Barry Soper: This week's announcement is a relief for the scientific community

Twenty years ago, the naysayers were telling us the world was about to mutate, we'd see all sorts of weird things appearing on our supermarket shelves and on our streets and in our streams, like two headed fish - at least it would have doubled the chance of catching one!

But while the rest of the world turned their back on this country, leaving it to wallow in its mantra of 100 percent New Zealand Pure, which the former Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison claims to have penned when he was working for image makers in Wellington, they got on with the science of genetics.

The announcement this week, ending the almost 30 year time warp of the gene technology ban, would in the past have led to uncontrolled outrage, as it did when the ban was coming up for renewal 20 years ago.

Thousands of anti-genetic modification protesters took to the streets throughout the country. In Auckland, the crowd was put at around 9,000, rivalling the anti Springbok tour protests in 1981.

They accused the then-Prime Minister Helen Clark of being a dictator and ignoring the wishes of the vast majority of the population. But the moratorium on testing outside the laboratory continued until the announcement this week which saw the scientific community, those who stayed in the country, breathe a sign of relief.

Up until now they were only permitted to do genetic research, anything outside the lab had to go through a complex approval regime.

As one leading scientist said, the relaxation will bring productivity and climate gains for this country, and also health advances, like gene therapies for cancer.

The examples of improvement in many aspects of life can be seen overseas.

Food's become more nutritious and tastier and at a lower cost and a longer shelf life, thanks to genetic modification, or as the Prime Minister calls it, genetic editing.

The environmental benefits are also obvious with fewer resources, like water and fertilizer, having to be used on disease and drought resistant plants.

And when it comes to down on the farm, the benefits should be felt here, making life more pleasant with modified grass, like ryegrass, reducing the flatulence in the dairy herd.

None of this will happen overnight, but the scientists will at least be able to test their research without having to cope with the big stick of Government, although there will be a regulator to make sure things don't get out of hand.

There'll be no repeat of what happened in China a few years back when a highly qualified scientist caused an international uproar after admitting to genetically modifying twin embryos before they were placed in their mother's womb.

The modification targeted the pathway used by the HIV virus to enter cells, which it was claimed would give the babies immunity. They're now living a normal life, he says.

The Chinese jailed him for three years but he's now in Beijing, working on affordable gene therapies for rare diseases.

Put the baby experiment to one side, his current work could indeed be the future for medical advancement, providing consent is given.

This country is of course nowhere near that, but now that we've come out of hibernation and into the real world, who knows what the future will bring?

A leading health academic welcomes the end to the moratorium but says on the medical front it has to be put into some sort of perspective.

He says the moral debate has to keep pace with the scientific one. But he says it has to be rooted in the real world.

Our sense of humanity has to be kept - we don't need a handbrake but we do need careful oversight.

Welcome the brave new world.

Barry Soper is a New Zealand political journalist, and has been featured regularly on radio and television since the 1970s. Currently, Soper's main role is political editor at Newstalk ZB, a radio network in New Zealand.