GE fears make New Zealand 'a laughing stock'

By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter

A top scientist who has come home after 14 years in Britain says New Zealand's restrictions on genetic modification are making this country "a laughing stock".

Professor Paul Rainey, one of five world experts who were invited by the New Scientist last month to report on the latest thinking on evolution, has so far been unable to import the genetically modified bacteria that he uses to study how evolution works.

Seven months after taking a job at Auckland University, he says he will leave the bacteria initially at Oxford, where he has a part-time appointment at an 11-person laboratory.

"I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel, especially as the lab runs in Oxford, so things can go on there.

"The bureaucracy is so extreme that, without paying $4000 and waiting an awfully long time for every single strain that we want to import, we can't bring into the country genetically modified variants.

"I know a number of academics who, rather than going through the process of trying to deal with this, either have their work done commercially overseas - which of course deprives New Zealand students of the training opportunities - or go overseas and do the work themselves at a host institution. The intellectual property from those discoveries then goes to the host institution, not to New Zealand. Unfortunately it makes New Zealand a bit of a laughing stock."

Dr Rainey's experiments at Oxford have shown how bacteria evolve to fit their environments. He has registered patents in Britain and the US on compounds the bacteria produce and novel methods they use to stick to surfaces.

He said he also needed approval to work on genetically modified organisms in Britain. But the process there was "pretty streamlined" compared to the uncertainty he found dealing with New Zealand's Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma).

He has won approval to bring in 50 billion bacteria that are either unmodified or covered by earlier approvals for other researchers.

But he is not yet allowed to import the genetically modified (GM) strain that he developed at Oxford.

An Otago University researcher working on similar bacteria, Dr Iain Lamont, said it typically cost thousands of dollars to win Erma approval to import GM bacteria.

"My own 'solution' to this has been to avoid importing any genetically modified strains of pseudomonas aeruginosa [bacteria]," he said.

"This has had some adverse effects on our research.

"There have been some experiments we could not carry out and it has reduced opportunities for collaboration with researchers overseas, but it has not been catastrophic.

"I would guess that this 'solution' would not work in Paul's case."

Dr Rainey's boss at Auckland University, School of Biological Sciences director Joerg Kistler, said the problem would be solved by legal changes before Parliament which would delegate control of importing low-risk GM organisms to biosafety committees at each university or institute.