UPI: China rejects 60,000 tons of GM corn from the US.

[proverbialwisdom]

40. It's disingenuous to ignore history.

http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11801-pusztai-to-receive-stuttgart-peace-prize

Dr Pusztai on the 10th anniversary of GM safety scandal

The following is an email - of 10 August 2008 from Dr Pusztai to Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews of GMWatch, in which Dr Pusztai comments on the 10th anniversary of the television interview.

Dear Claire and Jonathan,

I thought that I should write to you on the 10th anniversary of my 150 seconds of TV "fame" and tell you what I think now. It is very appropriate to write to you because you have provided the most comprehensive service to inform people about the shenanigans of the GM biotechnology industry and its advocates.

On this anniversary I have to admit that, unfortunately, not much has changed since 1998. In one of the few sentences I said in my broadcast ten years ago, I asked for a credible GM testing protocol to be established that would be acceptable to the majority of scientists and to people in general. 10 years on we still haven't got one. Instead, in Europe we have an unelected EFSA GMO Panel with no clear responsibility to European consumers, which invariably underwrites the safety of whatever product the GM biotech industry is pushing onto us.

All of us asked for independent, transparent and inclusive research into the safety of GM plants, and particularly those used in foods. There is not much sign of this either. There are still "many opinions but very few data"; less than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published describing the results of work relating to GM safety that could actually be regarded as being of an academic standard; and the majority of even these is from industry-supported labs. Instead we have the likes of Tony Trewavas and others writing unsupported claims for the safety of GM food and defaming people like Rachel Carson who can no longer defend herself; not that she needs to be defended from such nonentities.

In normal times one would not pay much attention to such people desperately trying to be seen as the advocates of true science, but these are not normal times. The mostly engineered (GM engineered) food crisis gives the GM biotech industry and its warriors an opportunity to come to the fore with claims that GM is the only way to save a hungry world; a claim not much supported by responsible bodies, such as the IAASTD. The advocates of GM also now think that they have found a chink in the armory of people's resolve that they can exploit by telling us that we would not be able to feed our animals without GM feedstuffs. In this way, they hope to bring in GM by the backdoor. Please remember that whatever our animals eat, we shall also get back indirectly. Rather ominously, there has been no work whatever to show the safety of the meat of GM-fed animals.

We must not underestimate the financial and political clout of the GM biotechnology industry. Most of our politicians are committed to the successful introduction of GM foods. We must therefore use all means at our disposal to show people the shallowness of these claims by the industry and the lack of credible science behind them, and then trust to people's good sense, just as in 1998, to see through the falseness of the claims for the safety of untested GM foods.

Let's hope that on the 20th anniversary I shall not have to write another warning letter about the dangers of untested GM foods!

Best wishes to all
Arpad Pusztai

http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11801-pusztai-to-receive-stuttgart-peace-prize

Pustzai to Receive Stuttgart Peace Prize

We've just heard that Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Susan Bardocz will be presented with this year's Stuttgart Peace Prize. The award is for their tireless advocacy for independent risk research. Both have made an essential contribution to a broader understanding of the dangers of genetic manipulation. The award also honours their courage and scientific integrity as well as their undaunted insistence on the public's right to know.

The award will take place on 18 December with a Film and Book launch at 4 pm and a Peace Gala at 7:30 pm, at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart.

More details (in German) here: http://www.gentechnikfreies-europa.eu/

Below is a profile of Dr Pusztai and how he changed the GM debate.

http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Arpad_Pusztai

Arpad Pusztai

The history of events and the quotes below are adapted from Andy Rowell's book, Don't Worry, It's Safe to Eat, Earthscan, 2003, ISBN 1853839329.

On 10 August 1998 the GM debate changed forever with the broadcast of a programme on British TV about GM food safety featuring a brief but revealing interview with Dr Arpad Pusztai about his research into GM food safety. Dr Pusztai told of his findings on the ill effects of GM potatoes on laboratory rats. He was subsequently gagged and suspended by his institute, the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland, his research team was disbanded, and his research data was confiscated. He was subjected to a campaign of vilification and misrepresentation by several pro-GM scientific bodies and pro-GM lobbyists, in an attempt to discredit him and his research.

The story began three years earlier. That's when the UK government's Scottish Office commissioned a three-year multi-centre research programme into the safety of GM food under the coordination of Dr Arpad Pusztai. At that time there was not a single publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the safety of GM food.

Dr Pusztai, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was an eminent scientist. He was the world's leading expert on the plant proteins known as lectins. He had published three books and over 270 scientific studies.

He and his team fought off competition from 28 other research organisations from across Europe to be awarded the GBP1.6 million contract by the Scottish Office. The project methodology was also reviewed and passed by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) - the UK government's main funding body for the biological sciences.

The research involved feeding GM potatoes to rats and monitoring physiological changes. By late 1997 preliminary results from the rat-feeding experiments were showing totally unexpected and worrying changes in the size and weight of the rat's body organs. Liver and heart sizes were getting smaller, and so was the brain. There were also indications that the rats' immune systems were weakening.

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Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine
Dr Stanley WB Ewen FRCPath, Arpad Pusztai PhD
The Lancet - 16 October 1999 ( Vol. 354, Issue 9187, Pages 1353-1354 )
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(98)05860-7

http://www.gmwatch.eu/latest-listing/1-news-items/12567-scientists-under-attack-film-review

Scientists under attack: Genetic engineering in the magnetic field of money
By Bertram Verhaag
Review by Claire Robinson

Denkmal-Film GmbH 2009

Available in English, German, or French versions
WORLDSALES: Tel [phone] Email [e-mail] for one-off screeners for academic purposes. As yet there is no official distributor for public consumption and the film has not yet been released in the UK.

Billed as "a political thriller on GMOs and freedom of speech", this film by the German film-maker Bertram Verhaag tells the stories of two scientists, Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Ignacio Chapela, whose research showed negative findings on GM foods and crops. Both suffered the fate of those who challenge the powerful vested interests that dominate agribusiness and scientific research. They were vilified and intimidated, attempts were made to suppress and discredit their research, and their careers were derailed.

Pusztai found that the internal organs of rats fed GM insecticidal potatoes either increased in size or did not develop properly compared with controls. His experiments turned up no less than 36 significant differences between GM-fed and non-GM-fed animals. Pusztai, encouraged by his research institute, gave a 150-second interview on British TV in which he summarised his findings and said it was unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs for GM foods.

For two days, Pusztai was treated as a hero by his institute. But following a phone call from UK prime minister Tony Blair to the institute's head, Pusztai was fired and gagged under threat of a lawsuit. His research team was disbanded and his data were confiscated. Lies were circulated about his research that he could not counter due to the gagging order, lifted only later when he was due to appear before a Parliamentary Committee. For Pusztai’s co-researchers, the gagging order remains in place for life.

Pusztai's results threatened the GM industry because they showed that it wasn't the insecticide engineered into the potatoes that damaged the rats, but the genetic engineering process itself. So the problem wasn't just with these GM potatoes but potentially with all GM foods on the market. The only solution for the industry and its friends in government was to shoot the messenger.

Traumatic though this was for Pusztai, it wasn't the biggest shock he had to face regarding GM foods. That came when he was asked to review safety submissions from the GM industry for crops we were already eating and found that they were scientifically flimsy. "That was a turning point in my life," said Pusztai. "I was doing safety studies; they were doing as little as possible [in terms of safety testing] to get their foods on the market as quickly as they could."

Another scientist whose run-in with the GM industry is featured in the film is Ignacio Chapela, a molecular geneticist at UC Berkeley. His research, co-authored with David Quist and published in the journal Nature, revealed that Mexican maize had been contaminated with GM genes. The finding was explosive because Mexico is the centre of origin for maize and the planting of GM maize there was illegal.

Chapela found himself the target of a vicious internet campaign condemning him as more of an activist than a scientist and claiming that his paper was false. Nature's editor published a partial retraction of the paper. As Chapela points out in the film, the editor's action flew in the face of scientific method. In the normal way of things, a journal editor publishes a study that he and peer reviewers judge to be sound. It is for subsequent published studies to confirm or correct the findings. It is not for the editor to state that he would not have published a study had he known then what he knows now without the benefit of further peer reviewed scientific input. The editor's move showed how the GM industry is rewriting the rules of science for its own ends.

To add insult to injury, the internet campaign against Chapela turned out not to have been initiated and fuelled not by his scientific peers but by fake citizens, "sockpuppets" invented by the Bivings Group, a public relations firm contracted by Monsanto.

Scientists Under Attack goes on to show how the GM industry has blocked the evolution of scientific knowledge. When Russian scientist Irina Ermakova's study found high mortality rates and low body weight in rats fed GM soy, and when Austrian government research found that decreased fertility in mice fed GM maize, the industry carried out its usual campaign of vilification. If the industry were interested in scientific truth, it would push for studies to be repeated with the alleged "flaws" corrected. But this never happens. Instead, GM companies use their patent-based ownership of GM crops to deny scientists access to research materials the GM crop and the non-GM parent line control. So the original research showing problems with GM crops is buried under a deluge of smears and follow up studies are not done. For the public, the difficulty and expense involved in accessing full research papers makes it hard to find where the truth lies.

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UCB has dealt harshly with critics of its deals with industry. In 2003, five years after Chapela's protest against the Novartis deal and two years after publication of his Mexican maize findings, he was denied tenure. The university only backed down after Chapela threatened to sue. In Scientists Under Attack, he says: "In genetic engineering, one question means one career. You ask one question, you get the answer. You might or might not be able to publish it. That's the end of your career. What's unique in my case is that I survived."

Chapela adds that the most powerful censorship does not come directly from the GM industry but from closer to home: "It's in the consciousness of the scientist. You censor yourself." In other words, it's not so much that the GM industry has taken away our power, but rather that we've given it away.

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RELATED: http://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=544398
Link: DO SEED COMPANIES CONTROL GM CROP RESEARCH? Scientific American, Editorial, August 2009 edition, published 21 July 2009
Link: GM industry's strong-arm tactics with researchers - Nature Biotechnology Monday, 12 October 2009 16:25