Gene Editing Offers Great Opportunities for Agriculture – If We’re Smart

When I think about inventions that changed the course of human history the most, the printing press, the electric light, the telegraph, the steam engine… and of course the cell phone… all come to mind. And then there are antibiotics! It is amazing how quickly we’ve forgotten that only 100 years ago, an infection as common as strep throat was an almost-certain death sentence.

Over the last few years, whether people realized it or not – we have been reading headlines about another innovation that will go down in history as a game-changer. “Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up,” WIRED magazine reported. Gene editing is the “Breakthrough of the Year,” Science magazine proclaimed. The Economist and Time both put the story on their covers.

This coverage isn’t hype. Gene editing really is an extraordinarily promising new technology with the potential to deliver great benefits to humanity. But we’ll need to make sure we do what we always need to do with new scientific discoveries – use them smartly. And we’ll need to do everything we can to help people understand it.

Gene editing offers great potential across many industries, not just agriculture. Gene editing is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies, including Zinc Fingers, TALENS, CRISPR-Cas9, CRISPR-Cpf1, programmable base editing and other novel systems being developed, which allow scientists to make precise and targeted improvements within a living thing’s DNA. These technologies make it possible to delete, replace or edit specific genes to achieve an improved characteristic. In human health, they’re helping scientists develop treatments for chronic and fatal diseases including Cancer, HIV, ALS and Cystic Fibrosis. In plant agriculture, gene editing will help scientists integrate desirable traits – like resistance to drought or disease, or better nutrition – into improved seed products with more efficiency and precision than ever before. Gene editing holds so much promise in agriculture because it is an even more precise form of plant breeding.

I see gene editing playing out very differently than GMOs. Back in the early days of biotechnology, Monsanto was one of the only players in the GMO space. In sharp contrast, gene editing is being researched today by many healthcare and agricultural companies, universities, hundreds of startup companies…and even some high school science fair students!

Nearly 11,000 research studies on gene editing have been published since 2010. I believe the broad support for this science is going to make a big difference when it comes to both public acceptance and broad adoption. Already, new and improved varieties of rice, wheat, potatoes and other crops are under development. I am excited by what we, and others driving hard toward the next generation of crop improvements, will achieve with this technology.

Monsanto’s plant scientists are actively examining what gene editing will mean for our crop portfolio, which includes corn, cotton, soybeans, canola and wheat, as well as fruit and vegetable crops. You may have read news over the last two years about our agreements with other innovators who are also exploring the space. Our recently-announced R&D collaboration with the pioneers in gene editing at Pairwise will help enable new and needed solutions to help farmers produce better harvests, protect crops from evolving threats, and conserve precious natural resources.

And as we move forward, we’re keeping certain lessons in mind.

We understand, for example, that this technology raises important questions that regulators, policymakers and scientists themselves are working to address. Many of these questions apply more to human health and animal husbandry applications than to crop improvement, but giving them due, careful consideration is important to all of us in the scientific community.

We also understand that the agriculture industry will need to work hard to help the public understand gene editing. The mistakes we and others made over 20 years ago with the introduction of modern plant biotechnology (GMOs) cannot be repeated.

Success along these lines will also increase the chances that governments around the world will regulate gene editing rationally. In our view, that means regulation based on consistent, science-based policies that focus on the characteristics of products rather than the process used to develop them. Excessive regulation would raise costs, impose delays, and choke off the potential for democratization of this promising new technology – and without improving either the safety or quality of crops.

It may not change our understanding of the universe, but gene editing offers some astonishing possibilities – especially in the face of a rising global population and growing environmental threats – and now is the time to apply the best that science has to offer to our food production.

Let’s be smart about it, and make the most of our opportunities.