Turbo Charging Nature? The political myth behind gene-editing ‘speed’ claims

October 10, 2025 by Staff Reporter

A new report from A Bigger Conversation – Turbo Charging Nature: The fast promises and slow delivery of gene-edited crops – reveals that after two decades of hype and heavy public investment, the UK’s flagship gene-editing projects have failed to deliver on their central promise: speed.

For years, ministers, biotech developers and government advisers have claimed that gene editing would “turbo charge nature”, speeding up traditional breeding and delivering rapid solutions to climate change, food insecurity and public health. But the report shows that the rhetoric of speed has been a political tool, not a scientific reality – used to justify deregulation, rebrand genetic modification as “precision breeding” and strip away public oversight.

Tracing the development timelines of five high-profile projects – low-asparagine wheat, blight-resistant potatoes, virus-resistant sugar beet, omega-3 camelina and the purple tomato – the report finds that none have reached the UK market despite decades of work and tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer funding. In several cases, conventionally bred varieties have beaten the biotech versions to market, achieving similar or better results without genetic modification.

“Speed was never really about biology,” says co-author Pat Thomas. “It was about politics – a story designed to make deregulation sound like innovation and to cast caution, consultation and public accountability as barriers to progress.”

Turbo Charging Nature documents how the myth of fast science has seeped into agricultural and food policy, shaping research priorities and public funding streams. It notes that many of the traits targeted by gene editing – from disease resistance to nutritional enhancement – are complex, involving multiple genes and long development cycles. Even the simplest projects, like Rothamsted’s low-asparagine wheat, have been underway for over twenty years and are still struggling to remove foreign DNA, undermining the claim that “precision breeding” is either faster or more natural.

Meanwhile, government has continued to relax oversight. Under the Genetic Technology Act 2023 and the 2025 implementing regulations, gene-edited organisms have been exempted from GMO safety and environmental checks – a move the report describes as “a fragile regulatory fiction built on PR rather than proof.”

Beyond the lab, Turbo Charging Nature argues that the fixation on technology has distracted from proven, systemic approaches to food resilience – soil health, agroecology, crop diversity and sustainable breeding programmes – that could deliver results here and now.

“The story of speed has done its political work,” says Thomas. “But after thirty years of promises, the technology is still crawling, not racing. It’s time to stop confusing deregulation with progress and start asking what kind of innovation genuinely serves farmers, consumers and the planet.”