Puzzles for plant synthetic genomics

We want to crowdsource different issues, puzzles or problems that the Synthetic Plants Programme should be engaging with. Below you’ll find a list of some things we’re wondering after talking to synthetic biologists, plant scientists, breeders, social scientists, historians, policy experts and citizens.

The point of this table isn’t to provide a fully organised picture, but to act as a prompt or provocation. That’s why it’s slightly messy and disordered. We’re presenting them as puzzles in the hope that they might spark some collective thinking and action. We’ll be developing some of these in our Governance Initiatives.

Whether to pursue plant synthetic genomics

It might seem strange to ask whether plant synthetic genomics is worth pursuing, when funders are already putting money into it. Yet ARIA-funded scientists were often unsure about what the approach offers in practical terms, despite being sure that it would be transformative for genetic engineering more broadly. We also found this uncertainty in the world outside ARIA’s programme, with people repeatedly telling us that synthetic biology still has to prove itself. They also told us that the plant synthetic genomics community should focus on tackling problems the technology is uniquely placed to solve. Several people also argued this debate should be broadly democratic, involving citizens and those who might be impacted by the technology.

This comes from our interviews, where people have said things like:

  • “Synthetic biology still has to prove itself.” (Professor of Food Politics)
  • “So, I mean, the debate should be around what you use the technology for. Right?” (Professor of Biotechnology)
  • “If you’ve got 6,000 varieties of potato why do you need to synthesise new ones? (…) I think synthetic biology has to show us what unique solution it is addressing.” (Head of Seed Collections)
  • “There has to be a very good reason to do this. But don’t just come to us with your shiny technology and say, ‘we can do this, what do you think?’ Tell us what you want to do and why.” (Member of Policy Advisory Committee)

How to connect lab and field

It’s widely recognised that to develop useful technologies you need to understand who, how, why and where someone might use it. How will it make their lives better? This understanding typically comes from engaging with those who operate in your intended context of use — in this case, people working in the potato industry. While most TA1 projects include a plant scientist with potato expertise, other relevant experts are largely absent from the programme and opportunities to engage with them have been hard to capitalise on. The puzzle, then, is how to bridge this gap; how to construct spaces for these different forms of expertise to meet and shape technological trajectories.

This comes from our interviews. Here are some illustrative quotes:

  • “One thing that kind of frustrates me is people don’t know where things are made, where it came from or where it’s headed. So people are very focused on their one little part of the thing. But really the whole thing is, it’s all collided. It’s a huge collaboration. You can’t have synbio without a good sturdy plant. So you need the conventional breeders to develop that. So that’s the foundation of all genetic improvement of plants. And then organic agriculture is very useful too because it’s developing strategies, cultural practices, not necessarily scientific practices that are more sustainable. So you can pick what you like out of every basket and you can make something better.” (Research Technician in Plant Science)
  • “Take feasibility seriously. It may not sound sexy, but my God, you could make a difference that way” (Professor of Plant Science)
  • “We need to learn to listen to the people that actually care about these crops, right?” (Research Fellow in Evolutionary Biology)

How to learn from prior biotechnology controversies

Novelty makes emerging technologies hard to govern because it implies there is no useful precedent for engaging with the issues they raise (Rayner 2003). But we can shift from ‘novelty’ to ‘continuity’ to look for analogous political moments to highlight what good governance might look like (Joly 2015). With plant synthetic genomics, we should avoid focusing narrowly on the technical novelty of the technology, i.e. the scale of edits and modifications. While this may be relevant, we can learn more if we also examine the broader social and political context.

The most obvious precedent for synthetic plants is the suite of controversies that arose internationally — and particularly in the UK — in response to genetically modified crops. Several attempts have already been made to draw lessons from these controversies, but they generally remain at the level of questioning purposes and prescribing public engagement around that dimension (Kearnes et al. 2006; Stilgoe et al. 2013). What other lessons might a thicker reading of biotechnology controversies yield?

How to agree on measures of success beyond creating a synthetic plant

In a departing interview with the BBC’s Evan Davis, the founding CEO of ARIA said “There’s only one definition of success: if we fast-forward 20–30 years in the UK, can you see a technology that is impacting everyone’s lives, a new trillion-pound scale industry that has taken root, where it is really obvious that that was born catalytically out of work that ARIA did.”

The synthetic plants programme has well-defined technical measures of success: to insert and maintain complex traits in plants using synthetic chloroplasts and chromosomes. Many TA1 teams describe the ‘grand prize’ in these terms too. These technical goals also govern teams’ progress in the form of contractual milestones. Yet a purely technical goal is only part-way toward the broader social ambition motivating the programme — and ARIA itself. How might more diverse forms of value and success be captured in the programme’s accomplishments? And how can — or should — their relative importance be weighed in programme-level decision-making?

  • We know from prior large-scale technological investments that the primary goal is rarely achieved. Instead, much value comes from spillovers, serendipitous discoveries, community building, and up-skilling researchers. Many teams have built in side-projects and contingencies that allow them to deliver value beyond the core technical targets. How can these more diverse forms of value and success be captured in the programme’s accomplishments? And how can — or should — their relative importance be weighed in programme-level decision-making?
  • Rob: what would success be?
  • Interviewee: Well, I think we’ll learn a huge amount from this project, whatever happens, from a biological perspective. I think it would be a fantastic training opportunity for the early career postdocs because they will get flavours of all sorts of different things. And I think the ARIA big challenge spirit is a good one. So success would be learnings of various kinds along the way. The obvious glorious success would be to have a small synthetic chromosome in potato by the end of year three. (Plant Synthetic Biology Group Lead)

How to prioritise community building and collaboration, when everyone is incentivised to focus on their own goals.

The technical breakthroughs that ARIA wants to catalyse will come from new scientific communities. People in these communities need to be incentivised to readily share ideas, findings and to build a sense of collective responsibility for them. We know that accelerated and intensely competitive dynamics inhibit sharing amongst researchers, particularly junior researchers who are on precarious contracts. The practices these researchers learn will shape the future of a field. How can the programme ensure its competitive environment is productive without creating a research culture that crowds out time spent building community values?

  • The synthetic plants programme recognises the importance of collaboration. Yet, many researchers we spoke to emphasise that they do not feel confident sharing findings within the TA1 community. This is because ARIA exists within a broader international ecosystem of scientific competition, where being first matters. It is also because projects are held primarily to their technical milestones, which may compete with individual time spent on collaborative activities.

How to ensure the trajectories out of the lab aren’t just towards further entrenchment of a consolidated and vertically integrated agricultural system.

Agricultural biotechnology is a heavily consolidated industry (Howard 2015; Clapp and Fuchs 2009). There are several reasons for this, including the integration of biotechnology with agronomic products and the historically high cost of deregulation in the US, which favours incumbents. Some scientists we interviewed suggested that the potato industry’s high degree of vertical integration could be an advantage to enabling the use of synthetic biology, while several industry experts see vertical integration and consolidation as a source of conservatism. Past work on agricultural innovation has suggests the latter outcome may be more likely (e.g. Vanloqueren and Baret 2009). Many ARIA scientists hope that plant synthetic biology will lead to positive sustainable futures — beyond palm oil plantations and sustainable intensification. But achieving this will require active work from ARIA to prioritise particular trajectories and embed particular values in the technology. Some previous British plant synthetic biology investments have positioned themselves explicitly in response to this by focusing on developing legal and governance tools for open source technology. How can ARIA diversify technological and agricultural trajectories away from the likely centre of gravity?

This comes from our fieldwork and interviewees, who have said things like:

  • “Interviewee: I work with a major potato company. And they do all of it from breeding all the way to the prepackaged French fries, you know. And they can really kind of see, you know, if we do some kind of improvement that they will profit from it. So, you know, it’s very easy for them.
  • Rob: So it’s very vertically integrated. They control everything.
  • Interviewee: Exactly. So they can see the value of the biotech potatoes. Whereas with wheat, it’s been very difficult because with wheat, you know, the breeder is separate from the grower. The grower is separate from the processor. Unless the processor is interested, the breeder is not going to be interested. So in terms of new technologies, I think potato’s been a little bit more innovative.” (Group Lead, Plant Science)
  • “The downsides for potatoes, like right off the bat, to me, is, I’m not sure if this is still true, but at one point, the entire potato industry was dictated literally by McDonald’s.” (Assistant Professor, Plant Synthetic Biology)
  • “I mean, in terms of the first thing that I said was power and control within the food system. So, you know, since the first generation of GMOs […] you really see this increasing, ever-increasing concentration of power within the food system, and not only are there, monopolies in the grain companies, there are monopolies in the agrochemical companies, and actually they’re entirely the same companies nowadays, due to all those mergers and acquisitions, so the companies that are supplying the seeds are the same companies that are supplying the chemicals to put on the land, you know, and the problems of this industrialised food system have never been more apparent. So, actually, if you choose to look, and you’re using a sort of analysis that sort of makes sense, the problems are actually massively entrenched.” (Director, Civil Society Organisation

How to ‘bake in’ the values of ARIA, its creator community and broader publics into the technology it creates.

Technologies have social and political consequences, which often stem from their design. Langdon Winner (1986) gives a canonical example, showing how the mechanical tomato harvester developed at the University of California in the 1940s replaced handpicking and led to new tomato varieties that could withstand its method of picking (vigorously shaking a whole plant). And because it was expensive, it centralised production amongst a very small number of large growers. ARIA already has a written set of values. But how well do these values align with members of the Synthetic Plants Programme, their stakeholders and publics more broadly? And can these values be used to build technologies that will distribute benefits more broadly and equitably than otherwise?

Answering these questions would likely involve not just having a conversation about values, but also whether the programme’s institutional structures can produce outcomes that genuinely redistribute rather than reproduce existing relations of power in biotechnology and agriculture (Stengers, 2010; Escobar, 2018).

Quotes from interviews:

  • “From a personal perspective is the last thing I want to see is this technology going on a shelf in Bayer’s back room […] the route to maximum profit for someone like Bayer is not the same as the route to getting in as many plants and as many fields and to the people who actually need this technology. I think it’s quite clear that the people who really need this technology are not the people who are able to pay the massive amounts of money for it. […] One of the things that we’ve thought a lot about is […] how do you get, you know, egalitarian use of this stuff?” (Research Fellow, Synthetic Biology)
  • “Technologies carry vectors of particular values. They have an impact on the organization of production, the organization of society, and they can close down spaces for democracy or a country enabled them. So those political aspects of technology have to be debated, decided collectively in a much more inclusive, democratic way. I think that remains a challenge.” (Professor, Food Politics)

How to ensure the synthetic potato isn’t totalitarian

Developers often say that new technologies are just one tool in a toolbox that will complement other approaches. In policy too, European regulations emphasise the importance of co-existence of organic agriculture with alternative forms, including that using genetic modification. However, several of our interviewees raised concerns that plant synthetic biology technologies may prevent alternative forms of agriculture from existing.

This could happen in a number of ways. If an ARIA variety was so successful, say a 20% increase in productivity, a farmer may not be able to opt out if they want to stay competitive. If powerful actors such as processors enforce use through contractual terms, then farmers may struggle to opt-out. Alternatively, an unlabelled ARIA potato would be impossible to differentiate from other potatoes, which conflicts with the legal requirements of organic agriculture. A similar problem has happened with precision breeding and organic agriculture, as documented by Soil Association briefings.

Interviewees have said things like:

  • “I mean, I think there’s always the potential like, you know, let’s say the UK develops super potato, based on these like chromosomes and you always have that, or same for the US. You would have a wealthy nation that would have IP on a super potato which could make the haves more have and the nots more not. So I think there’s always a potential discrepancy there if it’s not, you know, given universally. There’s also potential to weaponize food. It’s always weaponized. But there’s always the potential to weaponize food. If I have a food crop that’s resistant to some pest, then I can set market value for that food crop, especially if there’s an introduced pest or…” (Associate Professor, Plant Synthetic Biology)
  • “So there needs to be equitable and fair benefit sharing with the communities who are growing or using these crops so it can’t become  an arms race where they can’t afford to you know grow uh materials or that they’re pressured into growing these new ones and you lose all the land races and the traditional cultivars which at some point we are going to find are really important however good we are at synthesizing other stuff there will be things within these that we haven’t even thought about yet so you don’t want to lose those future options and you already I mean I think Kenya just passed a law that they can’t grow the old varieties of that they’ve got to do there’s something insane and I can’t remember the details but I would look into that so that’s something you don’t want to do yeah um but these things can go well beyond the well-intentioned and have serious impacts on people’s livelihoods I would say and that obviously there’s a lot of literature out there on that and lessons to be learned from it. So that should be, I’m assuming that’s already taken into consideration. I would hope.” (Head of Seed Collections)

How to choose organisms to work on based on a diversity of factors rather than just technical ones.

Almost everyone who learns about the Synthetic Plants programme asks, ‘why the potato’? There isn’t one answer, but it is clear that the programme team thought about a range of different dimensions to make the choice – epistemic, technical, political and cultural. In this sense the choice of a potato could be seen as a good compromise across a range of possibilities. But what comes after the potato? Can the same balancing be repeated? Can the factors going into this choice be systematised to ensure optimal decision making? And could they act as a guide for others wishing to adopt a similar choice regarding experimental organisms?

Our interviewees have said things like:

  • “If I think about what are going to be the easiest plants to work with genetically, I would say something like canola maybe because it’s related to Arabidopsis, the boring model plant everybody works with. And that’s great, but people don’t care about canola. It’s not a household point of discussion [whereas] everybody talks about potatoes at home.” (Research Fellow, Synthetic Biology)
  • “But in the end, I’m very, very happy that they chose potato. Because in terms of the funding landscape, you know, BBSRC has funded enormous amounts of work on wheat. Really, there hasn’t been a funding body really dedicated to potato.” (Group Lead, Plant Science)
  • “If you were reasonable, you wouldn’t do this in potato in my perspective. Scientifically speaking, you would take [something else]. I’m obviously biased, but I think most people in the field would, if you ask them which one is going to be the fastest plant to make a synthetic genome […] the answer is probably tabacum.” (Group Lead, Synthetic Biology)
  • “Do we have cultural license to work on things that are of indigenous ownership or should be of indigenous ownership? We don’t ask that about things from, you know, the new world. […] So, you know, that’s just being co-opted by Europeans and it’s considered this is globalised and, you know, it’s very unapologetic in that way. So I think there’s definitely like a social dimension to do with like do we have social license to work with it?” (Research Fellow, Synthetic Biology)

How to talk about synthetic plants?

ARIA prefers to talk about improved, enhanced or optimised plants rather than synthetic plants. None of these terms are neutral; they just raise different questions. Whereas ‘synthetic plants’ raise questions about naturalness, ‘improved plants’ raise questions of directionality – improved for whom, addressing whose concerns? Thinking carefully about how words carry cultural meaning is key to good science and science communication (McLeod & Nerlich, 2017). If language isn’t neutral, who should be involved in deciding its terms?

 Opening up the question of how to talk about synthetic plants for debate with publics and stakeholders is both an ethos accordant with socio-scientific approaches, and an opportunity for early engagement of publics in meaningful debate.

STS scholars have long emphasised that language is never neutral and is in itself doing epistemic work (Haraway, 1998) and that reflexivity around language is central to RRI (McLeod & Nerlich, 2017). Careful consideration of the cultural valences of word choice is thus an important component of good science and its communication. Furthermore, there may be strategic advantages in doing so. Opening up the debate around how (not) to speak about this technology may generate a sense of trust and ownership, of democratic debate around how we should— as collectives— think and talk about products arising out of plant synthetic genomics.

  • “Yeah when I because I only joined today so I got my phone out and I put in synthetic plants and they said made of plastic you know plants that need neither sunlight nor water and I thought okay so the gut reaction is these are fake and you can’t eat them so I think that word is very unwisely chosen yeah and of course the gut reaction to genetically manipulated is nononono, for many uninformed people, but also for many informed people. Those were my two immediate, what am I getting into here?”
  • “P1: And has the word synthetic been chosen because it’s not genetically manipulated or modified? Is that a new thing?”
  • AE: It really comes from synthetic biology.
  • P5: It’s just about synthesizing.
  • AE: Synthetic biology is about synthesizing the genetic material, not taking it from another species.
  • CH: Not cutting it out and putting it in.
  • P1:” Synthesizing would have been a much better word than synthetic, which just means if you’re buying something and it’s all synthetic material, you don’t want to wear it. It’s harder to say and it will make people wonder. “
  • “Because I thought that’s more along the lines of even though it’s like synthetic or like man-made, how we’ve influenced its genes or so. It’s just a sort of industrialised version of what we’ve already done. You think how plants have been bred to have higher yields and things. Compared to the fortified tomato. I can’t imagine naturally you can, I don’t know, it seems naturally you have more vitamins and things in it. It feels a bit more industrial and like, I don’t know, I don’t think the word processed is right, but like, I don’t know, I’m a bit more sceptical of it.
  • “(…) but do I want to eat something synthetic? that I wouldn’t want to do”
  • “I googled synthetic plants. And once you get past the page after page of plastic plants that are on sale in the area supermarkets, you do actually get to an article from ARIA UK which gives some useful background information. So if you’re interested, the information is out there.
  • P7: So I’m sure the NHS will monitor you. Don’t you think the title is misleading, synthetic? Yeah. I mean, I also thought it was more plastic”

Can plant synthetic genomics generate positive ecological futures?

Our focus group data shows public concern about how synthetic plants could affect multispecies ecosystems. People prioritise biodiversity and ecological relationships, including impacts on pollinators, as key conditions for supporting the technology.

The Synthetic Plants Programme operates in a context where experts urge urgent action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss (IPBES, 2024) to protect human wellbeing and the global economy. Biodiversity loss is also now being framed as a public health crisis (The Lancet, 2024). This happens in many ways, including depletion of plant resources that support pharmaceutical innovation. Biotech has often been linked to corporate power and extractive practices which drive biodiversity loss. A question, then, is how the technology can become a contributor to agricultural futures where biodiversity is brought to the foreground, aligning with current public priorities.

This comes from our fieldwork, and is also a strong theme in our focus group research, where citizens have said things like:

  • “And the other concern is how it’s going to affect nature, particularly pollinators, who always went to a tomato plant because that was fine. and with an adjusted plant, maybe it’s not fine, maybe they can’t get it.” (Participant, Public Focus Group)
  • “I’d be worried about pollinators again. Bird life” (Participant, Public Focus Group)

How to ensure that investment synthetic plant genomics co-exists democratically with a multiplicity of approaches to cultivation and stewardship of genetic resources?

A theme in our fieldwork and interviews was concern that investment in synthetic plants would result in disinvestment in other forms of stewardship of genetic resources; or be a threat to co-existence of different modes of agriculture. This was sometimes paired with enthusiasm for the technology. In other words, enthusiasm for the technical possibilities of synthetic plants as emerging technology can be tempered by caution about its potential to detract from democratic multiplicity. STS scholarship too has identified care for the multiplicity of social interventions as a key aspect of sustainability and resilience (e,g, Stirling 2024). This provokes us to consider what counts as success for this technology, beyond technical achievement. Might success be construed also as implementation of practices of care for democratic co-existence with alternative modes of intervention and livelihoods? If so, how to achieve this?

Some illustrative quotes include:

  • “There’s only one problem for me in that debate and that is coexisting self-organic agriculture and convention maker country and as we have when we haven’t solved that then I see a problem because you cannot guarantee GM free material from an organic farm anymore and for organic farming that’s the law yeah so you cannot say okay well they should be a little bit more flexible. No, it’s the law. So they cannot be flexible. So that’s the biggest problem. And I also do not think that organic farming should move away from that rule, because I think it’s one of the elements in which they can distinguish themselves. For many people it’s very important that you don’t violate the integrity of the plant. That’s an important background philosophy of organic agriculture and not using genetic modification is an important element of that.” (Associate Professor, Plant Science)
  • “The question of justice extends to the realm of knowledge production. There are certain kinds of knowledge that are promoted more than others. There’s a selective use of funds and human resources to produce certain technological options and suppress or marginalize others. So in the field of food and agriculture, we’ve seen a massive emphasis on genetic engineering biotechnology of the last 30-40 years, 40 years at least. And other broader, more comprehensive agronomic whole farm approaches have become neglected.” (Professor of Food Politics)
  • “The big problem is the compatibility with organic. In organic you’re not allowed to use GMOs and even a New Genetic Technique is still a GMO. It’s a deregulated one, but it’s still a GMO. So you’re not allowed to use it, but then again you have to be able, in order to keep it out, to know what is a GMO or not.” (Director, Participatory Breeding Programme)

Is a participatory synthetic biology possible?

Who benefits from plant synthetic genomics? Who gets a say in how it’s developed and governed? Some of the people we have spoken worried the technology might serve narrow interests rather than a broader public good. They saw value — especially for potato breeding — but also noted that past experiences with biotech might make trust hard to gain. A participatory approach, engaging diverse stakeholders throughout development, could help address this. It would embed real-world priorities into the technology early and actively decouple this emerging technology from the histories of its predecessors. As a hands-on public funder, ARIA is well placed to invest in this kind of governance experiment.

A key quote is:

  • “I guess there is different ways of doing, you know, approaching people. But what I did is just follow the plant, you know, follow the plant path. And then I found the people in that way. Because, you know, there will be people around it, you know. And so when I found them, the communication was direct, you know, directly with them. And so I asked them their WhatsApp number, and that’s how I created accountability. When I was telling them about my project, about myself, everything, I told them that I wanted to have these objectives, I potentially will, you know, the results I have, it may help them at some point, maybe, I hope. And they told me, okay, so in how many months are you going to come to, you know, bring the results? I’m like, oh, months. I wish. So I said, okay, you know what, let me create something. So I promised them I would do fieldwork notes, kind of a diary to share with everyone, or a report to share with everyone.” (…) “the fact that you have come back it creates that accountability. there is that interest.” (Research Fellow, Evolutionary Biology)

Who gets to imagine the new functionalities that ARIA will propose to plants?

The Synthetic Plants programme articulates plants as readily available, cheap resources which perform many essential functions in human society. Plant synthetic genomics is put forth as a technology that could imbue plants with new and useful functionalities to address pressing problems. This is a bold and ambitious proposition with possible ramifications for ecological futures— and one which, arguably, should be opened up beyond the fields of synthetic biology and botany. Plants live and grow embedded with ecosystems: biological and social. Experts across fields may have generative ideas around the kinds of functionalities that plant synthetic genomics might attempt to imbue plants with; although plants as experimental organisms will determine whether or not it is possible to develop their uses in that direction. The specialist plant knowledge of programme botanists and engineering capabilities of synthetic biologists are essential to Aria’s proposition, but their embeddedness within laboratory settings may also act as a barrier to creative thinking. Field ecologists,  evolutionary biologists, microbiologists, plant breeders, among others, may have additional propositions to make vis a vis what capabilities [or traits] might be designed into plants. Is it worthwhile to widen our thinking around who is consulted in the process of considering what traits will be proposed to the experimental plants?

Interviews have told us:

  • “whereas we have put billions of euros in in it…; if we had put the same amount of money into other developments then…And that is because well everything is focused on the molecular level but, well, a plant is not a molecule, plant is an organism.… And well I mean you used to have these wonderful papers saying, okay, we have now found a new modified gene that will increase your rice yields by 50 percent because we now have found out that the rice kernels are twice as thick as they used to be with that gene. Yeah, and then they do a single pot experiment and yes it works beautifully well, but if you then grow them in a field as a crop you find out that they make fewer kernels. Okay. And the yield per square meter is the same. You just have changed the yield components, but you haven’t changed the yield. And there are numerous examples like that.” (Professor of Plant Science)
  • “And it’s interesting then to look at the actor networks with which these small groups of people are associated. and what their value and what their worldview is. Now, you can open that up and have a much more inclusive deliberative process that is ethnically diverse, gender inclusive, that can inform the way research and development organize itself or is organized to deliver goods.” (Professor, Food Politics)

Which models of ownership to pursue

🚧 Developing… 🚧

Several of our interviewees and public focus groups have said things like:

  • And [in agroecology] the technologies deployed can be controlled locally by farmers. They’re not proprietary. Whereas the genetic one is the product of specialist knowledge of scientists done in particular places. And usually, given the political economy today and the food system, they’re likely to be proprietary technologies. So farmers will have to pay for them. They have patents and all that. […] One of the problems of synthetic biology, like genetic engine before, is that it’s proprietary technology. And that is a real issue because many, many farmers are suffering from increases in costs of production. The costs of production are going up. fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, and they’re getting less and less money for their produce. And I have a number of farmers who comment on me saying, yeah, well, synthetic biology, I like it, but it’s so expensive, I can’t afford it." (Professor of Food Politics)
  • “In terms of who owns it, that’s also a big thing, because, yeah, then it would make sense that then big companies that can invest in such technologies will own it, which is already the case for, you know, the big breeding companies that have their varieties in. Which isn’t specifically a wrong thing or a bad thing because, I mean, they put in the effort, right? And they put in the research and they make them a good product. But then from an ethical point of view, then it would make the big companies that earn a lot of money more extreme against the the other companies or other people that cannot use those techniques and then you would get more extreme differences which, yeah could be a bad thing in making the world a place with even more extremities.” (Curator, Plant Genetic Resources)