UK research scene drives plant scientists to Australia

Two Cambridge University plant molecular geneticists are quitting the UK to work in Australia because of the nation's climate of virulent opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops.

Australian-born Dr Mark Tester, and colleague Dr Thomas Martin, have both accepted senior academic research positions in Australia.

Tester, an Adelaide University graduate who gained his PhD at Cambridge, has worked in Britain for 15 of the past 18 years. He says the GM debate "has gone completely out of control".

"It has become oversimplified and over-polarised. People have lost all perspective, and their ability to make rational comment," he said.

Tester will return to Adelaide with his wife and two daughters, aged 5 and 9, in December, after accepting a Federation Fellowship and a professorial position at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute. He will work in the new Centre for Plant Functional Genomics.

Martin has accepted an appointment at the University of Western Australia.

Tester said extremists in the UK anti-GM movement had resorted to violent tactics, including vandalising experimental GM crops and farm machinery and intimidation of scientists.

Had he stayed in Britain, he would have been forced to remove his name from the telephone directory, as the head of the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University has done after receiving repeated threats to his personal safety.

"I haven't been hit over the head with a baseball bat yet, but other plant scientists have," he said. "But I'm also leaving because an entire sector of plant science has gone missing in the UK.

"The funding is still there to do glossy, basic research, and there's a lot of high-impact science being done in the UK.

"The problem is that it's impossible to get it into the field. The British government took its eye off the ball in the 1990s and effectively privatised all applied research. Now the anti-GM movement has bitten so hard that plant biotechnology company boards are moving their operations to the US.

"The UK plant biotechnology industry has been left high and dry. Its bad for students, because they see no jobs in the plant sciences -- the whole thing is very unbalanced, and it reduces their opportunities for funding for applied research."

Tester said the Australian research climate was much more favourable, despite most state governments imposing moratoriums on commercial cropping of GM canola.

"Australia is still doing applied research in plant biotechnology. It hasn't been privatised," he said.

"We should be proud of the Grains Research and Development Council, which is still funding strategic applied research. The GRDC, the South Australian government and the Australian Research Council have funded the new Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, which is exactly the sort of work I do."

Tester is an expert in the genetics of salinity tolerance in plants. At Cambridge, he has been working on the model plant Arabidopsis, but in Adelaide will work on salinity tolerance in rice, as a model plant for cereal crops like wheat and barley.

His colleague Thomas Martin has been studying genes involved in nitrogen transport and metabolism in plants, and will continue his work at the University of WA.

Australia spared

Australia has suffered only one incident of anti-GM vandalism -- the destruction by an anonymous group of an experimental plot of GM pineapples near Brisbane in 2001.

The pineapples, modified to increase their sugar and protein content, were developed by researchers at the Queensland Department of Primary Industries.

The Commonwealth Gene Technology Regulation Act 2001, which established the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, makes it an offence for anti-GM activists to trespass on private land where farmers are growing GM crops, or to damage those crops.

Activists may picket farms growing GM crops, but are not permitted to cross fence lines to enter private property to protest, or to destroy crops, as activists with anti-GM organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have done in Britain.

Two well-publicised court cases in Britain in 2001 saw activists acquitted of charges of trespass and vandalism on the grounds that they had a genuine belief that the crops posed a risk to human health or the environment.

The verdicts alarmed research organisations and corporations developing GM crops, because they appeared to sanction vandalism of experimental crops. Australia's Act excludes the 'genuine belief' defence.

Australian Biotechnology News invited the two leading anti-GM organisations in Australia to publicly state whether they condoned crop vandalism and intimidation of scientists.

John Hepburn, the anti-GM campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, said Greenpeace did not condone intimidation of scientists.

"To date, the worst intimidation has actually been by biotechnology companies against scientists attempting to speak out against GM crops, like [Dr Ignacio] Chapela," he said.

(Chapela, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, published a controversial paper in the international research journal Nature two years ago claiming to have shown that transgenes from GM maize had contaminated maize land races in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Nature subsequently took the unprecedented action of withdrawing the paper, on the grounds that the study's methodology and conclusions were so flawed that it should not never have been accepted for publication.)

Hepburn said while former Greenpeace UK director Lord Melchett had been arrested with other anti-GM protesters for vandalising a farmer's experimental maize crop in Britain in 2001, it was the only crop vandalism incident in which the organisation had been involved.

"It's not a tactic we've used in Australia," he said.

Bob Phelps, director of the Australian GeneEthics Network, declined to respond.