Charting the future without fear

Date: 17/07/1997

BIO and EuropaBio - the American and European biotechnology industry organisations - held their annual conference and exhibitions last month, one in Houston, Texas, the other in Amsterdam.

Each provided an impressive display of scientific and technological progress on innovations in health, agro-food and environmental protection; each was addressed by political leaders, underlining the importance of the bio-industries.

But there were differences. In Houston, 3,400 participants heard upbeat presentations, recalling the 5.75 billion ecu of new capital investment in the sector in the previous year and looking ahead to the 30 million acres which, in the coming season, would be growing plants modified by genetic engineering, with corresponding reductions in pesticide use and improved performance and product quality.

In Amsterdam, some 400 Europeans focused rather on ongoing regulatory uncertainties, political bans, consumer concerns and the progress of an EU draft directive on biotechnology patenting. With a symbolism perhaps more apt than it intended, Greenpeace blocked the conference doorway with a pile of (transgenic?) grain.

Yet 20 years ago, the two continents started from similar bases in terms of science, finance and scale of market potential. What has Europe done wrong?

The words 'biotechnology' and 'genetic engineering' frighten Europeans, and fear or ignorance is a poor basis for policy. The assumption that the topic is incomprehensible, and requires ad hoc and special treatment, leads to policy errors, or serves as a smokescreen behind which foolish or perverse policies proliferate, unchecked by competent public scrutiny.

The more ill-informed talk, the less useful action (biotechnology has practically disappeared from the political agenda in the US Congress).

Modern biotechnology is neither black magic, nor radioactive; it is about making good use of a recent and ongoing surge in knowledge concerning the structure and working of all living things.

But that surge of precise knowledge is provoking institutional indigestion in the vertical structures of the EU.

The title of Phili Viehoff's report for the European Parliament, adopted in 1987, summarised the message: Biotechnology in Europe: the need for an integrated policy.

Easier said than done. Within the European Commission alone, the interests and responsibilities of at least eight directorates-general are affected, and for seven years, Secretary-General David Williamson has wrestled with these problems through the biotechnology coordination committee.

In the inter-institutional arena and in national capitals, the complexities and delays are further compounded.

Modern biotechnology illustrates perfectly the evolution of the global economy towards greater information intensity - what the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calls the knowledge-based economy.

All sectors of the applied life sciences are involved: the agro-food system, health care and pharmaceuticals, and interactions with the environment.

They will all be transformed by the new knowledge, since it is irreversible, globally available and relevant - even vital. The laws of natural science, like those of economics, are not proposed by the Commission, amended by Parliament, nor decided by the Council of Ministers. But they do have global applicability.

Seed companies relabel themselves agrigenetics, and like the pharmaceutical companies, sign multi-million- dollar agreements with DNA sequencing centres for access to genes of the major crop plants. All the bio-industries are intensifying their knowledge base. The DNA strands at the core of all living cells are data tapes and the hottest current topic is bio-informatics.

At the EuropaBio conference in Amsterdam, ambitious targets were talked about for sales of 250 billion ecu by 2005 and 3 million jobs in biotech-using sectors.

More grimly possible will be the progressive loss of market shares and associated jobs, even in the established sectors of European strength, if Europe cannot assimilate and profit from the new knowledge which its own scientists and research programmes have done so much to generate.

Take the example of plant molecular genetics, which cannot yet be applied in Europe, a year after the centennial of Louis Pasteur (the first scientist to take out a biotech patent, on a yeast-based fermentation process) and the 50th anniversary of France's National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA).

For what did they labour?

Far from slowing down to let our systems and structures digest and assimilate, the knowledge mill is going into overdrive: the mapping and sequencing of the genomes of major model species - microbial, plant, animal and human - are creating a unique opportunity to chart terra incognita.

Like the scramble for Africa by the imperial powers last century, there is a less bloody scramble for the commanding heights of newly discovered domains of knowledge. The explorers are researchers, the cartographers are patent lawyers; the strategic resources are intellectual property rights.

These matters have been foreseen and communicated in scores of reports by national and international agencies and others, from the late 1970s onwards; and in reports from the Commission's own futures group, the FAST programme (Forecasting and Assessment in Science and Technology).

But these reports were often ignored in favour of siren voices or special interests. Agriculture and industry slept, while dialogue with consumers was abandoned.

Gradually, the pursuit of irrelevance to the neglect of essentials has built up visible economic consequences, in terms of costs, (non) investment, (lower) growth, (non)competitiveness and (un)employment. In the electronic village of today's global economy, there is no protection or excuse for the second-rate, since first-class science, data, products and services are known and available to all. The same should be true of public policies.

The saga of the biotech patenting directive is a telling example. In 1982, the OECD, following a broad report on then-recent scientific developments, foresaw the rising significance of intellectual property rights in biotechnology and undertook a survey of existing provisions in member countries.

It concluded that the situation in Japan and the United States was distinctly more favourable for the inventor than in Europe. The report - published in 1985 - stimulated action within the Commission, which consulted widely and at length, finally proposing a directive for the protection of biotechnological inventions in October 1988.

Nine years, several Commissioners and thousands of patents later, the draft directive, repeatedly revised, is still labouring through the institutional machinery of the European Union.

The debate has been ambushed time and again by inter-connections - with plant breeders' rights, with the Biodiversity Convention, with arguments over gene-patenting in general, and most bizarrely, with ethical debates that surely merit more appropriate fora.

The 20-year saga of so-called bio-safety regulation presents an essentially similar, long story of misdirected energies for doubtful, duplicative or even perverse results.

Opportunistic institutional “capacity-building” profits from public concerns and scientific uncertainties. All innovation implies some uncertainties and risks, which are handled in the US within existing structures, for instance covering agricultural quarantine, food safety, new medicines and vaccines, pathogens and pesticides.

Commission Vice-President Sir Leon Brittan has aptly quoted Montesquieu: “If it is not necessary to make a law, it is necessary not to make a law.”

For if legislative, administrative and scientific energies are diverted to the pursuit of irrelevancies, in a display of political virility or institutional turf-building, they are subtracted from the effort available for serious problems, thus endangering the protection of health and the environment.

A sombre warning was given by the International Food Policy Research Institute at the June 1997 OECD Forum for the Future conference, The Agro-Food Industry on the Threshold of the 21st Century.

Referring to laws that would constrain or prohibit the full application of the opportunities offered by genetic engineering and other tools of modern science to food production and processing, the institute warned that should such legislation spread within western Europe and to the rest of the world, the consequences for food security and nutrition could be severe for many millions of people in developing countries.

It is not only Europe and its competitiveness that could be endangered by the misapplication of effort. Careless policy costs jobs - and lives.

Mark Cantley heads the biotechnology unit in the directorate for science, technology and industry of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based think-tank of the 29 advanced market economies. From 1984 to 1992, he held a similar post in the European Commission's Directorate-General for science, research and development (DGXII).