Human Practices

We began our human practices well before the iGEM year began because we didn’t just want to do an informative survey. Although engaging with locals is really fun, we’ve always asked “How can we maximise societal benefit?”. We’ve started a couple significant initiatives that future MOD teams are keen to build upon.

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GMO Reform in New Zealand

GMOs are a contentious topic in many communities. Team MOD's general views are not representative of any person or organisation mentioned.

New Zealand’s ‘clean and green’ image means it is burdened with some of the strictest GMO regulation in the world, and our public wants to be better informed. When interviewing businesspeople about their views, it does not take long to find response bias due to social desirability. A common response is “I can’t wait for our community to benefit from genetic technologies, but I can’t be seen supporting GMOs at work.” Even when the majority of employees are pro-GMO, collective responsibility forces businesses to act otherwise (this did make it harder to find sponsors). Luckily, while hosting lab classes for some high schools last year, we learned that the upcoming youth are much more scientific about assessing the risks and benefits of GMOs. This makes sense because they were not influenced by the anti-GMO movement of the late 90s and the total ban of GMOs in 2001, which led to the regulations New Zealand still has today.

In an interview with a New Zealand Member of Parliament (who wishes to remain anonymous), we confirmed one of our hunches. If the University of Auckland was to publicly promote GMO science, this would put significant pressure on our Government to reassess its regulations. However, even though our university sells education on GMO science, it seems that the university purposefully lacks an official stance on the science. We believe, as students of a research-based university, it would be wrong to withhold science simply to avoid political whiplash. So, using the advice of the MP we interviewed, we have been building a campaign to launch within the university, to address people’s concerns and to have the Faculty of Science make their stance clear. In the end, their response will either be in support of the science, or it won’t.

The GMO debate will not be settled without discussing the ethics, but this campaign is about being pro-science, not inherently pro-GMO. This was eloquently summarised by New Zealand’s former Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman. When officially asked “Has the science been settled? Is there any risk from genetic modification in our food supply?”, Sir Gluckman answered:

“The science is as settled as it will be. That is, it’s safe. There are no significant ecological or health concerns associated with the use of advanced genetic technologies.”

Team MOD strongly recommends watching Sir Gluckman’s interview with Television New Zealand where he encourages New Zealand to renew the ethical and fiscal conversations surrounding GMOs.

The next stage is to simply open our campaign as a parliamentary petition and start collecting signatures. Somebody has to do it, but it is not going to be a business leader, and it is unlikely to be a researcher who has been told “No GMOs” their whole career. We students have much less to lose, but we do not want to take a naive, guns-blazing approach. We wanted to gain the greatest breadth of understanding, so we have spent this year researching countless publications about New Zealand’s public attitudes towards genetically modified food. To improve our qualitative understanding, we have interviewed nearly a dozen people who specialise in a range of fields including agritech, finance, marketing, technology adoption, politics, commercial law etc (most of whom asked for anonymity). Now that we are quite well equipped, we have begun designing the website that will host the campaign and petition (screenshot of beta provided below).

Keen to talk?

If you're interested, have questions, or want to know more, don't hesitate to contact us directly.