Giles Talks

On GM Health

It's not just about food is it? You look at ways of growing new tissue and organs and so on as well don't you?

Yeah. They grow my nose on a laboratory bench. And a beautiful thing it is too. They take photos of my nose, make a polymer scaffold, and using one skin cell, grew the skin and grew a nose – skin and cartilage.

Is there a danger that because the media has painted GM as a byword for evil we're in danger of junking all the good things it can achieve?

That is certainly Olivia's fear and the fear of the scientists that I talked to. The media has done a good job of vilification, so we're scared of scientists and hate them.

We love them when they save our lives. We love reading stories about how life expectancy goes up and up. We want cures for diseases and artificial hips and robot hands and face transplants. But the moment they fiddle with a plate of food, they're labelled Frankenstein.

I think people will watch the programme and probably remain sceptical about food but will be amazed as to what they can do to cure illnesses.

So how can this kind of technology help on a practical level to change people's lives?

In Vermont I met a 17-year-old girl with spina bifida who had a bladder built for her. Incontinence and self-catheterisation are among the many terrible bores of having spina bifida.

They built this bladder using her own tissue, which they had to use so her body didn't reject it. They grew it outside her body, on a scaffold, and implanted it in her. So there she was with a brand new bladder.

It's an amazing thing. You're standing there with this young, fairly disabled, very bright, sparky girl, who's able to go to her high school prom because they can build a bladder for her on a lab bench. You don't want to tell her ‘You're not entitled to that because it's not in God's plan’.

It all sounds quite inspirational, but there must have been some sides to it that you weren't so impressed by

One of the things I was sceptical about was the cloned rodeo horse. There was this champion rodeo horse that a good-looking rodeo girl was riding around on. She looked very nice with her cowboy boots and tight blue jeans and long blonde hair, so I didn't like to say what I felt to her face.

But she arrived with this horse that she'd cloned because the original horse had won a million dollars in rodeo tournaments but it couldn't sire because it had been gelded. So they cloned it in order to make money from its genes.

They'd taken a cell from Scamper, the original horse, inserted it into an enucleated egg of a female horse and the horse that was born was genetically identical to Scamper. I thought ‘Is this really the best use of the technology?’

And in Texas they'd created fish that glow in the dark. The fish had a coral gene implanted and were developed because they could be used to test the levels of various chemicals in rivers. If the fish glowed, the river was polluted. But nobody's taken it up, and all over the US they're just in fish shops, being sold as a novelty.

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