's not be so quick to ignore systems level solutions to systemic level problems.
And I'm perfectly willing to admit that they may still be a few things which can only be solved by gene sniping but have we even How much have we really invested in systemic?
System level solutions which works with farmers rather than You know, tries to put technologies in their hands for a price.
Okay, I'm sure Ron would like to comment back on that. But also I remind you run of the second question.
Was the broader question about the possibility of gene editing. You're really increasing productivity in agriculture because You know, this is a huge issue and a huge problem for farmers.
Particularly we start looking at farming and across sub-Saharan Africa. There's a big challenge and I think there's a social and economic, a kind of political economy challenge to increase productivity in agriculture.
But I think I think the student wanted to. Know about the potential. Of this technology to contribute to increasing productivity.
Maybe a bit like new seeds for poor people of the past.
Right. I think that
And I get it's gone very very macro and I think that's that is appropriate as a general framework for thinking about objectives and where do we go next?
And now James goes very micro and says, well, what specific things in specific crops would help? Farmers in Africa and those are both appropriate questions but the answer to the second one is not solved by the first one if you have a problem with infestation for particular parasite that kills plants.
You have infestation of soil miners that destroy the roots of plants. The various kinds of normal biological processes that are destructive to plants.
I mean, the whole African system, you can imagine marketing problems, you can imagine size and scale problems, etc. Etc.
But if you're talking about productivity of the individual plant, the health of the plant and the soil.
Then you have to figure out what has gone wrong. And we know in evolutionary terms, there will continuously be things that go wrong, and we have selected a narrow range of plants that we have have sort of become totally reliant on, some of which are not particularly reliable, but if they have problems, they've got to be solved.
Fungus infestations, all kinds of things of this sort. May be solved by plant breeding.
But I actually wanted 1 one thing for It took 8 years of research and field testing to get a BT Brindle for India.
That was shot down by, One person, a minister who didn't like it had a political following that that required that he stay in their in their bandwidth.
That, Bringal. Which did one change that allowed it to resist its one pest enemy, which was very destructive and farmers will tell you they didn't like to actually sell these crops in in the market because they were damaged by the this.
Infestation. That. That same BT Brindle has gone to Bangladesh where it's done extremely well and now being grown in the Philippines, it was a public sector project in in transferred free of patent rights to both Bangladesh and to the Philippines and in fact it's come back to India as a stealth seed because Indian farmers find that it's useful
for battling this one particular problem that on a 2 acre farm growing Brynj's can be devastating if it gets into your crop and you can't control it.
So that that's my answer.
Thank you. Just before we go back to the to the room, Ken Chabon, you have a question.
Yeah, hello, thanks very much. I always love listening to you and reading your stuff. I was wondering with regards to sort of this is a bit broader but In terms of the trust and mistrust in science, Do you think that that varies according to where the science comes from?
So what I have in mind, for example, in the pandemic. Here in the UK, we all took the Astrazeneca vaccine, but in the US when I tell family and friends that they laugh because it's regarded in the US as a bad vaccine.
Yeah, and the US, everybody loved the Pfizer. I mean, it came from Germany, but they regarded it as American and the Moderna vaccines.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I'm just wondering, thinking about sort of the trust and mistrust in science that you observed in India.
Does it matter where the science comes from or is it is that sort of an irrelevant factor?
I could just tack on to that and you know, specifically. Correct. And you can also. To comment on the BJP and modi's.
Gov's attitude towards this because They seem to endorse science in some places when It kind of And, but they're very anti science like other forms of right populist politics.
In other domains. Yeah. Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, why I'm okay.
Where to start? Ken's point about. Nationalism and it's sort of the reaction of where something came from or what it can be tagged with having its national roots.
I don't think there's any cure for nationalism and that's precisely why it's so difficult to make global process progress on anything.
We can't have a climate accord because nations that produce petroleum products are adamantly opposed to it.
Corporate interest in the United States repose to it because they make money off petroleum products. So we're having trouble at the at the level of particular interest of particular industries and there are associated particular places.
I don't know about that. Vaccine hesitancy marked by nationalism, but I can tell you in this country it was decisively marked by political affiliation, places of high Republican strength, the kind of red belt in the South and so on, had much higher levels of vaccine rejection and much higher levels of death from COVID precisely because they rejected the idea of vaccination per se.
They wouldn't know whether it came from outside or inside. So the demagoguery around China, for example, now everyone's opposed everything coming from China.
But if you're buying a refrigerator or a VCR, it's highly likely that you buy a Chinese one because that's what's in the market.
So I don't see that happening. Ken, it's it's kind of a political rhetorical point, but I don't think people behave that way at all and I don't know about the Astrazeneca versus the Pfizer vaccines.
I've had every vaccine that came on the market just because I my uncle died of polio before we even had a vaccine against polio.
And I have a number of friends who my age who were affected by polio as children. And this is something that we have now conquered with a vaccine.
So I don't know where agroecology comes up with new vaccines. Period.
Any good.
If you want.
So. See the for me There is no, I mean, there's no unitary science in the singular.
There are bodies of science. Sciences, their bodies of science. Which sometimes look at the same object and come to very different conclusions.
So it is from as far as I'm concerned, a political exercise in judgment. You know which how do you calibrate different bodies of science and the evidence emerging from it into some kind of an appropriate policy.
No, you know, I am not only talking about the big picture. There are so you know her besides which are which Ron spoke about earlier.
Our you know are very important in a particular model of farming and that is monoculture farming. I have myself seen intelligently designed polyculture where weeds are not so much of an issue and therefore you can.
Manage without herbicides and which are very productive funds. You know their land equivalent ratio and some of this is published research i mean that's not something which on you know i'm just telling you that I have seen there is evidence of it which is published in peer reviewed journals.
D 2 for fruit and shoot both you know. At lunch. Has best problems and which some of which can be solved if you do intelligent if you use it plant biodiversity.
And you end up that's of course provided you have access to it. So yes so my you know I would still say I would come back to it that.
That's different even before we get to politics and activism and nationalism. It's not like there is a singular scientific consensus on many of these questions and I keep coming back to this that ecologists have a very different take.
On these questions than molecular biologists. As far as your question about Prime Minister Modi goes, I think this government is very supportive of genomic technologies.
They have allowed a class of genomic technologies to go through without scrutiny from the environment ministry. Now that itself raises questions of.
DEMOCRATION, but in the sense that there was never much of a public discussion.
Even an attenuated public discussion on that decision. However, some of the older GMOs stay stuck in quotes.
And where the government is betting for them but you know ultimately the courts will decide.
Okay.
Can I just add one thing about Modi? Yes, I mean, I, the Deepak Pintles mustard that he modified as a public sector scientist in Delhi many, many years ago.
It's been resisted continually by everyone on the ground. And it's now, it been approved by all the social, the science in India's approved it at every level, but now it's stuck in the court because people don't want to have the genetically modified mustard.
Now the alternative which India does say import huge quantities of GMO canola oil from the United States and Canada.
So the alternative is instead of growing a mustard seed, which is a much healthier oil, much better oil and can be grown on small scale, grows beautifully in Rajasthan, you go there in the spring, magnificent mustard fields, but it doesn't have the productivity to make profits for farmers.
That they would have with this genetically engineered mustard of Deepak Pinto, former Vice Chancellor of Delhi University.
And I think the debug Pintle was just kept down and pushed down by, attacked viciously by people who basically didn't know what they were talking about but were opposed to anything that scientists produce as opposed to something that they preferred.
But the consequence were eating GMO oil from Canada and the United States.
Thanks. Before I go back to you and get on on that. We have some 2 students with questions in the room and I know Laura does have a question and so does David Lewis.
So let's take the 2 students and Laura first have another round and then we'll come back to.
David and other students who come up with their questions. So go ahead. In the room.
Hello, thank you very much. I had a couple of questions, maybe a bit broad as well. I was wondering a bit more about the question of democracy and whether this is really a question of the nation state or is there any type of bottom up approaches where there's alternative political structures afar or unions or organizations that are challenging the the dominance of a nation state in terms of deciding which types of processes are gonna be used
transgenic or GMOs or gene editing or whatever the process might be. I was also kind of curious about the relationship between labor and capital intensive agricultural practices and wanting to know how genetics between labor and capital intensive agricultural practices and wanting to know how gene editing is affecting agricultural practices and wanting to know how gene editing is affecting the the and wanting to know how gene editing is affecting the the labor and a bit about the knowledge economy
that's affecting the the labor and a bit about the knowledge economy that's taking place. So just gonna keep it kind of general.
Yeah, and thank you. And then I think there's Matthew. Max. Okay.
Elliot. Anika, you mentioned that the nutrition quotient of GMO varieties had declined and I was wondering if you could go a little bit deeper into that and why that is the case.
Okay, and Laura.
So I had a sort of 2 part question. I guess the first question is returning a little bit to what Ken said about where science comes from.
And when you were answering that question, you were mainly talking about like. Geographically, where it comes from.
But I, you know, I remember reading this great book. Catherine Kramer who was talking about kind of populism in Wisconsin.
And why people in rural Wisconsin were turning so much against both public school teachers as well as the university of Wisconsin and her research kind of was pointing to the fact that you know, the way that people in rural areas now experience higher education is incredibly costly.
It's out of reach. And so when their kids are going to university, there's a kind of sense of resentment.
And so her research was kind of looking at what kind of popular understandings of why people in rural areas have this kind of suspicious view of the university.
I wonder whether the kind of populism we see is partly an outcome of changes to higher education and science that have been driven very much around commercialization and corporate interests.
And whether that is kind of shaping the way that people understand these kinds of sciences. And then the second part of my question is if you could say a little bit more about the kind of entry barriers of doing this kind of science and the degree to which this science is something that's largely happening in in universities and research centers in the United States or Europe.
Or whether, you know, the science to do this is something that, you know, universities and research centers can do in the developing world outside of these big internationally funded research centers because I think it does matter like where the science is done in shaping how people understand it.
Thanks.
Yeah, I imagine this. The corporate involvement in the research too, so. Go ahead, want to take those 3, Ron.
Oh, really? Small, pile on my plate. To take the last one first. I think the great thing about CRISPR and I will be a defender here of of this process it came out of of 2 2 scientists.
There was a battle between Harvard and Berkeley over who had the patent rights, but But there's no way to enforce any patent right in this technology.
I asked Jennifer Dudna since I have written constantly about stealth seeds. We have all these international laws and national laws, but you can only grow these varieties, not those varieties, all of which have been, evaded by peasants all over the world.
I mean, BT, BT rice getting to Europe. Despite China banning it and the EU banning it, it happened for years BT rice.
Okay, so I asked Jennifer Dude, I said I've always been in stealth seeds that these regulatory frameworks and these police state kind of restrictions and so on don't seem to work.
Same like drug trade. And she said, well, no, he said, said CRISPR is like scarlet surgery.
You cannot find the scar because when you shift something there's constant transcriptomic error in every time DNA replicates you get small errors most of them have no impact on But if you just look at a strand of DNA, it's going to be very hard to tell with this.
Scrent, Strangecryptomic error or whether someone has simply snipped out a bit of DNA that was harming the organism.
It is not a findable thing. So how would you ever enforce these patents? It is, you know, so it is certainly the case that in, in Wagen University, I just say one more thing about universities.
This came out of universities, Berkeley and Harvard. Boggan University has said everything that it does will be available patent free around the world.
I don't think that we're going to have a serious problem with enforce, with the patent regimes that we've seen in manufacturing and various other kinds and copyrights on on films and so on.
I don't think those problems are going to to show up. Now the United States and Kathy Kramer's book, it's a brilliant book.
I like Kathy Kramer a lot. So here's the problem. This anger, this populist anger that's that's welling up.
And, and indeed is evidenced by, by the incredibly high death rate we have from private weapons in the United States.
This anger bubbles up into horrific social violence both against science and against ordinary people against gay people etc.
So, It is, it isn't gendered. It has, I think it's been gendered more than Kathy Kramer thinks it has.
It's true that there's a class division. It's a pretty clear class divide between university educated people and non university educated people.
There's a red blue distinction between those 2 groups and the red group is much more populist in their orientation against science, against authority and against education, certainly against anything that isn't in the Bible.
Now, unfortunately, this is a male problem. And so the death rates among males are increasing faster.
The suicide rates, the failure rate of American males compared to females is quite dramatic. So this this science culture, formal sector kind of advancement is increasingly female not male.
And the anger that that gives. Especially sort of white males, is, is Very difficult to manage in a solution for.
So our our split is not so much against science and non-science, but it is the way that it affects society and it gets gendered.
And it's true that rural areas in the United States have been long distressed by the concentration of power and wealth and in The big cities and then the universities and so on.
That's a that's a nature of I think. Many countries but the United States especially powerful in our politics.
Then there was the question about gosh I can't remember now the oh, the whether there are alternative small scale research and development institutions that outside the the global system.
I think increasingly And increasingly that's a very difficult thing to imagine on a global scale. In other words, problems that are very local should be solved with investigation of local ecologies and investigation of local plants.
But these things do spread. So when you have a generic solution to a particular kind of problem, it can be used anywhere in the world.
And if that's if the vector that you need to. Control or something that that needs a solution in terms of soil quality or soil ecology.
Those are questions that have to have variable answers regionally, but the basic principles behind solutions may well come out of pure science.
So I think that's true. And I can't remember the other question about,
Okay, that was bottom up science. Okay.
There was a question about labor and capital and how this
Oh yes.
Kind of technology may affect the relations between. Between them.
I don't know. The United States has had a long-term decline in organized labor's strength and share of the national product.
That's been reversed a little bit in recent years. But, it is, still largely the knowledge economy is resented by people who are outside the knowledge economy and I don't I don't see any lessening of that that tendency into the future and that's why the fact that males are not doing as well in school as females has a tremendous impact on the the sort of social stability and social
cohesion of this society.
I need, do you want to come back on? Any of these 3 questions?
Yeah, just a few quick points. I did not say that the nutrition quotient of Do. GM crops has been declining.
I was pointing to a recent article which shows that The green revolution rises in beta nutritionally much more than the More dispersed, aggregate logically adaptive heirloom biodiversity that they're replaced.
So, you know, just for instance, Rise is experienced a 33% drop in zinc.
27% decrease in iron. I just pulled these numbers out since you asked. And zinc and Ireland and wheat have fallen by 30% and 19% respectively.
And I will again say that these are all findings that actually anthropologists noted. When they were working with the first generation of farmers to try out green revolution, higher breadth and high-end varieties, so-called.
But But these were completely dismissed. These concerns and today in 2,023, you know, we have getting confirmation.
So, I will. I will see you know history and political economy I feel we are do not We are not appreciating.
The larger lessons coming from there, you know, today we can debate whether GM mustard is important for edible oil, India's oil security, edible oil security or not.
Nonetheless, the fact is that why do we have an edible all shortage to begin with?
Because the green revolution marginalized oil seeds and incentivized farmers who would, oil seeds earlier to switch wholesale to rice and beat.
So, you know, we start from one flawed model. And then instead of fixing the flawed model and again adopting a system science approach to them, we again do small small tweaks and I mean, I don't really see this either as efficient or particularly democratic.
And on a final point, You know, the where the science come from and does that matter?
There's an old debate in the green revolution that MS. Swami Nathan had with another rice scientist called CRHRI.
NOTHAN had with another rice scientist called CRHRI in India. And Richaria was of the view that it to improve eels and to improve contents of food production, it is better to work in a decentralized manner with farmers varieties.
And, Swami Nathan was of the view that, that, you know, expensive research project at a central location will produce us fewer relatively fewer number of varieties which have to be adopted.
In widely different agra apologies and stabilize through, you know, basically chemical, agrochemical routines.
It's, model is the one which which one in history, but I don't see why You know, especially since.
Conference of the Global South have small research budgets relative to those of the global north. And they still have access to biodiversity.
I would, I would say yes, the location of science matters. And thrifty science is better especially if it takes a system view of the problem.
Thank you. I know that students in maybe chafing at the bit to get. Onto reading week and perhaps stopping at the pub with us.
For those of us who are in London. After this is over, but I know we have one more question anyway from David Lewis.
And we'll see if there's any.
I'm you, James. Thanks. And
Yeah, thank you to Ron and Anicet for a really interesting discussion and it's so much food for thought that actually most of some of what I was going to ask.
Has already been preempted I think by the recent very interesting discussion. But, I just wanted to say one thing, which is that BT Brindel case that you that you mentioned I think is It's something interesting.
In the sense that it confirms, I think, all the fears of the lack of gun.
Lack of governability of these kind of technologies because if it's if it's being happily grown in Bangladesh I mean the border with India is entirely permeable.
I mean there's no there's no possibility that India's effort to Control it, you know, will be successful, you know, and so I think I mean, I don't know enough about the science to know, for example, whether seeds can be reused or whether or not.
That you know it can be independently grown of seed providers but That was one thing I was interested in.
Second thing I think and What strikes me from this really interesting discussion is that you know, run in a wh, well I think both of you are making making a strong case for multi-disciplinarity at many different levels within within the natural sciences but also much much more broadly than that.
But also for a for a form of systems thinking. And also for better public accountability. And that makes me think about this.
Well, on the one hand, the need to think creatively about how we may need to reorganize the research infrastructure.
And I wondered if you had any comments on the state of the CGI, system for example in terms of providing anything there, but it also seems to beg the question of the need to reorganize universities as well.
I mean, this, you know, it seems that we're hopelessly. Out of step with needs on this and it made me think as well as this field of what we were calling a few years ago, the field of the public understanding of science.
We used to have a lot of people being appointed in universities and media tasked with this public understanding of science.
And it may be my imagination, but it seems to me that's sort of faded quite a lot in the last few years as an idea.
So anyway, I, you know, there was so many different strands of thinking that that you prompted, I just wanted to get a few comments from both of you on those themes.
Thank you.
Maybe fighting because Bill Gates and and whatnot. But I'll play you over. Can I?
Yeah, I know I think so.
Can I pass first to anicat? And then to Ron for kind of last words and answer to these questions.
And the cat first maybe.
Yeah, I thank you David very much. Yes, I,
You know, we absolutely, I completely endorse what you said about the importance of multi-disciplinary approach to these problems.
With and the only carrier I would say is that especially as for a state science, I mean, state science is concerned.
We have to start with at least some kind of prioritization. What is the problem that we are tackling and at what level?
That's the first point and yeah, public understanding of science. I think it's a real, it's, It's a real shame that that moment seems to have passed because If anything, you know, we We need much more of that right now.
We need much more of it because of precisely the kind of challenges to you know science wholesale that you know that Ron has to importantly, to me.
And Also, on a lesser, I mean, on, equally important, but Less often said point which is the point that Sheila Justinov has made a number of times that the public understanding of science cannot only be working or Brian when may have made it to cannot be only working with a deficit model.
So we need a public understanding of science that is also starting from the bottom and Translating the kind of concerns that are there on the ground into an agenda for science and technology.
So a bi-directional public understanding of science.
Thank you. Ron.
Just to. Annika's last remark. In our country we have to worry about the pushing of all science out of textbooks by what's called creation science.
I mean, we the the attack on secular science is really quite serious in this country. Banning books, taking them out of libraries and so on.
So we face kind of a return to the dark ages in a literal sense of dark ages weren't so dark as they're trying to in a literal since the dark ages weren't so dark as they're trying to make them now in the American South.
But I wanted to make this, this comparison to this permeable boundaries. And think about the war on drugs when when I was I was just like a teenager we constantly read about the war on drugs and the money going to the war on drugs and the arming the border and sending arms to South America so that they could take care of the war on drugs.
Continuous battle against the war on drugs. Well, they're here now. There's never been a success in the war on drugs.
High value products will cross national boundaries. People will take the risk if the return is high enough. That's true of seeds or drugs.
For example, the the the first BT cotton in India it was illegal, it was underground.
It was smuggled in from the United States. And the Argentinas, tremendous growth in in soy production and so on came directly out of smuggled, actually taken technology that, Monsanto couldn't reinforce.
Monsanto would constantly go to the US government and say, go beat up these Argentines.
They've got to respect our patent. And the Argentines would say go suck an egg.
They ignored them for many, many years, which then spread to Brazil, as well.
So, if you're not going trans border movement of either knowledge or germ plasm. It that just isn't going to happen if we can't even stop the movement of forbidden.
Final products were never going to stop the germ plasm or the components or the knowledge of new products.
So that That is not going to happen. And in fact, CRISPR makes things much worse as Jennifer Dudna told me.
It's scarlet surgery. Now we have we have students on this campus at Cornell who can can prosperize things make new new versions of them they can work on fruit flies and things like that but they have that knowledge in that capacity and they're you know, 20 years old, 19 years old.
I don't see how you're going to stop human inventiveness and the sharing of new technologies and new information.
I don't think there's any way you can do that. And the sharing of new technologies and new information. I don't think there's any way you can do that.
And I think that that you just hope that these are built up into positive leaning institutions rather than negative leaning institutions.
But if you're trying to think about crispering new, diseases that you can unleash on your foes.
This is, this has been going on for many centuries trying to figure out some way to defeat your enemy by getting one step ahead of them technologically.
This is true of poison gas, for example. Okay, so. I don't I don't think there's any way to do that.
As to the multidisciplinary. I worry a lot because we are losing the humanities in the United States.
They don't pay off. The universities are cutting back on humanities faculties. And of course I worry much about that.
It disturbs us. But you can't critique science if you don't understand it. So I think there's a kind of a basic level.
Of understanding if people don't know any molecular biology. They can't possibly understand what the issues are with changing.
A bit of DNA here and a bit of DNA there. That it's just not it's not possible and we're facing a very difficult humanities based questions right now about things like
Editing, embryos. Right, you grow embryos and test tubes.
You've got Let's say you have 6 embryos and you do the DNA testing and one of them turns out to be, you know, potentially 6 foot 2 blonde white male.
Well, that's the one you may want to keep, right? If you can look into the genome of the in vitro fertilization outcomes and you can get rid of the the the ones you don't want and keep the ones you do.
These kinds of issues are going to come up and of course they're stratified by wealth, by access.
And they're poorly understood by a population that doesn't really understand basic science. So there's a, those are huge issues on the plate and I don't see how There is any way to stop.
There's even a group. In the United States called self hackers. That are trying to hack their own genomes.
And I don't see any way to stop this. I just, I don't, I'm.
I wish I had some, some wisdom on that. In terms of decentralization okay Yeah, this criminalization, but if we don't have any national regulation of any kind.
I'm not sure. How we prevent. Oops, sorry. I'll stop there because I've said enough.
I'm Okay.
Okay. I really want to thank you. I mean, so good to listen to you again and And it's been a pleasure to And we want to have you back and preferably both of you in person at some point would be great.
I mean, you almost feel like we're back in the pandemic. But at least it allows us, you know, with no budget for this.
I'm ready just even whenever.
Yes. Yes, it allows us with no budget for this series to be able to listen to both of you.
Hmm.
From the U.S.A. At the moment. So I remind the students who are left here online or in the room that when we come back from reading week we're gonna have the first of the development studies alumni lectures with Paolo Derenzio who is an Italian based in Brazil and has a long experience since he graduated from the MSC development studies.
Many years ago, working in development policy and practice and research and teaching. And he's gonna be talking about citizens and civil society's influence over taxation movements.
So, please come back with that. That will be the Monday after we return from reading week. And I think I speak on behalf of everybody, Ron and Anniket.
To say thank you very much for giving us your time and maybe stay online for a couple seconds after we go off.
Thank you.
Thank you guys very much.
Thank you.
Thanks.