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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] no research against GMO is allowed
  • Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:24:28 -0600


The Pusztai scandal laid bare
(text originally published by GM Watch on the 10th August 2005)
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5592

...on the 10th August 1998 the GM debate changed forever.

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.

Dr Pusztai was interviewed for a programme about GM food being made by
Granada TV's 'The World in Action'. The filming took place in late June 1998
with the agreement of the director of the Rowett Institute, Professor James,
and in the presence of the Rowett Institute's press officer. The World in
Action interview was broadcast on the evening of Monday 10th August 1998.

Later that evening Professor James congratulated Dr Pusztai on his TV
appearance, commenting on 'how well Arpad had handled the questions'. The
next day a further press release from the Rowett noted that 'a range of
carefully controlled studies underlie the basis of Dr Pusztai's concerns'.
However, reportedly following two calls to the Rowett from the Prime
Minister's Office, the Government, the Royal Society and the Rowett launched
a vitriolic campaign to sack, silence and ridicule Dr Pusztai.

He was accused of unprofessional conduct because his work had not been
peer-reviewed. However, his research subsequently passed peer-review after
being reviewed by a larger than usual panel of scientists and was published
(see below). Many people also take the view that in circumstances where
research is giving rise to serious concerns that may need to be addressed
sooner rather than later, it is acceptable for scientists to act as whistle
blowers and draw attention to the problems their research is uncovering even
prior to peer-reviewed publication.

The Government criticised the methodology of Pusztai's research despite the
fact that this had been approved in advance by its own Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council. Neither the Government nor any other
official body has ever repeated or refined Dr Pusztai's experiments to test
the validity of his results.

The Royal Society and its leading Fellows were key players in the attacks on
Dr Pusztai from the time he went public with doubts about the safety of GM
foods. In February 1999, for instance, nineteen Fellows of the Royal Society
condemned Pusztai, in all but name, in a letter published in the national
press. Among the signatories was Peter Lachmann, who played a key role in
the attacks on Pusztai.

Three months later in May 1999 the Royal Society published a partial 'peer
review' of Pusztai's then unpublished research. This review was based not on
a properly prepared paper, like that Pusztai and his collaborator Ewen
submitted to The Lancet for peer-review, but on a far-from-complete internal
report intended for use by Pusztai's research team at the Rowett Institute.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, described the Royal Society review as
'a gesture of breathtaking impertinence to the Rowett Institute scientists
who should be judged only on the full and final publication of their work.'

The Royal Society's review was organised by members of a working group
appointed by the Society in coordination with the Society's officers. The
Royal Society claimed that anyone who had already commented on the Pusztai
affair had been excluded from this decision making process in order to avoid
bias. However, William Hill, Patrick Bateson, Brian Heap and Eric Ash, who
were all involved, were all among the co-signatories of the letter
condemning Pusztai that had been published in The Daily Telegraph back in
February.

In addition, four key people involved, including the Chair of the working
group, Noreen Murray, as well as Brian Heap, Rebecca Bowden and Sir Aaron
Klug, were all part of the earlier working group that had issued the Royal
Society's 1998 report supporting GM foods.

There were other issues of bias. For instance, William Hill, the chair of
the Pusztai working group, was also the deputy chair of the Roslin
Institute, famous for genetically modifying animals and for cloning Dolly
the sheep. Roslin in turn had links to Geron Biomed for whom Lachmann
consulted. Similarly, Noreen Murray was the wife of the co-founder of
Europe's first biotechnology company, Biogen.

Undaunted by the Royal Society's attack on their unpublished work, Pusztai
and his co-researcher, Prof Stanley Ewen, submitted their final paper on
their experiments to The Lancet. It was sent to six reviewers, double the
normal number, and a clear majority were in favour of its publication.

However, prior to publication the Lancet's editor Richard Horton received a
phone call from Peter Lachmann, the former Vice-President of the Royal
Society. According to Horton, Lachmann called him 'immoral' for publishing
something he knew to be 'untrue'. Towards the end of the conversation Horton
says Lachmann also told him that if he published Pusztai's paper, this would
'have implications for his personal position' as editor.

The Guardian broke the news of Horton being threatened in November 1999 in a
front-page story. It quoted Horton saying that the Royal Society had acted
like a Star Chamber over the Pusztai affair. 'The Royal Society has
absolutely no remit to conduct that sort of inquiry.' Lachmann denied
threatening Horton although he admitted making the phone call in order to
discuss the pending publication.

The Guardian also talked of a GM 'rebuttal unit' operating from within the
Royal Society. According to the journalist Andy Rowell, who helped research
The Guardian article, Rebecca Bowden, who had coordinated the Pusztai
peer-review and who had worked for the Government's Biotechnology Unit
before joining The Royal Society in 1998, admitted to the paper, 'We have an
organization that filters the news out there. It's really an information
exchange to keep an eye on what's happening and to know what the government
is having problems about . its just so that I know who to put up.'

The attacks on The Lancet editor and his decision to publish Pusztai's paper
continued. Sir Aaron Klug, vigorously opposed the publication of Pusztai's
research, saying it was fatally flawed in design because the protein content
of the diets which control groups of rats were fed on was not the same as
that of the other diets. Pusztai commented: 'In fact, the paper clearly
states that ALL diets had the same protein content and were iso-energetic. I
cannot assume that Sir Aaron is not sufficiently intelligent to read a
simple statement as that, so the only conclusion I can come to is that he
deliberately briefed the reporters with something that was untrue.'

Richard Horton remained unbowed. 'Stanley Ewen and Arpad Pusztai's research
letter,' he wrote, 'was published on grounds of scientific merit, as well as
public interest'. What Sir Aaron Klug from the Royal Society cannot 'defend
is the reckless decision of the Royal Society to abandon the principles of
due process in passing judgement on their work. To review and then publish
criticism of these researchers' findings without publishing either their
original data or their response was, at best, unfair and ill-judged'.

The attacks continue unabated. Peter Lachmann's successor as Biological
Secretary of the Royal Society, Patrick Bateson, told readers of the British
Association's journal Science and Public Affairs that The Lancet had only
published Pusztai's research 'in the face of objections by its
statistically-competent referees' (June 2002, Mavericks are not always
right). Bateson, presumably deliberately, inverts the fact that Pusztai's
Lancet paper successfully came through a peer review process that was far
more stringent than that applying to most published papers.

In an article in The Independent, giving the Royal Society's views on why
the public no longer trusts experts like themselves - 'Scientists blame
media and fraud for fall in public trust' - Pusztai's work is categorised as
'fraud'. Pusztai's peer reviewers, we are told in the article, 'refused it
for publication, citing numerous flaws in its methods - notably that the
rats in the experiment had not been fed GM potatoes, but normal ones spiked
with a toxin that GM potatoes might have made.' Almost every word of this is
straight fabrication. There was no fraud. Rats were fed GM potatoes. The
publication of Pusztai's Lancet paper was supported by a clear majority of
its peer reviewers, etc. etc. It is particularly ironic that such a travesty
should have been published in an article reporting the Royal Society's
concerns about the reporting of science in the media.

In February 2002 a new Royal Society report on GM crops was published as an
update to the Society's September 1998 report on GM. The expert group which
produced it was much more broadly based than in '98 and the report took a
noticeably more cautious line. 'British Scientists Turn on GM Foods', ran
The Guardian's headline on a report which included an admission 'that GM
technology could lead to... unpredicted harmful changes in the nutritional
status of foods'.

The expert group was chaired by Jim Smith, who had sat on the Society's
Pusztai working group, and tucked away inside the report was a paragraph on
Pusztai. Once again, it was designed to mislead.

The first part of the paragraph read: 'In June 1999, the Royal Society
published a report, review of data on possible toxicity of GM potatoes, in
response to claims made by Dr Pusztai (Ewen and Pusztai, 1999). The report
found that Dr Pusztai had produced no convincing evidence of adverse effects
from GM potatoes on the growth of rats or their immune function.'

The Royal Society report references the phrase 'claims made by Dr Pusztai' -
claims it said it had reviewed - to the article published by Pusztai and
Ewen in The Lancet in 1999. In fact, however, the Royal Society's partial
review of Pusztai's research was published months before The Lancet article
appeared. The Royal Society thus conceals the fact that it had only ever
reviewed part of Pusztai's data, condemning him ahead of publication of his
actual paper.

The 2002 report continued: 'It concluded that the only way to clarify Dr
Pusztai's claims would be to refine his experimental design and carry out
further studies to test clearly defined hypotheses focused on the specific
effects reported by him. Such studies, on the results of feeding GM sweet
peppers and GM tomatoes to rats, and GM soya to mice and rats, have now been
completed and no adverse effects have been found (Gasson and Burke, 2001).'

But the Gasson and Burke paper, to which these further feeding studies are
referenced by the Society, was not a piece of primary research but an
'opinion' piece written by two pro-GM scientists, Mike Gasson and Derek
Burke. Worse, one of t he two further studies mentioned had not even been
published, except by way of summary, ie it had never been fully
peer-reviewed. In other words, the Royal Society uses an unpublished and
un-peer-reviewed study to attack Pusztai, two years after it had condemned
him for speaking to the media without first publishing peer-reviewed work.

In response to criticism, the Royal Society admitted that the work in
question remained unpublished but said this was not a problem because, 'it
had been discussed at international scientific conferences'. By this
definition, however, Pusztai's research would have been equally validated
before the Society ever launched its partial review as it had been presented
at an international conference prior to the Society's review. Curiously, the
Royal Society has also described the opinion piece by Gasson and Burke as
'primary research,' even though it is a literature review involving no lab
work.

Andy Rowell, author of a book that deals extensively with the Royal
Society's role in the Pusztai affair, writes, 'the fundamental flaw in the
scientific establishment's response is not that they try and damn Pusztai
with unpublished data, nor is it that they have overlooked published studies
[supporting Pusztai's concerns], but that in 1999, everyone agreed that more
work was needed. Three years later, that work remains to be undertaken...
[A] scientific body, like The Royal Society, that allocates millions in
research funds every year, could have funded a repeat of Pusztai's
experiments.'

Nobody ever has.

[Much of the information above comes from Andy Rowell's book, 'Don't Worry:
Its Safe To Eat'. (Earthscan, 2003, ISBN 1853839329). See also:
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=113]
................................................................
Jenny Huston, MA, CEC, CDM, CFPP
Director of Culinary Social Enterprise
Farm to Table Program
Bay Area Community Services
459 - 22nd St.
Oakland, CA 94612
Ph: 510.271.8835
Fax: 510.986.8920
Tdd: 510.986.8902
jhuston@bayareacs.org

http://www.bayareacs.org


The real Arsenal of Democracy is a fertile soil, the fresh produce of which
is the birthright of nations.

- Sir Albert Howard





  • [Livingontheland] no research against GMO is allowed, Tradingpost, 08/12/2008

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