Published yesterday, just prior to today’s release of the details of the UK government’s “Farm Scale Evaluations” (FSEs) of Genetically Modified (GM) Crops, is an article by one of the scientists involved in the FSEs. Dr Joe Perry, a renowned scientist retained by the government to plan and devise the FSE experiments – and a professing Christian believer, with a strong Jewish background – is well qualified to write about the risks involved in GM crops and from a religious perspective.

Published in the prestigious journal Science and Christian Belief (1), Dr Perry considers the risks, benefits and bioethical challenges – and many of the accompanying theological questions – raised by the advent of GM crops. Dr Perry, a scientist at the Rothamsted Research station in Harpenden, points out that there are many senior scientists who are Christians who have contributed greatly to the UK debate on GM crops over recent years – concluding that their approach has “been positive, engaged with the public, has mixed scientific rationality with prudence, is unsullied by attachment to big business, has due humility and recognises fallibility”.

This is not the picture painted by some Christians who are fearful of ivory tower scientists messing with God’s creation. In contradiction, Dr Perry argues that “the growing of GM crops does not have consequences that must of necessity be outside God’s will”. They may in fact be very beneficial – as long as their planting is carefully controlled. The “direct genetic effects of GM Crops are marginal ecologically”, he writes, although this requires “assessment on a case-by-case basis” – hence his involvement in the FSEs – and his evident frustration at the attempts to hijack them. He would certainly not be numbered among those Christians who have joined with Green organisations to dig up some of the very crops that were planted as part of the FSEs. Indeed, he concludes, not without irony, that “The challenges for Christians [concerning GM Crops] will remain for many years … not least … the requirement to pray for those with whom we disagree, even when they trash our experiments”!

But his main concern is that GM crop management must be seen as part of a wider review of farming practices, and only with appropriate checks and balances can they then be seen as part of our God-given stewardship of the countryside. As the Minister for the Environment, Michael Meacher, said when launching the FSEs: “This research will not only address GM crops. This is an extremely important opportunity to gain a more detailed understanding of the effects of agricultural management on farmland wildlife generally, which will inform our work to implement the [Biodiversity] Action Plan”. Dr Perry’s conclusion is that “to recommend commercialisation in an unrestricted fashion would be to relinquish the responsibility of stewardship given us in Genesis 2.” Dr Perry concludes in his Science and Christian Belief paper that “Fortunately, we know enough to impose particular mandatory restrictions on the way GM crops are grown so as to ensure a positive benefit to biodiversity, at the expense of a relatively small yield.”

Dr Perry feels that although there are profound implications for the implementation of GM Crops, these are not to do with the introduction of GM technology per se. He argues that the vitriolic controversy surrounding GM Crops is crowding out the importance of an integrated approach to agriculture. His worry is that, just as with the impact on our environment that has been seen with intensive agricultural practices over many years, the introduction of GM Crops willy nilly could exacerbate the problem – and a further decline in species diversity in the UK would be seen, i.e. there will even more damage to our biological heritage. He says that there is already “plenty of evidence that the increased intensity of farming since the Second World War is the most likely cause of the decline of several important species of birds, butterflies and other taxa”.

Therefore, whatever the policy outcome of the FSE trials, if the introduction of GM Crops is to be implemented, it must not be done in an unrestricted fashion – which could lead to a further decline in ‘biodiversity’. This, according to Perry, would be to relinquish the responsibility of the stewardship of creation given to us by God in Genesis 2.

Moreover, Perry also believes that “The Christian has much to offer, in an area where there are difficult and conflicting issues to balance: personal integrity, an objective set of values, a readiness to listen to others, and a willingness to pray for guidance from the Spirit, particularly regarding the uses to which the technology is put.” He feels there can be resolution to the conflict between profit, power and public access to technology, based on the principle of careful stewardship of God’s creation.

Echoing a recent report by a Christian organisation that convened a working party on this issue (2), Perry denigrates the tendency of campaigning organisations to ‘choose only data and examples that support their goals’, which ‘flies in the face of New Testament teaching’ about not using deception and distortion (2 Corinthians 4:2). “It is absolutely crucial to separate out the many and complex issues involved in GM crops, to treat each separately and to avoid the temptation to embrace uncritically or reject absolutely GM crops as a technology.” Dr Perry also recognizes the need to increase food production in developing countries, but he is not convinced that GM technology yet conforms to the “goals of feeding the hungry, and requires changes in delivery to ensure equitability and sustainability.” Singling out the Christian Aid report “Selling Suicide” (3), he also sees it as “intellectual laziness to argue that because of such issues we should turn our back on biotechnology as a whole”.

2. Commissioned by the Evangelical Alliance Policy Commission: resulting in the book Modifying Creation? GM Crops and Foods: A Christian Perspective, edited by Donald Bruce and Don Horrocks (Paternoster 2001).

Dr Joe N. Perry is available for interview. He is currently at the Science Media Centre of the Royal Institution. 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS. Tel: 0207 670 2980. Fax: (+44) 0207 670 2950. Email: joe.perry@bbsrc.ac.uk.

(Dr Perry is a scientist at the Plant & Invertebrate Ecology Division, Rothamsted Research, Rothamsted, Harpenden, Herts AL5 2JQ and visiting professor of Biometry at the University of Greenwich. He has joint responsibility for the statistical design and analysis of the Farm Scale Evaluations of GM Crops, commissioned by the UK Government.)

(Dr Alexander is Chairman of the Programme of Molecular Immunology, The Babraham Institute, and Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He is also author of Rebuilding the Matrix: Science and Faith in the 21st Century – “essential reading for all those interested in science, its history, its philosophy and its relationship to religion” – Professor Lord Robert Winston)