Obvious and serious conflicts of interest are still not in the past for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA): a look at the agency’s working group on the risks associated to gene drive organisms makes this quite clear. For instance, two of the appointed experts are receiving funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which in turn funds research and lobby work in favour of the technology. Even according to EFSA’s own, rather weak, independence policy, one of these appointments should not have been made due to obvious conflicts of interest.

So why did EFSA put together such a problematic expert panel on an issue that is this sensitive? The agency has defended its choices, stating that the appointments are compliant with its independence rules – a claim which in one case is not correct in our assessment. Apart from showing that EFSA has not properly implemented its own rules in this case, the fact that several other grave conflicts of interest did not even trigger the policy demonstrates that there are still severe loopholes.

In 2017, the European Parliament requested that EFSA puts in place a "two-year cooling-off period for all material interests related to the companies whose products are assessed by the Authority and to any organisations funded by them". This simple approach would have prevented such a panel to be appointed, but EFSA preferred to keep loopholes in its 2018 independence policy revision.

After so many years of EFSA’s poor implementation and partial disregard of repeated EU Parliament requests to fix its independence policy, the new Parliament would be wise to step up the pressure on this EU agency.

EFSA created its working group on gene drive following the mandate it received from the European Commission in June 2018. This mandate requested EFSA to “identify potential risks in terms of impact on human and animal health and the environment that gene drive modified organisms could pose”; to “identify potential novel hazards of gene drive modified organisms”; and to “determine whether the existing guidelines for risk assessment are adequate and sufficient for gene drive modified organisms”.

EFSA accepted the mandate in August 2018, created the working group at the end of the year, and promised to deliver its opinion before March 2020. The agency organised a workshop to discuss the issues with various stakeholders in May 2019.

Gene drive is a new, potentially very risky genetic engineering approach through which scientists force a gene – thanks to genome editing techniques such as Crispr-Cas9 – into the population of a given species so that a desired trait is inherited at a higher rate and with greater certainty than through natural reproduction alone. If ever effective and released into the environment, this could enable the genetic re-engineering of an entire species in the wild, whether it be to eradicate or transform it - with vast implications.

So far, the technology has not proven to be reversible or containable, meaning mistakes must be avoided at all costs. As a result, the main current sources of funding for developing the technology are either philanthropy (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) or the military (the US Department of Defense’s DARPA agency). As gene drive organisms can have military uses as well – US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper even listed genome editing as a potential weapon of mass destruction in February 2016 – the military is also seeking antidotes to it. In December 2017, CEO together with other groups documented how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was funding lobby work at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, in coordination with other US and EU lobby groups from the biotech and pesticides industries, to convince regulators worldwide to oppose a moratorium on the technology.

The development of gene drives has already led to major public controversy as well as debates among scientists, politicians and civil society. In November 2016, 170 groups (including CEO) called upon the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity to place a moratorium on the technology. Scientists are calling upon all researchers working with gene drives to adopt the same security measures as those required for work with self-propagating pathogens like viruses.

For now, gene drives organisms have not been used in the wild, only in the lab. However, some companies are already developing GM insects for a comparable purpose of pests suppression, such as the British firm Oxitec (short for ‘Oxford Insects Technologies’), created in 2002 as a spin-off from the University of Oxford. The company was bought in 2015 for $160 million by the US synthetic biology company Intrexon (whose largest shareholder with more than 40% is Third Security, a US venture capital firm mostly investing in life sciences start-ups), which wants to “design and engineer living systems to address the world’s greatest challenges in health, energy, food, and environmental sustainability”.

Oxitec has released millions of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in trials in Malaysia, Grand Cayman, Brazil and Panama. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can carry multiple diseases, such as dengue fever and the chikungunya and zika viruses. Oxitec's mosquitoes have been genetically engineered so that their offspring dies before reproducing, thereby reducing the size of the disease-carrying population. A new version of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes – called Friendly™ – includes a genome modification that causes all female offspring to die (only females feed on humans) but lets all male offspring survivors inherit the genome modification and cause their own female offspring to die, and so on and so forth. The gene is called "self-limiting" because, unlike a gene drive, it is supposed to eventually disappear from the mosquito population a few generations after the release.

Oxitec is also developing a GM version of Anopheles, the mosquito that carries malaria, with the help of $7 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But, beyond the charitable projects, Oxitec is also looking at much bigger markets, where the same technology could be applied to developing GM versions of the most common agricultural insect pests (including the diamondback moth, the fall armyworm, and the soybean looper moth).

While Oxitec claims positive results, these experiments are very contested : citizens of Florida have successfully blocked planned local experiments, and Grand Cayman’s government discontinued funding for the project due to “unsatisfactory results”. Indeed, the evidence that has become available on the releases undermines Oxitec's claims.

Meanwhile, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Target Malaria project is releasing GM mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, but with the intention to pave the way for future releases involving GM mosquitoes carrying a gene drive.

Gene drive is a typical example of technology development that regulators have not yet come to grips with. EFSA’s opinion therefore comes in at a crucial moment, and the independence of the experts in its working group will be critical to deeming the resulting opinion trustworthy. However, an analysis of the Annual Declarations of Interest Sidenote (ADoI) of these experts shows that EFSA has failed to recruit a panel that will be reasonably independent, or that will even reflect the diversity of positions in the debate.