In message <Pine.ULT.3.91.990221224617.27513A-100000 at cumsl.ctr.columbia. edu>, Joseph E. Moryl <joe at cumsl.ctr.columbia.edu> writes
quoting Nick Cohen in the Guardian newspaper on GM Food
> The dopey British had
>finally woken up to the implications of genetically modified food,
>the alarming nature of which had already caused riots from India to
>France.
..........
> Yesterday Tony Blair, shaken by the
>spectacle of the many sticking their noses into the business of the few,
>denounced his critics as 'hypocrites', and Friends of the
>Earth and other pressure groups as 'tyrants'.
>
>'There is no scientific evidence' to justify a ban,' he said, and anyone
>who contradicted him was - what else? - 'scaremongering'.
In fact the Prime Minister was shown to be quite correct and Cohen nothing more than a scaremonger. The impetus behind the awakening of the 'dopey British' were the findings of Dr Arpad Pusztai that genetically modified potatoes caused thickening of the stomach wall of rats who at them for 100 days (the equivalent of a ten year potato diet for humans).
These results were trumpeted by Cohen's paper as proof of the dangerous implications of 'Frankenfood'. As usual, Cohen was blind drunk when he wrote his column, and had failed to notice that Pusztai's extrapolations from his experiments had been blown out of the water by scientists.
Pusztai failed to point out that the negative effect was not due to the gene sequence itself, but that the modified potato produced poisonous lectins. But poisons are hardly alien to nature. One scientist commented that Pusztai's research was akin to showing that a cocktail of arsenic and vermouth was poisonous, and that therefore all cocktails were poisonous.
Debating the Guardian's George Monbiot, on GMOs veteran leftist and geneticist Steve Jones (The Language of the Genes), so frustrated at the journalists know-nothing scare-mongering said 'I did not know whether George Monbiot was a liar or a fool - now I see he is both.'
So when Joseph writes
>I can't imagine a major US paper that would touch
>this article:
Perhaps he has a point, but Cohen's bluster about multinationals is designed to obscure the fact that the government was right, the reports based on Arpad Pusztai's research were scaremongering.
Incidentally, Richard Lewontin's comments on GMOs should be taken with a pinch of salt, too. When asked to contribute to a television programme on GMOs he declined on the grounds that he was by no means an expert on the matter. -- Jim heartfield