The involvement of the public in the formulation of the EU position on the so-called “new genetic engineering” was also controversial in the last public round. Criticism rains down.
This much seems certain: It will be a hot autumn when the EU Commission negotiates the design of the rules that are to apply to “Crispr/Cas9”. This abbreviation stands for the new genetic engineering, in which targeted interventions are used to switch plant properties on or off. Before this method was developed, genetic engineering involved inserting cells from another organism into a plant.
In 2018, the European Court of Justice decided that the new method should also be treated like the previous one, i.e. in particular that it also had to be labelled. Immediately afterwards, the EU Commission started a process to formulate new regulations for “Crispr/Cas9”.