Oh dear, that sounds a bit more official and serious! I assumed it did apply because the products are banned for sale in the UK, but wasn't sure if that ban extended to bringing things in from other countries i.e. not purchased in this country.
Technically they're not banned for sale in the UK, but the having them on unapproved premises. So I guess that in theory I could buy gene-edited yeast (subject to some paperwork) and have them sent to my workplace and that would be OK, as it's a licensed location for transgenics- but I couldn't have them sent to my home, as it's not.
Without contadicting what
@Northern_Brewer says, above, which I'm sure is spot on, this is the UK, we're talking about. A country that tips its sewage into our rivers and our seas, which shuns European food standards in the hope of doing a deal with countries with much lower standards, etc, etc and we're actually thinking of taking notice of legislation relating to GM organisms?
I'm sorry, this is just tired, lazy and wrong. Didn't the complaint used to be that the UK always "gold-plated" regulations and enforced them over-rigorously compared to other European countries?
Some media outlets want you to think that the entire country is going to hell as a way to excuse the terrible behaviour of a few members of the government, they want you to think that those few people are not really that bad because "they're all at it". But no, they're not "all at it". People in the Environment Agency would love to nail the water companies over sewage, but they just can't because their hands are tied by decisions made by the ministers that direct them. The problem is those few ministers in government, not the whole country.
And yes, we do take notice of legislation surrounding transgenics - I guess making my various workplaces compliant with the regs has cost my employers £100k's if not £millions over the years. In general people in bleeding-edge industries like good regulation, as it stops the cowboys ruining things for everybody. Just imagine that you ran a responsible company offering submarine tours to shipwrecks, how would you feel about the idiots doing tours to the Titanic who ignored all the safety regulations and got squished? Nobody will want to do tours of shipwrecks any more, even with a company that follows the rules.
We should, but as soon as a backhander is offered to the right department, you can be sure that such regulations will go out of the window.
If you have evidence of that, you should report it and someone could be looking at a 10-year stretch. All I can say is that having been "the man from the Ministry" in a former life, if anyone had tried to offer me a backhander I would have gone out of my way to get that person locked up. And while there's always going to be the occasional bad egg, that was the general ethos of the scientific bit of the Civil Service that I worked for. There was a strong sense that we were working for the greater good of the UK, and that is not served by encouraging people to bend the rules (for the same reason as the Titanic example). So speaking as someone who's actually done that kind of job - you're far more likely to get banged up than see "regulations go out of the window".
Law is always behind the times.
That doesn't mean it can be ignored. And at least it is made under advice from people who know a bit about this stuff.
GMO ban made sense when genetic modification was done by splicing together bits of DNA as that had plenty of chances to create some kind of godforsaken chimera. Although in reality that's never happened and I can't find a single example of a harmful GMO product. Gene editing these days is much more precise, switching on/off specific genes.
Sort of - there were two problems with early transgenic technology. One was that they (well - "we", I was one of those doing it) used gene "cassettes" that included the gene you wanted to add along with a marker gene that allowed you to tell whether it had inserted into the genome, as the hitrate of insertions was really low. But that marker gene was usually an antibiotic resistance gene or herbicide resistance gene that you didn't want "leaking" into the wider world. But sometimes it did - that wasn't a hypothetical thing, it could and did happen.
The other problem was that the cassette would insert into a random place in the genome, and if that random place happened to be an active gene then you were effectively knocking out that gene at the same time as adding your new one. There were also problems with different areas of the genome being more or less active, so your expression levels could vary a lot depending on where your cassette ended up, which is not really what you want.
And I can understand why people were wary of that and it's why I was OK with that first generation being tightly regulated, even if it wasn't great from the perspective of my personal career in the UK.
The difference with gene editing is not that you're operating at the level of individual genes - that was true of the first-gen stuff too - but it's easier to target specific locations in the genome, and you're not using markers in the same way.
The law will change eventually, although I expect they'll concentrate first on allowing boring things like higher yielding crops that can avoid people starving
See above - it's happened already, that's exactly what's allowed under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 which was passed in March.
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