 Okay, let's start. Good afternoon to all of you. Thank you for joining us. Today we have a special colloquium. We have the pleasure to have here Jennifer Thompson. Let me just say some words about her. She will, of course, we'll talk about, oh no, it's not written. It's the pros and cons of genetically modified crops. Believe it or not, this is a subject, it's a title that I suggested, and she was showing me the title of the paper. He had written exactly this title. It was very impressive. So let me say some words about Jennifer. Jennifer, after obtaining her PhD in bacterial genetics at Rose University in South Africa, Haley Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard was a associate professor in genetics at the University of the... with water strength, a visiting scientist at MIT and director of the lab for molecular and cell biology for the CSIR. Before becoming head of the Department of Microbiology, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, 1988. She won the L'Oreal UNESCO Prize for Women in Science for Africa in 2004 and has an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne University. At the moment, she's a medical professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology of the Cape Town University in South Africa. Jennifer's research field is the development of genetically modified maize resistant to the African endemic maize-strike virus and tolerant to drought. She has published three books on genetically modified organisms, genes for Africa, seeds for the future, and food for Africa. And is a frequent speaker at international meetings. She's a member of the board of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation based in Nairobi at the National Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Piotec Applications. She serves on the National Advisory Constable in Innovation for the South African Ministry of Science and Technology. The main reason that Jennifer has been visiting ICTP in our campus for a very several times is that she is the president of the Organization for Women in Science for the developing world, OWSD, which is hosted here at ICTP in the campus and she is being a newly elected fellow of Tuas, which is also based here in our campus. And among the audience we also have the pleasure to have here representatives from IDRC in Canada and from CEDA in Sweden. And so it's a pleasure to welcome all of you here also. So, as usual in our colloquia we will have the standard talk then we'll ask for questions and after the questions everybody will be welcome to join us for some refreshments outside except for the students who will come down and the students will have the opportunity to talk to Jennifer in a more private way asking any questions they may want to ask, I hope she doesn't mind. But of course we always guarantee that food will be left for them when they are back, so in that sense there's no problem. So let's join me in welcoming Jennifer please. Thank you so much for the invitation I'm really honoured. When I was asked to speak I said I'm a molecular biologist so we decided that I'd talk on my research and then at the last minute Fernanda contacted me over the weekend and said please could you make it broader and he suggested a title of the pros and cons of genetically modified crops that was unbeknown to him last year I published a paper entitled the pros and cons of GM crops in an Australian journal and I've got copies here if anybody of you would like to get more details so it was very, very appropriate that he did that. I've changed it again slightly because I'm talking about it from an African perspective. When I speak to an audience in Europe you have a different culture of agriculture from ours in Africa and I'm always amazed that the logic of the European Union when they say after mad cow disease they could no longer feed their animals awful because of the cross from animals to humans and so they had to feed them plant products soybeans and maize and where did they get them from they got them from Argentina and the United States and nearly 90, 95% of those products are genetically modified so the European Union has no trouble in importing GM products but they will not let their farmers plant it now if you understand the logic perhaps you can explain it to me but I don't so I've got it, I'm always amazed at the ingenuity of farmers when you think that this is the origin of maize and that's the size of it against a rather interesting looking kernel and that you could breed farmers could breed from that to that but it did take 7,500 years and we can do it a little faster with genetic engineering but I want to point out one thing that people don't always understand is that nature doesn't always give us what we need in breeding so we can't always cross what we want so if there is a trait we want that doesn't exist in nature we do it by mutagenesis treatment by radiation or chemicals and these mutations are random so you just subject the seed or whatever it is that your starting material is you subject it to mutations and you just wham the whole genetic material and you have no idea what you're doing what damage you're doing you just look for a trait because when a farmer asks what trait they want they want yield, yield and yield so but it's so you look what you have but you don't know what other changes you've made and you will never know because it's never regulated only GM crops are regulated and interestingly enough look at the number of crops varieties including ruby grapefruit that were developed by mutagenesis and we have no idea what else is going on in the genomes but we eat them and by trial and error we know we're fine so we go on but not with GM crops which is a much more precise method now this is one of the most important slides in my talk because the anti-GMO lobby often says oh poor farmers they've got to buy seed every year well that's because most of these crops are hybrids and this is how you develop a hybrid you have a female and a male parent and you cross them and these have been developed inbred lines over many many generations so that the breeders know when you cross a given female line with a given male line you get a hybrid and that has the trait you want now if those plants self pollinate or cross pollinate themselves by self you're going to get random gene assortment you're going to lose those traits so if you want those traits you can buy your hybrids every year hybrids came in at the beginning of the last century and this is how they were received they said wow no we don't want these very similar to GM crops we want to plant our own seeds then there was a drought and then they realized they needed the hybrids and now most commercial farmers plant hybrids and buy seeds every year but there are also what we call open pollinated varieties so if you're a farmer that wants to plant your own seed you can buy open pollinated varieties but none of those have been genetically modified so if you want to go for the hybrids it's not oh the poor farmers it's because it's a hybrid and those are important factors to bear in mind now what I'm looking at is Africa and I'm going to talk about the main traits but I'm going to show you them from an African perspective from a distance to weed killers now believe you me in Africa and in most areas we will not go into this research if there is another cheaper solution available because of the backlash against GM so we would never embark on a GM project if it was possible to breed it by other means so for herbicide tolerance for instance I'm going to show you a typical farm in Kenya this is a maize farm that has been devastated by a weed called striga and the striga puts out thousands and thousands of little seeds and only do those germinate when a maize plant they will germinate when a maize plant grows and they get a chemical signal from the root and then they put their root so they are parasitic weeds so you can get herbicide resistance you can even coat the seeds in the herbicide and then you can plant them you don't necessarily have to spray but of course the same thing has happened with maize in America that's a difference in Africa now what are the pros and cons of herbicide tolerance first of all the gene that gives you resistance to the only used herbicide is glyphosate which is the active ingredient in Roundup I'm sure most of you have heard of Roundup ready maize which has been developed not only by Bonsanto but by many others and it is by degradable which is an advantage of using it but the World Health Authority came out a couple of years ago saying glyphosate is probably carcinogenic so everybody got a fright all these farmers are using glyphosate but remember that the body that made the statement the World Health Organization International Agents on Research in Cancer just looks at the compound they don't look at exposure or risk they just look at a compound so we have to remember that dose matters ultraviolet light is very dangerous you can get skin cancer but we don't ban sunlight it depends on the dose so the amount of it being exposed to you'd have to drink it and for instance if you look at the class that glyphosate was in it was also in the same class as apples because apples have 22 parts per million of formaldehyde so don't eat an apple please and don't do night shift work because that's seriously dangerous so you've got to put it in context and dose does matter but some of the other aspects of it because if you're a farmer and you've got a maize field you don't want to have the weeds growing up when you've got your maize growing so what you do you spray you till the soil to let the weeds grow then you spray but you can't plant maize quickly in that soil because it'll kill the maize so you've got to wait this is with ordinary maize not GM maize wait until that herbicide has dissipated and you could lose your topsoil, wind, rain etc. now what you can do is you don't have to till you don't have to spray before you plant you can plant the maize it grows the weeds grow and then you can just spray because the weeds are sensitive and the crop is resistant but that's a good side it is we're getting improvement but overuse can get to weed resistance so you can't overuse a single chemical but it's not as if GM crops brought this phenomenon to human nature what about antibiotic resistance they talk about super weeds that's resistant to one herbicide okay you can kill it with another herbicide it's not advisable it's rather don't overuse swap herbicides but if you like me live in the western Cape of South Africa we are the TB capital of the world and because doctors over prescribe and patients don't use the full dose of antibiotics we don't only have multi drug resistance to tuberculosis in the western Cape we have extremely multi drug resistance now we're talking super weeds now we're talking super antibiotic resistance but resistance to a single but I'm not saying it's a good thing don't overuse any single chemical but remember it's a management problem it's not a problem of the technology per se next one I'm going to use insect resistance and again I'm going to use an African perspective instead of the normal borer in maize which is important I'm going to use a principle from sugar cane here's a moth that lays her eggs on the edge of the sugar and the larvae bore in so that's what causes the damage whether it's sugar cane or maize or whether it's cotton ball it's all the same principle they are inside so even if you were to spray from the outside it's not much use because it's like shutting the stable door after the horse is bolted but the solution is a soil bacterium called bacillus thuringiensis don't forget immediately it's just called BT and I'm sure many of you have heard about BT toxin it's specific to insects and I'll show you just now why it's been used as a safe spray for decades so we don't know it doesn't harm humans or other animals and I'll again tell you why but again it's on the surface so it's not much use so what scientists have done they've taken the toxin gene put it into the plant so the toxin performs inside the stem or the stalk or the cotton balls now this is my beautiful autistic rendition of a cut section through a larval gut and here's the larvae and it's going to be feeding on this insect toxin and I just want to target here here's the toxin that's produced by the bacillus thuringiensis on the outside but in the genetically modified one it's produced inside the what the insect is eating so it eats the toxin and there are specific cells on the lining of the gut of the insect larva that are bound by this toxin and we don't have those cells butterflies don't have that those butterflies have different but let's get back to that but anything that isn't an insect doesn't have this so it's specific to those frogs don't, birds don't so it's very specific and this was photographs taken in South Africa just after we planted a BT cotton and you can see here these are the BT ones, they have many mature bowls you don't not have to spray because it's only resistant against the borer so you might have to spray against aphids and things like that but here is a non-BT in a neighboring plant and they grow you know what plants like because all they are doing is producing offspring and the offspring are the cotton balls and they grow and then they produce very much fewer and they are very low quality so and again you have to do these 10 sprayings hence it's pretty sterile the whole environment so the other thing in Africa is that water doesn't always come out of taps I'm going to talk to you about water coming out of taps in Cape Town just now with our drought but in Africa you very often have to go and fetch things and you have to mix herbicides in or insecticides in coke bottles and you say to this farmer what are you going to do with that bottle that contained this toxic herbicide obviously we just throw it away so a kid will pick it up and put water in it and drink it so they are poisonings and then sometimes you have to go and collect the water and who collects the water the women and the girls and this is a friend slide from India very often the spray will be on your back and if the wind turns that will happen so it's a good thing to get rid of sprays what are the cons of insect resistant crops insects can develop resistance they'll develop resistance insects are the smartest animals on earth that's why there are so many of them there's no resistance to any chemical that you give to any insecticide whether it's a chemical or a protein so what do the chemical companies do they bring out a new insecticide what do the GM companies do they stack different BT genes they are about at the last count I think about 180 different BT genes that are subtly different in how they act so you can stack them all we use something that farmers plant refuges or refuges or fuchsia and these are rows of non GM crops that you plant around the crop and they source for insects to remain susceptible so if they were to develop resistance they can cross, they can mate with susceptible ones in the same field and you have susceptible offspring so that has worked very well but it doesn't always work because farmers don't always obey the rules but we can use many different BT genes and stack them but again it's a management problem it's not the problem of the technology per se okay now in Africa there's another spin-off from insect resistance and that's fungus resistance now if you're a farmer in Africa you will harvest your maize crop and store it in these bins this is in a part of South Africa that used to be called transchiatin old slide and the sun can shine down the rain can go on it and if it's got holes if it's been eaten by little insects it'll get fungi growing moldy maize and what can happen if you eat that maybe live a cancer not so nice but in more prevalent cases if a farmer and they're mainly women in many parts of Africa looks at that maize she says I'm not going to feed this to my family but I'm not going to throw it away what am I going to do with it I'll turn it into beer so I'll ferment it so you can imagine the fermentation of all these fungi so in parts of South Africa certainly we have levels of throat cancer that are very high because of these mycotoxins and in Africa also we have other crops that have borers one of them is cowpeas and the organization that I am involved in in Nairobi the African agricultural technology that is aimed at taking intellectual property from multinationals free licensed absolutely free and used in Africa for African farmers and this is one case of a BT on cowpea one of the regulations is that if you're doing a field trial this is so dangerous it's got to be fenced now they were building a fence in Gana when I was there and I talked to some of the locals and I said is a fence good enough she said of course not because you know little boys if there's a fence they climb it so they have to have guards so I mean the logic is it's so dangerous ah nevermind okay now I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own labs research one of the things that we've been working on is maize streak virus which is endemic it's only found in Africa it's transmitted by a small leaf hopper that is prevalent in Africa it's amazing that it hasn't ever spread but this is why it's called maize streak virus and this farmer in Kenya is Shamba is not going to have much of a of a harvest both due to maize streak virus and due to drought so we came up with this and that's what it does we came I wouldn't be telling you this if it hadn't worked we came up with an idea of developing a genetically modified maize that was resistant to virus infection that's when it's not and here is one that's pretty much immune compared with a non GM plant now here is the story of somewhat desperation living in Africa we published this maize streak virus resistant transgenic maize at first for Africa it was picked up oh we also made the cover it was picked up by science the first genetically modified crop entirely developed entirely in Africa is getting ready for field trials that success would be a milestone we did it entirely with our own hands everybody in the lab was from Africa the date is 2007 ladies and gentlemen we have not done a field trial why it's too expensive the regulatory costs are so huge in time and and in expense that when we went to Panor that's the seed company we work with in South Africa they said no way it's too expensive so it's all very well to have a good idea you've got to have perseverance so we had some perseverance and oh no I'm not oh yes this is this is the reason for the problem the regulatory costs which are insisted upon by the anti-GMO lobby and have now become part of the cart again a protocol and all of that means it's too expensive for the public sector and for small companies certainly my lab couldn't afford it and Panor couldn't they were taken over by pioneer a multinational lots of money I went to pioneer and I said can we do field trials and they said no it's too expensive MSV may street viruses is only an African problem African problem is a poor we can't recover the costs that are going to be entailed in taking it to field trials it's just too expensive so even a pioneer of these lives of life cannot afford it and then the anti-GMO lobby turns around and says why are GM crops all being managed by multinationals QED so our may street viruses are sitting in the fridge in my lab and in Panor's lab and I don't think it'll ever see the light of day however I've got a good news story for you in the next one and that is drought tolerance now I'm going to scare you a bit I brought a paper with me in case anybody is interested on the prognosis of water brain in the next century where I live it's about as bad as you're going to get where I actually live in the western Cape in that little corner it's about there Trieste where we're here is about there you'll probably have a bit less rain throughout the century but believe you me it's not going to get any better here look how red Africa is so in Cape Town we were due to switch the taps off on the 12th of April that is switch the taps off no water will come out of the taps you will have to take your containers to 200 specified stations and you will queue to fill up your container and what if you don't have transport what if you old fortunately what's happened is that agriculture has cut back so we have now pushed our D-Day to early June but it's not going to change so we're going to have to have drought tolerant crops so what we decided to do I have to tell you a story I was funded from the for the virus resistance work by a South African trust called the Claude Leon Foundation and when they saw the way it was going they said look there's no point in us funding you anymore so they took me out to lunch and they said what are you going to do next and I said well actually I'm moving into drought tolerant maze and one of the trustees looked at me and this was 15 years ago but he looked at me and he said what if there isn't a drought and the trustees said that was the first time they've ever seen me lost for words so but we decided to to go African so what we did we took genes from a resurrection plant I'll tell you why it's called that to introduce into crops so this is what it looks in its hydrated form and that's in its it looks dead doesn't it lost its chlorophyll lost everything you add water to that in 72 hours it turns to that so it's obviously got genes that can be obviously not going to turn maze into a resurrection plant but you just have to let the maze survive in that little period when it's first growing and then when it's setting seed so those are the two critical points so there's a resurrection plant it grows in cracks and rocks very close to water often but no water so we found one of my former postdocs started a seed company selling indigenous seeds so I called it up and I said Rachel one of my friends who works in desiccation says we need to get this plant called Zero Fighter Biscosa have you ever heard of it oh she said yes it's in our catalogue but nobody's ever bought it because it only flowers two days a year so there's so much point in growing it in your back garden but she says I think they grow in the Drakensberg mountains in Quasulina, Italy so we got a permit and we went up there we hadn't a clue what we were going to find and there we found them in an abundance after a five hour hike way up into the mountains and that's me in my younger days in my research lab and there they were growing in cracks and rocks so we were given permission each of us had quite big plants so every student took their own plant and put it in their back pack and that we took down into our lab and into our glass house and they had to look after that plant the second time we went up there it was it had been a very hot summer and the temperature up there were in the 42 degree centigrade mark and the night before we hiked up it rained and by the time we got to this ridge up here it's actually quite a few can't see it but it's share on both sides it was below zero so these plants can survive and they were we actually could see them beginning to resurrect but on the way down I said to one of my students are you pleased you came and she said yes I'll never do it again fortunately we can now propagate them in the lab and we can set our own seeds and germinate them so we don't have to go climbing up pity really because it was quite fun and then you see every student have their own plant for their PhD and one of them decided without consulting too much that he would see if there were any cold tolerance genes in this plant so he put it in the deep freeze and of course the next day it was dead so I didn't expel him from the lab but he was not my popular person for a little long I wouldn't be telling you this if it didn't work so obviously we set out to test it in tobacco which is the test plant and there we are and this is in further trials in a third generation and following dehydration and rehydration but that's all very well so when I started working on maize I was incredibly ignorant because I'm a microbiologist and I don't know anything about plants and I didn't know that you can't grow maize in Cape Town Cape Town does not have enough light intensity so you can only grow it in the glass house and our glass houses are in the shade of Table Mountain so we lose the sun at about three o'clock in the afternoon it's not very good for growing maize so I had a partnership with Nairobi with Kenyatta University and this is looking at some of our maize plants in a biosafety controlled glass house where they get two crops of maize a year Cape Town we don't even get one maize helps anyway obviously the UCT group is not the only one working on drought tolerant maize for Africa and certainly this is called the water efficient maize in Africa partnership and it's managed by my organization the AATF and I used to go around the world talking about this project we got the gene from Monsanto and it was put using the summit the international maize breeding organization they put it into local varieties then we used the national agricultural research stations of the different countries to do the testing but it was all managed by the AATF so I used to go around the world trying to encourage investment in this and I'd get back to the lab and they said to me but why are you talking about the opposition you know we're in opposition and I said in science there is no opposition in this you know who knows whether one will work or the other will work and let me tell you why I have some confidence in our work but who knows in the WEMMA project they use one bacterial gene at UCT we use three genes from the resurrection plant one converts glucose to sorbitol which is osmoprotectant one is a membrane bound receptor that switches on a whole lot of other genes and one is a peroxy reductant which is an antioxidant the WEMMA gene is produced all the time so it's always switched on which can give a metabolic load to the plant ours is switched on only by dehydration so we've got a signal in front of it and oh don't worry about that so where is it going to go I think to have lost the slide that should have come next at the end of last year we heard that we had a 12.5 million rand grant from the government 12.5 million rand divided by the 12 to get to euros so it's not very much money but it goes further in South Africa and we've got that grant to take to take our drought tolerant potentially drought tolerant maze to a glass house trial with a group in up the coast called clan kuru seeds so at least there is light on the horizon I mean the government is a little slow they've taken three years to when they first said three years ago that they were going to fund us it's now taken talk about bureaucracy you think there's problems in Italy come to South Africa and you know a little bit about bureaucracy it's taken three years to get this grant anyway now to talk about the general issues about GM crops the developing world says we've I mean the developed world says we've got enough food we don't need this and they used to say to me they don't say to me quite so much anymore I used to go to Brussels to speak to the EU and I said you know you're very naive there's enough food to feed everybody you come to Nairobi and you see the road structure there when I first went the camels could drown in the potholes in the roads and you would hardly notice it so the infrastructure is just not there so in Africa we are desperately short of food we need anything that can increase food availability and we have poor physical we have things like that and I don't have to tell you about the word corruption in South African terms I mean it's endemic in many other countries as well this is an organization that Fernando mentioned it's called ISAAA I'm the vice president of it and every year we put out a graph of how GM crops have grown worldwide and this is the total this is the developing world which is now taken over by China and Brazil they're virtually 100% GM in their soybeans so they can't go anywhere else but now the developed world is coming up China, India and places like that but it is the one technology that has had the highest impact in an uptake by farmers the trouble is of course all the traits help farmers so the consumers in the developed world say what's in it for me but in Africa the consumer farmer are very often the same person so it's a very different perspective this is a paper taken from 2016 guys called Brooks and Barford put out a very often annual report but they didn't do it last year economic benefits two thirds higher yield highest gains for farmers in developing countries environment benefiting from as I said the conservative tillage the no till plus biodegradable herbicides plus a decrease in insecticides and of course you don't have to physically use sprays so you're losing greenhouse gas savings equivalent to 10 million cars in that period of time reduced chemical pesticides and you can grow more without using more land can GM crops help small holder farmers some years ago there was a published paper on BT cotton in India decreasing in increase in yield due to decrease 50% gain benefits have been stable that's an important thing if you can go to the bank and say I've had this level of yield for the last three years they're much more likely to give you a loan so there's been a lot of spin-offs in that in getting financial assistance it's used very heavily in India in South Africa we find labour saving is the important thing because with the migration from the rural areas to the cities there's far less labour and so if you can cut down on GM maize saves approximately 50% on labour and that's mainly women and they can do other things now and so it's a saving in labour the damage of misinformation when I so many years ago I was asked to speak at the United Nations and to name drop, Kofi Annan asked me if I would talk on the problems we were finding and this is from Greenpeace there's their label no bride no child GM foot you say to an African man you will be sterile if you eat this not a good message and of course absolutely no truth so if we look at food safety issues in fact food safety issues is almost a non-issue anymore I've got dated as early as 2004 they haven't changed their mind no deleterious effects from consumption of foods due to GM again all these organisations ages ago hasn't changed so it's almost a non-issue environmental impacts on biodiversity conservation tillage as I say improving our soil, reduction in sector size more environmentally benign herbicides and this is an interesting thing you've got one gene you see or maybe a cassette of three genes it's much easier to put it into a number of cases than to do the breeding the natural breeding so you can have a much wider variety of a given crop so for instance the BT gene is in 500 cotton varieties in India so this is my last slide it's not a magic bullet it's not going to solve everything in terms of food shortage but we need to improve infrastructure probably the single most important thing in feeding children in Africa is educating their mothers educating mothers that's why I am pleased to be a teacher educating mothers about nutrition, about don't have 12 children have the number you can afford this would be nice so my message is that GM crops can help to feed hungry people and I have to say it would be shameful if welfare Westerners issues which include trade, the early days was the EU was saying we subsidize our farmers we don't want to have imports of GM amaze or whatever cotton it is so we're going to ban it they are unashamedly saying it's a political decision it's not to do with science it's a political decision but Africa looks to Europe Africans get most of their aid from Europe Africans send their kids to school in Europe it's a very close connection and if Europeans come and tell them you will be sterile if you eat this why wouldn't they believe it so it's it's a crime against African humanity and if Westerners don't want it, fine but don't try and foist your views and prevent the technology from helping to feed the poor thank you very much Jennifer it was a great talk are there any questions? I've got a question about the difference between genetically modified corpse as well the nature does the same kind of things there is a change in the genome continuously the difference is that one is regulated the other is not is it the only thing or there are other factors comes into play in these things you mean why GM crops are regulated? no no they are regulated but I'm saying are there other factors which which makes different between the two kinds of things well you see you have to realize that GM crops are artificial they are not natural certain types of naturally breeding that isn't regulated including in the lab doing wide crosses forcing crosses of plants that don't normally hybridize that's not natural but that's not regulated it's this whole idea of playing God that you're going to take a gene from one species and put it into another that freaks people out it's the unnaturalness of it but is chemical mutagenesis natural? of course not but it is on the same plant so you can understand I try and understand as much as I can I have two nieces one grows GM crops the other doesn't speak to me because I'm the devil incarnate and so it can split families in fact I work for an Alliance for Science at Cornell University and we have a Gates Foundation project to educate journalists teams of journalists to come from developing countries and come to Cornell for three months and I teach them the basics just as I've been teaching you but at the very first meeting there was a guy there called Mark Linus now Mark Linus is from the UK and he was head of Greenpeace and he was responsible for burning GM crops left, right and centre and I said to him what made you change he said I'm also very keen on climate change and I was reading the literature on climate change on the AAAS site and he said then I looked at the literature on GM crops and I thought I haven't looked at that so he started reading the science and then he flipped and I said and the response he said well my best man doesn't talk to me and my wife has problems extending further this question are there laboratory tests for use of genetically modified food compared to natural food do you make any distinction yes you do that and there's no change there's no change wonderful, that's great comment thank you very much thank you Jennifer for this fantastic talk you showed the map of Africa that there are only three countries that grow GMOs including my country Sudan where I think it is cotton beauty cotton so how do you see the future of GMOs in Africa are you optimistic that something will happen to scale up the operation we're winning and we're losing I mean we are using these journalists from the developing countries very much in fighting this battle so we had a group from Uganda and Uganda had a biosafety bill in parliament for four years and they wouldn't pass it and they wouldn't pass it and eventually these journalists made such a public outcry that it was passed by both houses so we thought oh we're home and dry and then President Sevinny comes and says I don't understand this let's hold it so individuals can be incredibly important to speak to the right people look I'm optimistic because that's my nature and you know I keep on hoping that it's going to get better then we have a setback and so for instance in oh now I've gone blank one of the countries in the west where they started doing beauty cotton West Africa Burkina Fasa thank you Burkina Fasa do you know about that and they didn't use the best varieties so the variety they were using didn't have the best milling characteristics so it wasn't as popular with the millers and so it was viewed as a failure of GM crops that's why you've got to be so careful that you do it right you can't make a mistake in this kind of technology but I think you know you saw what's going to happen in Africa with drought and that's going to mean all crops are going to be less yield less so they're going to have to use every technology available a question so sorry do you mention the huge cost for field trials did I read correctly you handed plus million dollars that was what the Canadians have worked out here but so why first of all you have to do controlled field trials well first of all you have to do glass house trials so that's and they can take five years so that's the whole of my grant is going just on glass house trials then you don't even know it's going to work in the field in fact I was talking to a person who knows more about and he said it's a complete waste of time doing glass house trials I'm not going to tell our government funding agency that because at least we want to get field trials glass house trials because field trials are so different then you've got to do localised field trials that you've got to get farmers to do and then you've got to do broad scale field trials so it can take ten years thank you I was just wondering if you could go into a little bit more detail about this issue of GM resistance in insects you mentioned for example the strategy of using refuges and you said that breeding between resistant and non-resistant insects would lead to non-resistant offspring I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more about why that is the case because if the resistance could be passed at least some of the offspring it would just slow down if it's dominant and it's more resistance is recessive so you've got a recessive with a dominant susceptible and so the offspring will be that's what I was thinking because if it wasn't if it weren't in the case they would just slow down the resistance spread wouldn't it? thank you questions could you touch on the topic of patents and perhaps the pros and cons of this thank you I was very anti-patent until I met Ingo Putraicus Ingo Putraicus is the man who's done golden rice and he told us that he was horrified that when he went into developing genetically modified goldenness as vitamin enriched rice so that babies don't die and people don't go blind from eating ordinary rice he was horrified at the number of patents that he was faced with when he came to do it and then he realized that if it weren't patented it wouldn't be in the open open literature and he'd have to do those steps himself so he could use that for research and that then you can piggyback on other people's work because it's in the public domain if it were like Coke and it's just a trade secret you would never clue what was happening so patents are useful in getting to where you want to but then I'm very much against patenting the end product and that's why the African Agricultural Technology Foundation was developed in order to get multinationals to give their technology for Africa but in my case we have patented the process of getting our genes the three genes and how we got them because we don't want Monsanto to replicate it and then make a killing because we with our grant from the government we are giving it to African farmers free at the cost of a normal maize plant maize seeds so that's why we're protecting our technology to prevent a multinational using our knowledge to leapfrog and get people to pay Adi I have sort of a related question I mean does this possibility of corporate control worry you because what control? that big corporations having control over the gene I love it not to be so but it's the anti-GMO it's made so expensive I'd love it that we could produce it you know when I first started my academic career I was a bacterial genetic engineer I'm a microbiologist by training and I used to go to industrial microbiology conferences and to start off it was all very open and all the universities were talking about it and then it became more and more expensive and bigger, bigger reactors and then suddenly it was all the multinationals and I never went anymore so it's because of the artificial regulations that this is something so dangerous that we can't let it out into the normal public Just a short question I think it's really very exciting what you have described but how do you see this new revolution in biology genomics chryspinine gene therapy gene sequencing mapping and so on is that going to provide an alternative to GMOs or is it going to reinforce GMOs? You see CRISPR CRISPR is a much much more defined way of introducing genes but it still requires a gene to be introduced so it's the difference with CRISPR and my genetic engineering that we do we use an agrobacterium bacterium and a plasmid of a little piece of DNA and it has signatures on the side that help it integrate into the chromosome of the plant so you've got that little area that anybody can recognize using a PCR reaction PCR is just something that you can actually recognize a string of DNA so you can easily detect in a laboratory something has been genetically engineered by the old fashioned stuff the new fashioned stuff doesn't require that so don't let this go beyond this room but I mean you could get away with saying this is natural try and prove me wrong and unless they knew how it had been done there are no fingerprints so CRISPR could get away nobody will but will it be recognized as non-GM because it's got no foreign DNA in it because you could take a gene from one variety of poplar and put it into another variety of poplar to get it to grow 10 times faster and you couldn't detect it is that genetic engineering the United States have said that's not but Canada has said it's not but Europe is a genetic engineering so forget that so different countries will view it differently but the beauty of it is it's so quick so that I've taken 20 years to do this you see and it's a long time you could do it much quicker with modern technology and the advantage a lot of our crops have got many chromosomes not just two like we've got there might be tetraploid they have four and with the new CRISPR technique because you have the enzyme in it in one cell it'll get into all four chromosomes so you don't have to do the breeding it's much, much more efficient so even if we don't get around the GM regulatory side it'll just speed things up enormously and then of course the genomic thing is you've got a much better handle on how to knock out genes so with the genomics you can see if there is a gene you could knock out specifically and you would have resistance to a pest so the genomics is very powerful from that point of view I have a bit of technical question how do you decide which part of the genome supplies and insert the gene from outside I wish we could do that with the new CRISPR you can because there's certain sites it'll go into in my old fashioned site it's random so then what you have to do it's a numbers game so most of them you knock out something the new gene knocks out something that is required so they don't even get to pass the germination stage so you start with huge numbers and then you power it down and then you put it into the glass house do they actually cross fertilize do they produce fruit then you have to check all that so the CRISPR thing in that term will knock out will obviate that problem of random insertion I have a short question myself why is it that the main streak is only in Africa is it understood that is found only in Africa we don't really understand it's because the leaf hopper is found in Africa but we can take insects anywhere when I was working with the John Inner Centre in the UK they worked on May Street virus until the UK government said what are you working on something that's only found in Africa and shut their lab stock and they were growing it in their plots next to the John Ennis and I said aren't you afraid of it spreading no, there are no leaf hoppers in the environment America is paranoid when I was working with some American groups they will only work with half the genome of May Street virus in case it gets out and stuff we don't actually know why doesn't it it's dangerous once it spreads I worry for my part of the world because we depend on Maze very good so I don't know if I understood your point but I guess I don't know if I understood your talk but I have the feeling that you are more pro than con more than con more than con so let's thank Jennifer again for such a wonderful talk