GM meets AI at Rothamsted
Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire is one of the world’s longest-running agricultural research institutions and has been at the forefront of research and field trials of genetically engineered crops since the 1990s. Rothamsted offers its biotech services commercially, including its position as “one of the very few sites in the UK” where field trials of gene-edited crops can take place at farm scale.
In October, tech-biotech start-up Biographica announced that it would be opening lab facilities at Rothamsted Enterprises. Biographica describes itself as a machine-learning driven platform for “precision design” of next-generation seed genetics.
Campaign groups have sounded the alarm about the combination of machine learning (Artificial Intelligence) and genetic engineering. The report Black Box Biotech, by the African Centre for Biodiversity, Third World Network and ETC Group, states:
“Using AI to digitally design genetic systems moves the process of genetic engineering into an unknowable algorithmic ‘black box’ where individual design decisions can be neither traced nor explained… it challenges current biosafety assessment capabilities, undermines monitoring requirements, and removes the traceability required to ensure fair and equitable benefit sharing from the use of genetic resources or to support systems of liability and redress.”
The report’s author, Jim Thomas, has also highlighted the dangers of fusing two powerful, risky, experimental and unpredictable technologies and using them to design life forms.
Police shield the GM wheat trials at Rothamsted from protesters
This article first appeared in the GM Freeze newsletter, Thin Ice, issue 69.
