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Team:TU-Delft/Meet with RIVM
From 2013.igem.org
Meeting with the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
During May, we had the opportunity to meet the people from the GMO department of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment(RIVM). The aim of that meeting was to discuss about:
- current regulations
- how is it perceived from the related parties?
- what possible changes should we make for the ideal regulation?
Balance of regulation vs. innovation
- Do you get complaints from researchers on the current legislation? Does it impede innovation?
Researchers will complain when safety rules are delaying their work, which is to be expected, but we don’t see it very often.
- Is the regulation often revised?
An update mostly entails making a study proceed with biosafety level 1 instead of level 2 (i.e. requiring less safety rules). We evaluate risk assessments case by case, the overall regulation is not updated often. However, since the biosafety officer platform is a very small community, all biosafety officers will hear about adaptations we made with respect to one case and communicate that to their researchers.
- Have you heard concerns (biosafety, biosecurity) on the current legislation?
We get complaints from a small number of people (±10, always the same individuals). Their concerns are about ethical issues with respect to GMO’s. However the permit given out by the RIVM only covers the environmental risk and does not regard ethics, so we cannot do anything about these complaints.
The use GMOs can be split into green and white applications. By green GMOs the modified seeds are meant, by white GMOs we refer to industrial applications (food enzymes etc.). The public is mostly aware of the green GMOs and not of the white ones. So public concerns are mostly about the seeds and the crops although this is only one part of the GMO applications.
