Sir

New Zealand has found a novel approach to the problems caused by the brain drain and by chronic underfunding for basic biological research1,2. The government's solution is to make much biological research illegal instead of just prohibitively expensive (see page 8).

The Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (HSNO) Act has imposed the most oppressive restrictions on laboratory biological research in the Western world, making even safe science a potentially criminal endeavour. Most universities and research institutions were unaware of the act's full implications until they recently started coming up against them. Just this April, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) revoked all previously given institutional authorities to approve laboratory experiments. It halted any new work involving genetic modification, even the most trivial, until ERMA itself had inspected each experiment.

HSNO makes no distinction between, on the one hand, routine genetic manipulation such as making a DNA library, performed in containment laboratories designed to keep organisms in and the public out, and, on the other, genetic manipulation designed to produce a biological product or organism for field release. Every procedure that puts DNA with any history of in vitro manipulation into any ‘organism’ has to go through an expensive risk assessment by ERMA. The assessment must anticipate every manipulated nucleic acid and every recombinant organism: imagine that, if you are making a DNA library.

ERMA requires up to NZ$3,000 (US$1,400) for each application to import modified organisms safely into containment, even if they are only a source of a new cloning plasmid. So research organisms identical to those that might be considered safe if developed in New Zealand — where there is not enough money to fund their development — are too expensive to import. Materials developed here will still be distributed freely as part of the generosity shown by scientists to one another, but we will not be able to afford to import the analogous materials offered to us for free.

As a university lecturer, I think it would be irresponsible of me to not advise New Zealand biology students to leave for an overseas education. In the short term, we cannot afford to teach them modern genetic techniques — not because our laboratories are unsafe, but because of the ongoing compliance costs under HSNO. In the long term, we will neither keep those most qualified to teach modern biology, nor attract many of our best young biologists back.

Ironically, our government is advocating a new ‘knowledge economy’. How this is to be created is not clear.