Well, it has been an interesting debate. As I promised on Monday, I will not have an exaggerated summing-up on this issue. One cannot deny from the literature that there is still a huge amount of unpredictability and uncertainty about some of the mutations, particularly the off-target ones, and the vulnerability of the CRISPR technique, which is still probably the best one that we have; TALENs and zinc finger nucleases are not as effective. However, that efficiency should not prevent us understanding that there are mistakes that occur during the technique. We need to discuss that and look at it in detail.
A difficulty that I have, and I think probably we all have, in this debate is that the rules of what we do in this House depend on the scope of the Bill. We have a very tricky issue here because, according to the Bill and how it is seen by many of the people running it, the scope of the Bill is the release of organisms. But, without looking at the science as well, what happens before the release of the organisms is critical to this.
For that reason, I think both the Minister and I are at something of a disadvantage, because we cannot table sensible amendments that really cover that—and it is of course a Defra Bill.
I do not intend at this stage to discuss some of the points that the Minister has made in detail. I just think that there is enough uncertainty, as shown in so much of what I have said, that we need to have that discussion and work out who is advising us. He mentioned a number of authorities, such as some of the royal colleges—noble institutions, of which of course I am also a member—which argue that these positions are safe. I am not quite sure on what basis they are saying that or who advises the people who give out that information, because many of them will not necessarily be involved in this technology, which is so specialised. That is not to rubbish the people who are advising anybody, but I think it shows that there is a cloud around some of the issues that we are getting through.
What is undeniable is the wealth of publications that we have. For example, this publication by Carey, which incidentally seems to be funded and supported by the State of Virginia in the United States, is clearly in favour of trying to genetically modify pigs. One of the issues we always had with pigs when we did a bit of work on them in my laboratory was how difficult it was to manage a lot of the manipulations that we were doing. It is very clear that with pigs, for example, there is still considerable unpredictability in which part of which GMO is sometimes affected by the way the CRISPR is constructed. So we need to talk through a lot of issues to make this a sensible and safe procedure.
Nobody in this Chamber, unless they are very foolish, wants to try to strangle an important technology—people like me would not be working in it. Obviously, ultimately, we want to see it used in human science as well, not in modifying humans, but certainly in doing things in human medicine; not in the germ line, but certainly in the somatic cell line where you have much more control. There is clearly a very big difference there. We are not looking to make super-races, or anything like that, but it is an issue that needs to be looked at. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.