By Melissa Smith and Rob Verkerk PhD

Bioengineering or biotechnology, at its core, involves manipulating biological systems to achieve specific outcomes—think genetically modified organisms (GMOs), gene-edited crops, synthetic vaccines, or even human gene therapies. While biotech corporates laud its use and supposed opportunities, the intent, application, and power structures behind its use, raises red flags with its view that nature is a machine to be reprogrammed rather than respecting it as the living, self-regulating entity it really is.

The Promise: Essential Innovation

Bioengineering companies promise solutions to pressing problems, such as disease-resistant crops to feed the hungry, gene therapies to cure rare disorders or chronic diseases, or engineered microbes to clean up pollution.

Here’s the rub. Not only are the promises often oversold, there is often disturbingly inadequate testing to check on the possible downsides of these biotechnologies once they’re let loose on the public or the environment.

The track record of bioengineering—especially in food and medicine—shows a pattern of hype with parallel efforts to conceal unintended consequences. Take ‘old school’ GMOs: while marketed as a fix for world hunger, there’s ample evidence that they lock farmers into patented seed systems, increased pesticide use, and fail to deliver on nutritional gains. A classic case of corporate agendas hijacking a technology and prioritising profit over people and planet.

What Have We Learned Along the Way?

Gene therapies or mRNA vaccines are often proclaimed as life-saving and indispensable innovations in the face of emerging health challenges. The media soundbites seem cultivated to give an air of ‘all benefit, no risk’. Sadly, these biotech ‘solutions’ are fraught with potential unintended problems and risks, many of which are unpredictable. Behind the hype are concerted efforts to conceal the risks they might present, until the evidence is so overt that the truth can no longer be suppressed.

Let’s look at some examples:

• Gene editing technologies such as CRISPR, can have serious unintended off-target effects. mRNA drugs (‘vaccines’) have led to an array of unintended immune reactions such as inflammation, tissue damage, myocarditis and pericarditis.
• Gene therapies, which often use retroviruses or lentiviruses as viral vectors can be mistakenly inserted in the wrong location and activate oncogenes that increase the risk of cancer.
• Lipid nanoparticles used to deliver mRNA technology have been shown to accumulate in certain organs like the liver and spleen and increase inflammation with likely deleterious long-term consequences.
• Viral vector or mRNA sequences can trigger new-onset autoimmune conditions, and…
• Quality control: there have been ongoing concerns over contamination, misfolded proteins, improper dosing and data integrity among mRNA drugs.

The Pressure is On

The extent of global corporate agri-tech businesses reach and influence can be seen in the rush for countries to adopt legislation that deregulates genetically modified organisms (GMOs) created using CRISPR-based techniques and other gene-editing technologies (e.g., zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effects nucleases (TALENs), base editing, prime editing, retro library recombineering (RLR), Cas12 and Cas 13, NgAgo, etc), which flings the door open to wholesale patenting of such organisms. This has been Big Biotech’s desire for a long-time, especially when it saw what happened when GMO labelling became mandatory in the EU: the vast majority chose to avoid it.

Now we have a new push for what we might call GMO 2.0, involving these newly emerging gene-editing technologies like CRISPR. The industry doesn’t want to call them GMOs any more as we said earlier—they don’t want to be tainted.

But it goes way beyond semantics. What Big Biotech really wants is to avoid expensive testing that might cut into profits, or might raise safety signals that prevents them getting products to market.   

In order to disguise what’s happening, new terms are being rolled out such as “precision breeding techniques (PBTs)”, “new genomic techniques (NGTs)”,  "engineering biology", “technologies for assisted evolution”, “assisted evolution techniques" and “products of modern biotechnology”.

Representatives of EU Member states have voted to move towards deregulation. This could fly directly in the face of the 2018 European Court of Justice ruling that organisms developed through new (2001 or later) mutagenesis techniques, such as CRISPR-Cas9, fall under the EU's GMO Directive (2001/18), subjecting them to comprehensive safety assessments and approval processes. In simple terms? No exemption or fast-track to market.

With 7 years of lobbying pressure, the EU looks ever more likely to cave to industry demands. The UK has already imposed the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023, which establishes a framework for the pre-market authorisation of precision-bred organisms (PBOs) intended for food and feed. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has proposed a two-tiered regulatory approach to assess these products. Big Biotech desperately wants NGTs to be exempt from labelling, safety checks, monitoring and liability requirements. Why would they not given their profit motive? The UK is currently consulting over whether or not it will label the seeds from NGTs, while the New Zealand government is trying to usher in The Gene Technology Bill that will effectively allow such organisms to be labelled as natural because the modifications are claimed to be the same as mutations, that occur naturally. Yes, it’s the same argument they tried to use in GMO 1.0 around substantial equivalence. Big biotech lost that argument for GMO 1.0, and they’re now throwing the kitchen sink at it in the hope of winning it for GMO 2.0. That explains their need to hype it up as much as they do, while downplaying risks.

Deregulating genetically edited organisms opens a Pandora’s box. All sorts of ingredients used in foods (e.g., proteins), as additives, flavours, processing aids, and in food supplements, let along OTC drugs, could seamlessly transition to include cheap, ‘synbio’ alternatives. And we, the consumers, wouldn’t even be told.

Tampering with Nature’s Blueprint

ANH’s ethos is deeply rooted in respect for natural processes. Bioengineering, by contrast, often seeks to rewrite those processes—inserting fish genes into tomatoes, editing human embryos, or editing nature in ways that disrespect the eons of evolution that got us this far, a process that works with very intricate rules of genetic exchange that we little understand. It’s one hell of a gamble—with systems that are far from fully understood.

It's taken years to see the ramifications of GMO 1.0. Bioengineered crops like Bt corn or Roundup-ready soybeans, have sparked resistant pests, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and have caused glyphosate, a poison and a probable human carcinogen, to be widely distributed in the tissues of most of us. Shall we just wait and see what happens to those gene-drive mosquitoes—is it enough that they might fulfil their promise, and that we second-guess that they won’t outcompete or destabilise an array of non-target species?

A Call for Caution and Informed Choice

At the end of the day, bioengineering isn’t inherently evil—it’s a tool shaped by intent. In the right hands powered by the right mindset, it could serve humanity; in the wrong ones, it’s a weapon of control and disruption. Forty years of experience with GMO 1.0 tells us we need to be sceptical towards the biotech industry’s grandiose claims, be vigilant against corporate capture, and promote a return to nature’s wisdom wherever possible. Health and disrupted ecosystems aren’t problems to be engineered away—they’re relationships to be nurtured.

For us at ANH, the future isn’t bioengineered humans or crops; it’s empowered individuals armed with knowledge, thriving in harmony with a living world. Anything less risks trading our birthright for a synthetic mirage, one potentially framed by ecological devastation.

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