The Irishman heading GM trials in the UK says genetically modified foods can and will play a key role in feeding the world, writes MARK HENNESSY,London Editor

MAURICE MOLONEY spent his early years in the 1950s living upstairs over a sweet-shop in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, where his parents sold confectionery to locals as they headed to the cinema.

By age five, Moloney had moved to Lancashire, where his father, John, had found work in the still-thriving Preston mills. “I did have a trouble a’mill accent for a significant proportion of my life,” he says.

Today, Moloney heads Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, the world’s oldest agricultural research station, which was set up in 1843 by the man who produced the first commercially made fertilizers.

Rothamsted has been in the news because of the GM trials it is undertaking on a strain of spring wheat genetically modified to resist aphids, small bugs that feed by sucking sap from plants.

The tests are not popular with opponents, but the opposition which ended GM trials in the 1990s – including such unusual allies as the Daily Mail and Greenpeace – seems to have weakened considerably.

Last month, more than 100 protesters who had threatened to rip up the crops, were kept away by police, though, in truth, the protesters made few if any real efforts to cause damage.

Moloney, a studious, quietly spoken man, makes an unlikely hate figure, but he is that for some anti-GM campaigners – both because of his role in Rothamsted and earlier work in Canada.

There, he helped to develop canola, a GM variant of rapeseed, resistant to the Round-Up pesticide, and it is work of which he remains proud today.

“The soil was getting really dry and dusty. The top-soil was blowing away. In fact, when I moved to Canada there was a big question about whether we were heading for another Dustbowl.”

In spring, fields filled with massive clouds of top-soil. “If you talk to the prairie farmers they will say that they have got better yields, but what they have really saved is the quality of the soil,” he says.

Educated in Preston College by the Jesuits, Moloney went to Imperial College to study chemistry: “During my under-graduate degree we were taught by three Nobel Prize winners.”

Later he worked for ICI developing plant growth regulators, before doing a PhD in plant biochemistry and later study in Seattle in the US and Switzerland.

His plans to return to Britain were stymied by the education cuts of the Thatcher era: “There really wasn’t anything. That was probably the worst time to be looking for a university job.”

Instead, he visited Calgene, one of the earliest biotech companies in San Francisco: “After I had given my talk the CEO said, ‘Why don’t you come and work for us?’”

Calgene was interested in protecting plants using genetics rather than agricultural chemicals. “So for example, could you make a plant insect-resistant? Either because insects can’t eat it, or they find it some way distasteful, or whatever. Could you make the plant resistant to fungi without using fungicides, for instance?

“That was the basic principle. It appealed to me. Not only was it frontier-thinking but also there were a lot of positive environmental benefits to it.”

Nobody then, in the early 1980s, had conquered transgenics, putting a new gene in a plant. “When I got there nobody had ever done that. We had to devise means of doing it. We did eventually.”

Calgene’s great competitor was Monsanto – which personifies everything that is wrong with GM foods in the eyes of those most opposed to them. Later, Monsanto bought Calgene.

“In terms of patents we were slightly tipped at the post by Monsanto for some. We were the first in some things. We were the first in oil-seeds, which is my work.

“We were the first to do it in tomatoes; we were the first to do it in trees. Monsanto beat us by doing it in tobacco, of all things. Tobacco is like the white mouse of the plant world,” he says.

Calgene’s work was “right at the frontier of what could be done”, opening “a new way of doing plant breeding” on a gene-for-gene basis rather than by selection.

Monsanto’s still best known brand, Round-Up Ready seeds, were developed by Calgene, which allow farmers to spread the Round-Up herbicide without damaging the agricultural crop.

Despite its opponents, and there are many, Round-Up, says Moloney, is “the most benign agricultural chemical” that has ever been found: “It is less toxic than common salt. So you could actually eat it.”

Throughout the morning, Moloney again and again emphasises the need to respect the evidence and the belief in the scientific method, wherever it leads – “without fear or favour”.

Nearly 30 countries are growing transgenic crops, while in the last 15 years “over a billion hectares have been grown and probably about a trillion meals with GM ingredients have been served.

“Nobody has, even in a litigious society like the US, ever won a lawsuit that demonstrates that they have had an adverse effect from eating GM foods.”

In most parts of North and South America, China, Australia and elsewhere, GM is now “a non-issue”, but he accepts that the same situation does not apply in Europe.

Fundamental mistakes were made by scientists, he argues, that allowed for “obfuscation and excessive complication of the science for the general public”.

Monsanto failed to understand “how people functioned in Europe”, who bridled at being told what to do by a large corporation, including adverts telling the EU that it had to accept Round-Up Ready.

“So there was complete cultural incompatibility between what one of the first companies was trying to do and what the general public was seeing.”

Scientists in North America did better: “[There], scientists did get together to make key statements to reassure the public that this wasn’t lunatic, crazy science that put everybody at risk,” he says.

Besides Monsanto’s mistakes, the 1990s GM debate in the UK was lost partly on the back of the “Frankenstein foods” campaign waged by the Daily Mail.

Such a tag is “a slur, not a statement of fact”, says Moloney “[That] is to scare people, as opposed to giving them any information. What are we talking about?

“We are talking about a plant that has resistance to insects so we didn’t have to use insecticides on them. There is one less chemical residue to worry about.”

The Rothamsted trials have been surrounded by a web of disinformation by its enemies, he insists – particularly the allegation that it has patented its work, which it has not. “You have to understand that when we deal with these people they don’t use scientific fact, they just say whatever they feel like saying,” he says trenchantly.

In time, the merits of GM will be accepted, particularly when the world ever more faces food crises, he argues. “A 70 per cent increase in yield is needed. Inevitably that is going to be a big problem.

“Part of what has been going on in the Arab Spring was sparked by things like food riots, [even if] it wasn’t the only thing going on. The knock-on effect for us is that we end up being peacekeepers.

“We’ll have to deal with all those things multiplied by a factor of five or 10 if the food security problem is not dealt with appropriately.”