“We need a societal discourse in which the political and ethical dimensions of the research in question are explored. What sort of agricultural system do we want? How are the new technologies to be used?” emphazised Prof. Matthias Mahlmann, lawyer and member of the Swiss Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology, at a recent panel discussion on genome editing at the www.tnam2019.ethz.ch.

The participants of the TNAM 2019 conference take a tri-national view on the main issues and potential consequences of the ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on organisms obtained by mutagenesis. The PSC has summarized the discussions at: https://www.plantsciences.uzh.ch/en/outreach/roundtable.html

Invited guests were:

• Prof. Holger Puchta, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Franziska Schwab, Small Farmers Association, Switzerland
• Prof. em. Jean-Marc Neuhaus,  Institut de Biologie, Université de Neuchâtel, Member of the Swiss Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology
• Prof. Matthias Mahlmann, Faculty of Law, University of Zurich, Member of the Swiss Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology
• Dr. Ortrun Mittelsten Scheid, Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, Austria

The panel discussion was organized by PlantHUB ‒ a European industrial doctorate program funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 722338.