When fed to rats it affected their kidneys and blood counts. So what might it do to humans? We think you should be told The secret research we reveal today raises the potential health risks of genetically modified foods. Here, environment editor Geoffrey Lean, who has led this paper's campaign on GM technology for the past six years, examines the new evidence. And he asks the questions that must concern us all: why is Monsanto, the company trying to sell GM corn to Britain and Europe, so reluctant to publish the full results of its alarming tests on lab rats? Why are our leaders so keen to buy the unproven technology against the wishes of consumers? And why is the man who first raised these concerns six years ago shunned by the scientific establishment and his former political masters?
22 May 2005
One blustery day six years ago - at the start of The Independent on Sunday's successful GM campaign - I travelled to Aberdeen to meet a man who had been sent to Coventry.
Dr Arpad Pusztai was then the bogeyman of the British scientific establishment. No less a figure than Lord May - then the Government's chief scientific adviser, now president of the Royal Society - had accused him of violating "every canon of scientific rectitude", and ministers and top scientists had queued up to denounce him.
His crime had been to find disturbing evidence that the GM potatoes he was studying damaged the immune systems, brains, livers and kidneys of rats - and to mention it briefly in a television programme before his research was completed and published.
His punishment was draconian; his research was stopped, his team disbanded and his data confiscated (see box). He was ostracised by his colleagues, forced into retirement and gagged for seven months, forbidden to put his case. I was the first journalist to interview him at length, spending six hours with him.
I arrived, very sceptical, at his semi-detached house in the granite city, where he had worked for the prestigious Rowett Research Institute for 37 years, with two handwritten pages of hostile questions. But I was surprised by what I found.
For a start, he proved to be no wild-eyed maverick, but the world's acknowledged top authority in his field, a small, vital, precise man with 270 papers to his name and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Far from a headline-seeker, he was evidently a bewildered stranger to public controversy, cautious in his language, anxious to cross every scientific "t" before venturing a conclusion.
Perhaps most surprising of all he turned out to be, in his words, "a very enthusiastic supporter" of genetic modification who had fully expected his experiments - approved and funded by the Government - to give it a "clean bill of health".
"I was totally taken aback," he told me. "I was absolutely confident that I wouldn't find anything. But the longer I spent on the experiments, the more uneasy I became."
One by one he answered my questions. I can't say I was totally convinced, but I was persuaded of his integrity, and that he deserved a hearing. Grey-faced with the strain - and just recovering from a minor heart attack that he put down to it - he spoke of the "intolerable burden" of being attacked by the scientific community, without being able to defend himself, of being "vilified and totally destroyed".
As we walked to a nearby shop to photocopy some of his papers, he told me that he believed his troubles had started with a phone call to his employers, the Rowett Research Institute, from Downing Street. That really did seem incredible at the time - though rather less so now after the David Kelly affair and the revelations of the Hutton and Butler inquiries.
Some supporting evidence for his suspicion since seems to have emerged (see box). But whatever the truth about that, this was a time when the Government was determined to press full-speed ahead with GM technology - and to rubbish him.
Tony Blair had just put his full weight behind modified foods, letting it be known that he would happily eat them himself. Jack Cunningham, then in charge of the Government's GM strategy, announced that Dr Pusztai had been "comprehensively discredited". His office drew up secret plans - revealed in The Independent on Sunday - to enlist "eminent scientists" to attack him and "trail the Government's key messages".
Worse, the Government refused to undertake the normal scientific process of repeating Dr Pusztai's experiments in order to either confirm or disprove his findings. Top officials at the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food told me that it would be "wrong", "immoral" and "a waste of money" to do so - an extraordinary attitude given the potential threat to public health, should he be right.
In the end all these official efforts were in vain. The public settled the argument simply by refusing to eat GM food. Before the Pusztai controversy, 60 per cent of processed foods on supermarket shelves contained GM material. After it the big chains fell over themselves to remove them in the face of the consumer revolt. Eighty-four per cent of Britons still say they will not eat them and even the most pro-GM ministers admit there is no market for them.
Attention then moved away from the health effects of GM food to the infinitely stronger evidence emerging on the environmental impact of GM crops. Study after study - reported in our pages - showed that genes escaped from them to breed superweeds and to contaminate organic and conventional produce. Finally, the Government's own trials - widely expected to support GM crops - found that growing most of them damaged wildlife.
The biotech companies - in stark contrast to their confidence before the start of our campaign - abandoned their plans to grow GM crops in Britain. Six years ago they were awaiting imminent government approval to grow 53 different varieties of them. Not one of these applications now remains, and no new one is expected to be made in the near future. The Independent on Sunday's campaign has been widely praised for its key role in this volte-face.
Now, the focus is swinging back to GM foods - and their safety. The European Commission is pressing for more and more of them to be allowed to be sold in Britain and the rest of the EU. European governments are almost evenly divided for and against them and, in the resulting deadlock, the commission is using a loophole in the democratic process to nod them through one by one.
The latest modified crop to come up for approval for use in food is MON 863, a modified corn already grown and eaten in the US and Canada. On Thursday officials from EU governments were deadlocked again, making it likely that the commission will again wave it through later in the year.
full: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640402
****************************************************************** "If a man rates all phenomena alike because he knows of no essence that would allow him to discriminate, he will in a fanaticized love of truth make common cause with untruth." NEGATIVE DIALECTICS--Adorno http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
__________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Get on-the-go sports scores, stock quotes, news and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/mobile.html