Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 30.07.2023, Economy, page 24

The Man with the Gene Scissor

Peter Welters wants to make genetic engineering affordable for agriculture. Laws have prevented this for 25 years. Is His Big Opportunity Coming Now?

Vum Sebastian Balzter

Some company founders have a bold idea, are there at just the right time and are celebrated like heroes for it. Peter Welters' entrepreneurship is of a different kind. It has a lot to do with persistence and evasion, with detours and emergency solutions. Whether he looks like a hero or like a sad knight depends on the perspective.

Peter Welters, 64 years old, Baker's son and doctorate in molecular biologist, is the man with gene scissors. The Laboratories of His Company Phytowelt Green Technologies on the Outskirts of Cologne could produce plants that yield more, are more resistant to diseases and tolerate the heat better than the grains, fruit and vegetables that currently grow in the fields.

If only it were possible to grow, harvest and sell such new varieties in Europe.

That is exactly why Peter Welters founded his company a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps not with a brilliant idea, but with such a good idea that he won a prize for his business plan in a start-up competition. The prize money was his starting capital. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That was in 1998. Welters founded Phytowelt in June. In September, all field tests with genetically modified plants in the European Union were put on hold.

At first, there was only talk of a moratorium on new attempts. But genetic engineering in Europe came under so much public fire that small manufacturers preferred to keep their hands off it completely and large companies moved their research to America. In Germany, angry opponents of genetic engineering devastated the test plots. The ongoing protests against BASF's “genetically modified potato” Amflora are still remembered by many today. It was not logical. Hardly anyone was bothered by the fact that new cancer drugs were being produced with genetically modified bacteria, for example; in agriculture, on the other hand, the new technology should be left out on the old continent. The European genetic engineering regulation adopted in 2003 created the legal basis for this.

Today, genetically modified plants, especially soy beans and corn, are cultivated around the world on an area five times as large as Germany. But not in Europe. The requirements for this are so huge that no one wanted to start with them.

The question now is whether 2023 will one day also be described as a year of change for this topic. As the year in which green genetic engineering still got a chance in Europe. This summer, the EU Commission opened the door that it slammed in front of Peter Welters back then. The Member States should soon decide whether to follow the Commission's proposal to allow a specific form of genetic engineering as a regular new form of plant breeding without the existing hurdles.

If that happens, the scientists from Phytowelt will have a lot of work to do in their laboratories. And Peter Welters wants to be able to feel a bit more heroic than he has been used to in the past 25 years.

That is when he will be able to prove that, contrary to popular belief, green genetic engineering is not just for large corporations with budgets worth billions. But that it can also be used by companies such as phytoworld, which have little capital but a lot of experience and ingenuity. The idea that smaller companies have better opportunities as long as the technology is not used in Europe points Welters to the Realm of Legend: “The opposite is the case. The big players can move abroad, we can't.”

It is primarily about a method called CRISPR-Cas, whose inventors received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it two years ago. They have discovered how specific enzymes can be used to remove components of the genetic material from a cell in a targeted manner. After cutting, the severed DNA strand grows back together, either with or without the incorporation of a piece of foreign genetic material. Research projects abound, and only three CRISPR-Cas plants have been approved for marketing worldwide: one type of tomato in Japan and one type of salad and one type of soy in the United States. For the variant without foreign DNA, the EU could soon relax its rules. In this way, only those mutations can occur which can also occur by chance in nature or as a result of the use of chemicals and radioactivity, which has always been permitted in breeding. It is no longer possible to distinguish whether the changes were brought about in the laboratory or came about otherwise. So neither killer tomatoes nor miracle wheat are to be expected from them. But breeding could progress faster and with fewer failed attempts than before.

The term “gene scissors” has become common for this technique. Agricultural companies such as Syngenta and Bayer work with it in their own laboratories and with their own employees.

However, smaller seed companies without these options, such as Stefan Streng's traditional family business from Franconian, do not necessarily have to do without them. You can hire providers such as Phytowelt as a service provider. How much does it cost to have a wheat plant modified so that it copes better with fungal diseases? Nobody wants to publicly state the exact price. However, around 20,000 to 30,000 euros per cut with genetic scissors and subsequent cultivation of the modified plant should be realistic. In any case, the amount is manageable enough that breeders like Streng even speak of a “democratic method.”

Peter Welters shows visitors the tools needed for this in the yellow clinked flat roof bungalow, which houses his company's research and development department. He is wearing colorful sneakers, trekking pants, and a short-sleeved shirt. With a somewhat dragging step, he moves through the corridors; perhaps it is because of his size, perhaps because of the upset stomach, which he apologetically points out.

Anyone who only expects high-tech in sparkling new buildings, with robots, touch screens and flawless Apple look, can be amazed here. The building, which is somewhat hidden behind trees in the furthest corner of an industrial area, looks so inconspicuous from the outside and inside that it creaks. Hydrangeas are blooming outside the door. There are devices in the laboratory with plenty of signs of use. There are centrifuges and microscopes, a refrigerator and a microwave, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks, mason jars, and boxes full of pipette tips.

Peter Welters pulls a small glass flask with a watery, cloudy liquid out of the refrigerator. “That's exactly what the gene scissors look like,” he says.

For the big act, a drop of the enzyme solution would now be applied to a so-called fusion plate, a tub made of transparent plastic about the size of a matchbox, at a sterile workplace. There, the enzymes could hit a wheat, strawberry or potato cell. “The cut would be completed in a fraction of a second,” promises Welters.

Would, could, would be: subjunctive. Peter Welters does not currently have any contracts for this technology. In 2020, he used it for a research project, and there were commercial prospects last in 2018. Five seed breeders from Germany and abroad, reports Welters, would have wanted to do business with him back then. They expected the method to be released soon. They had miscalculated. The EU stuck to its strict regulation and the projects were cancelled immediately.

Peter Welters has become accustomed to talking laconically about such deception. Perhaps there were too many of them. He simply says, “Open drawer, close drawer.”

That is why the flask actually does not contain the gene scissors after all, but another watery, cloudy solution. Welters and his approximately 30 employees are using them for one of the many alternative transactions that have kept the company afloat since 1998. Originally, they had wanted to organize field trials for seed breeders. Nothing came of this due to the adverse circumstances mentioned above. They then wanted to use the genetic engineering research of several scientists who came on board as minority shareholders. Nothing came of it either. In the tough world of business, the researchers' famous ideas were worth little. There was no market for this type of high-tech in Europe.

“Our goal was to give up all these patents at some point,” says Peter Welters looking back. “They just cost us a lot of lawyers' fees and didn't make any money.”

That sounds a lot hardened again. But it must have been a very painful insight for Welters at first. There is simply too much enthusiasm for science when he tells the story of his life. As a result, he discovered his passion for biology even as a student. “I was fascinated by a volume from the series 'Spectrum of Science, 'that was the start,” reports Welters. He studied chemistry in Aachen, later biochemistry in Tübingen and finally received his doctorate in Cologne. Welters still raves about his doctoral supervisor Jeff Schell, “the inventor of plant gene technology.”

The economic potential of biotechnology was then demonstrated to the young scientist during a research stay of several years in the United States. During the biotech start-up boom there, the trees seemed to be growing in the sky, and business plans were being written all the time. Compared to the dreams of back then, the balance sheet is modest today. “I imagined it to be bigger,” Welters admits. “As a company with 100 or 200 employees.” Of course, he already knew from home how many ups and downs an entrepreneurial life could contain. His father had set up a bakery chain in Mönchengladbach, then took over a restaurant and finally earned his money in the vending machine business and in the real estate sector, always as a self-employed person. “His example probably showed me how important flexibility is,” says Welters looking back.

In summary: Nothing could be earned with the field tests; hardly anything could be earned with green genetic engineering. “We have the knowledge and skills available for this without being able to use them,” says Welters, describing the status quo. Meanwhile, poplar varieties that grow particularly quickly have become flagship products. And raspberry flavor, which is produced by coli bacteria in the fermenter.

The Trick with Poplars is also important for the work with gene scissors that may soon be in demand. For now, Welters has decided to speed up plant breeding in the way a loophole in the genetic engineering ordinance allows. Breeding outdoors and even in a commercial greenhouse is a lengthy process. The Augustinian Monk Gregor Mendel described it systematically for the first time in the 19th century. By crossing and backcrossing, desired properties can be strengthened and stabilized. With poplars, this takes much longer than with grains, because a young tree in the wild needs many years before it produces its first pollen. In the laboratory, cells can be purified more quickly. Purists also want to see this as genetic engineering, but EU law makes an exception. Anyone who knows how it works can make the cells grow again after this treatment. Welters estimates that a poplar cycle can be shortened to one twentieth of the usual duration in this way.

“That is actually a trade secret,” warns the boss, as one of his employees wants to demonstrate the process in detail, using the correctly mixed enzyme solution and an electric pulse. One floor down, in the basement of the Cologne bungalow, LED tubes provide everlasting early summer lighting. There, the strained cells are nurtured, supplied with nutrients and hormones so that they divide and grow. Experts call this regeneration. Even after a CRISPR-Cas procedure, Peter Welters asserts, it is more tricky than simply cutting with gene scissors.

“This requires experience and sensitivity,” says Welters. “It's not mumbo jumbo or alchemy, it's science.” He is referring to green genetic engineering as a whole. His message is clear: It would be irresponsible to continue to refrain from feeding the world, fighting climate change, maintaining biodiversity and avoiding insect venom. Not to mention the wasting of talent that has been accepted. “99 percent of the doctoral students in my class left this field of research,” says Welters.

Is the genetic engineering turnaround coming now? Peter Welters is skeptical. The outcome of the debate that has unfolded since the EU Commission's proposal was incalculable. It sounds like: Just don't fall into the same trap again and be deceived again. That's the way it is with burnt children.

https://www.phytowelt.com/faz-artikel-der-mann-mit-der-gen-schere/

‍

© All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by Frankfurter Allgemeine Archiv.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 30.07.2023, Economy, page 24

The Man with the Gene Scissor

Peter Welters wants to make genetic engineering affordable for agriculture. Laws have prevented this for 25 years. Is His Big Opportunity Coming Now?

Vum Sebastian Balzter

Some company founders have a bold idea, are there at just the right time and are celebrated like heroes for it. Peter Welters' entrepreneurship is of a different kind. It has a lot to do with persistence and evasion, with detours and emergency solutions. Whether he looks like a hero or like a sad knight depends on the perspective.

Peter Welters, 64 years old, Baker's son and doctorate in molecular biologist, is the man with gene scissors. The Laboratories of His Company Phytowelt Green Technologies on the Outskirts of Cologne could produce plants that yield more, are more resistant to diseases and tolerate the heat better than the grains, fruit and vegetables that currently grow in the fields.

If only it were possible to grow, harvest and sell such new varieties in Europe.

That is exactly why Peter Welters founded his company a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps not with a brilliant idea, but with such a good idea that he won a prize for his business plan in a start-up competition. The prize money was his starting capital. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That was in 1998. Welters founded Phytowelt in June. In September, all field tests with genetically modified plants in the European Union were put on hold.

At first, there was only talk of a moratorium on new attempts. But genetic engineering in Europe came under so much public fire that small manufacturers preferred to keep their hands off it completely and large companies moved their research to America. In Germany, angry opponents of genetic engineering devastated the test plots. The ongoing protests against BASF's “genetically modified potato” Amflora are still remembered by many today. It was not logical. Hardly anyone was bothered by the fact that new cancer drugs were being produced with genetically modified bacteria, for example; in agriculture, on the other hand, the new technology should be left out on the old continent. The European genetic engineering regulation adopted in 2003 created the legal basis for this.

Today, genetically modified plants, especially soy beans and corn, are cultivated around the world on an area five times as large as Germany. But not in Europe. The requirements for this are so huge that no one wanted to start with them.

The question now is whether 2023 will one day also be described as a year of change for this topic. As the year in which green genetic engineering still got a chance in Europe. This summer, the EU Commission opened the door that it slammed in front of Peter Welters back then. The Member States should soon decide whether to follow the Commission's proposal to allow a specific form of genetic engineering as a regular new form of plant breeding without the existing hurdles.

If that happens, the scientists from Phytowelt will have a lot of work to do in their laboratories. And Peter Welters wants to be able to feel a bit more heroic than he has been used to in the past 25 years.

That is when he will be able to prove that, contrary to popular belief, green genetic engineering is not just for large corporations with budgets worth billions. But that it can also be used by companies such as phytoworld, which have little capital but a lot of experience and ingenuity. The idea that smaller companies have better opportunities as long as the technology is not used in Europe points Welters to the Realm of Legend: “The opposite is the case. The big players can move abroad, we can't.”

It is primarily about a method called CRISPR-Cas, whose inventors received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it two years ago. They have discovered how specific enzymes can be used to remove components of the genetic material from a cell in a targeted manner. After cutting, the severed DNA strand grows back together, either with or without the incorporation of a piece of foreign genetic material. Research projects abound, and only three CRISPR-Cas plants have been approved for marketing worldwide: one type of tomato in Japan and one type of salad and one type of soy in the United States. For the variant without foreign DNA, the EU could soon relax its rules. In this way, only those mutations can occur which can also occur by chance in nature or as a result of the use of chemicals and radioactivity, which has always been permitted in breeding. It is no longer possible to distinguish whether the changes were brought about in the laboratory or came about otherwise. So neither killer tomatoes nor miracle wheat are to be expected from them. But breeding could progress faster and with fewer failed attempts than before.

The term “gene scissors” has become common for this technique. Agricultural companies such as Syngenta and Bayer work with it in their own laboratories and with their own employees.

However, smaller seed companies without these options, such as Stefan Streng's traditional family business from Franconian, do not necessarily have to do without them. You can hire providers such as Phytowelt as a service provider. How much does it cost to have a wheat plant modified so that it copes better with fungal diseases? Nobody wants to publicly state the exact price. However, around 20,000 to 30,000 euros per cut with genetic scissors and subsequent cultivation of the modified plant should be realistic. In any case, the amount is manageable enough that breeders like Streng even speak of a “democratic method.”

Peter Welters shows visitors the tools needed for this in the yellow clinked flat roof bungalow, which houses his company's research and development department. He is wearing colorful sneakers, trekking pants, and a short-sleeved shirt. With a somewhat dragging step, he moves through the corridors; perhaps it is because of his size, perhaps because of the upset stomach, which he apologetically points out.

Anyone who only expects high-tech in sparkling new buildings, with robots, touch screens and flawless Apple look, can be amazed here. The building, which is somewhat hidden behind trees in the furthest corner of an industrial area, looks so inconspicuous from the outside and inside that it creaks. Hydrangeas are blooming outside the door. There are devices in the laboratory with plenty of signs of use. There are centrifuges and microscopes, a refrigerator and a microwave, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks, mason jars, and boxes full of pipette tips.

Peter Welters pulls a small glass flask with a watery, cloudy liquid out of the refrigerator. “That's exactly what the gene scissors look like,” he says.

For the big act, a drop of the enzyme solution would now be applied to a so-called fusion plate, a tub made of transparent plastic about the size of a matchbox, at a sterile workplace. There, the enzymes could hit a wheat, strawberry or potato cell. “The cut would be completed in a fraction of a second,” promises Welters.

Would, could, would be: subjunctive. Peter Welters does not currently have any contracts for this technology. In 2020, he used it for a research project, and there were commercial prospects last in 2018. Five seed breeders from Germany and abroad, reports Welters, would have wanted to do business with him back then. They expected the method to be released soon. They had miscalculated. The EU stuck to its strict regulation and the projects were cancelled immediately.

Peter Welters has become accustomed to talking laconically about such deception. Perhaps there were too many of them. He simply says, “Open drawer, close drawer.”

That is why the flask actually does not contain the gene scissors after all, but another watery, cloudy solution. Welters and his approximately 30 employees are using them for one of the many alternative transactions that have kept the company afloat since 1998. Originally, they had wanted to organize field trials for seed breeders. Nothing came of this due to the adverse circumstances mentioned above. They then wanted to use the genetic engineering research of several scientists who came on board as minority shareholders. Nothing came of it either. In the tough world of business, the researchers' famous ideas were worth little. There was no market for this type of high-tech in Europe.

“Our goal was to give up all these patents at some point,” says Peter Welters looking back. “They just cost us a lot of lawyers' fees and didn't make any money.”

That sounds a lot hardened again. But it must have been a very painful insight for Welters at first. There is simply too much enthusiasm for science when he tells the story of his life. As a result, he discovered his passion for biology even as a student. “I was fascinated by a volume from the series 'Spectrum of Science, 'that was the start,” reports Welters. He studied chemistry in Aachen, later biochemistry in Tübingen and finally received his doctorate in Cologne. Welters still raves about his doctoral supervisor Jeff Schell, “the inventor of plant gene technology.”

The economic potential of biotechnology was then demonstrated to the young scientist during a research stay of several years in the United States. During the biotech start-up boom there, the trees seemed to be growing in the sky, and business plans were being written all the time. Compared to the dreams of back then, the balance sheet is modest today. “I imagined it to be bigger,” Welters admits. “As a company with 100 or 200 employees.” Of course, he already knew from home how many ups and downs an entrepreneurial life could contain. His father had set up a bakery chain in Mönchengladbach, then took over a restaurant and finally earned his money in the vending machine business and in the real estate sector, always as a self-employed person. “His example probably showed me how important flexibility is,” says Welters looking back.

In summary: Nothing could be earned with the field tests; hardly anything could be earned with green genetic engineering. “We have the knowledge and skills available for this without being able to use them,” says Welters, describing the status quo. Meanwhile, poplar varieties that grow particularly quickly have become flagship products. And raspberry flavor, which is produced by coli bacteria in the fermenter.

The Trick with Poplars is also important for the work with gene scissors that may soon be in demand. For now, Welters has decided to speed up plant breeding in the way a loophole in the genetic engineering ordinance allows. Breeding outdoors and even in a commercial greenhouse is a lengthy process. The Augustinian Monk Gregor Mendel described it systematically for the first time in the 19th century. By crossing and backcrossing, desired properties can be strengthened and stabilized. With poplars, this takes much longer than with grains, because a young tree in the wild needs many years before it produces its first pollen. In the laboratory, cells can be purified more quickly. Purists also want to see this as genetic engineering, but EU law makes an exception. Anyone who knows how it works can make the cells grow again after this treatment. Welters estimates that a poplar cycle can be shortened to one twentieth of the usual duration in this way.

“That is actually a trade secret,” warns the boss, as one of his employees wants to demonstrate the process in detail, using the correctly mixed enzyme solution and an electric pulse. One floor down, in the basement of the Cologne bungalow, LED tubes provide everlasting early summer lighting. There, the strained cells are nurtured, supplied with nutrients and hormones so that they divide and grow. Experts call this regeneration. Even after a CRISPR-Cas procedure, Peter Welters asserts, it is more tricky than simply cutting with gene scissors.

“This requires experience and sensitivity,” says Welters. “It's not mumbo jumbo or alchemy, it's science.” He is referring to green genetic engineering as a whole. His message is clear: It would be irresponsible to continue to refrain from feeding the world, fighting climate change, maintaining biodiversity and avoiding insect venom. Not to mention the wasting of talent that has been accepted. “99 percent of the doctoral students in my class left this field of research,” says Welters.

Is the genetic engineering turnaround coming now? Peter Welters is skeptical. The outcome of the debate that has unfolded since the EU Commission's proposal was incalculable. It sounds like: Just don't fall into the same trap again and be deceived again. That's the way it is with burnt children.

https://www.phytowelt.com/faz-artikel-der-mann-mit-der-gen-schere/

‍

© All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by Frankfurter Allgemeine Archiv.