Commerce Drowning Science In GE Use
Posted 4th April 2001

The following article by Professor Ann Clark on GM food safety research proves that there are NO INDEPENDENT PUBLISHED RESULTS OF FEEDING TRIALS OF GM CROPS anywhere in the world. This is despite the fact that there are now dozens of GM foods that have been approved by various governments, despite the fact that there are now probably over 100,000 full time biotechnologist in the world and despite the fact that complaints about the absence of safety evidence have been made continually for over three years. Major publications such as Science, Nature and the Lancet have reached similar conclusions, as has the Royal Society of Canada, a committee of Irish GPs and the EU-US Biotechnology Consultative Forum.

The fact - or the absence of facts, to be precise - is now indisputable. Government and industry spokespersons now defend GM foods only by declaring that "no-one has been harmed by them" but there is no monitoring going on to detect such harm. One can only conclude that there must be a strict and undeclared global moratorium on safety research to ensure that no proof of danger emerges - as Dr Pusztai and others have discovered to their cost. Now is the time to write to MPs and Government Food Standards Agencies and Agriculture Ministries to demand an immediate Five Year Moratorium on GM food and crops to provide time for proper safety research - and to demand an end to what is obviously a global moratorium on such research.

EXTRACT:

One common criticism in many such studies is the near absence of credible scientific evidence upon which to assess environmental and food safety risks. Last June, the prestigious journal Science reported a detailed database search by Jose Domingo, who could find a grand total of just eight refereed journal articles dealing with any aspect of the safety of GM foods. The eight included only four actual feeding trials, of which three were from Monsanto teams. The final report of the elite, hand-picked EU-U.S. Biotechnology Consultative Forum, which came out in December, 2000, stated, "There is a lack of substantial scientific data and evidence, often (presented) more as personal interpretations disguised as scientifically validated statements." The full report is available at europa.eu.int.

"LUDDITES" GET SOME AMMUNITION Prof. Ann Clark, Toronto Star [Canada] March 12, 2001 [Ann Clark is an associate professor of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph]. Until recently, people tended to identify most of the concern about GM agriculture with groups such as the Council of Canadians, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth. Industry proponents wasted little time in painting these people as misinformed, hysterical greenies. But thanks to those groups, informed citizen opposition has slowed adoption of GM crops to a crawl, providing much-needed breathing space for senior scientists, lawyers, and physicians to reflect upon the issues and begin to speak out.

Proponent efforts to paint the opposition as ill-informed malcontents and Luddites sound increasingly silly in the face of the significant doubts now reaching the public media from prestigious scientific analysts. One common criticism in many such studies is the near absence of credible scientific evidence upon which to assess environmental and food safety risks. Last June, the prestigious journal Science reported a detailed database search by Jose Domingo, who could find a grand total of just eight refereed journal articles dealing with any aspect of the safety of GM foods. The eight included only four actual feeding trials, of which three were from Monsanto teams. The final report of the elite, hand-picked EU-U.S. Biotechnology Consultative Forum, which came out in December, 2000, stated, "There is a lack of substantial scientific data and evidence, often (presented) more as personal interpretations disguised as scientifically validated statements."

This group of distinguished senior scientists identified numerous critical failings in the Canadian GM regulatory process, and were particularly critical of the pivotal role accorded the unscientific concept of "substantial equivalence." The report is available at www.rsc.ca In another recent issue of Science, U.S. government scientists LaReesa Wolfenbarger and Paul Phifer noted that "key experiments on both the environmental risks and benefits are lacking." They identified numerous critical deficiencies in the evidence that would need to be rectified before determining whether GM crops are indeed safe for the environment. Each of these studies calls for substantially increased research to figure out whether any risk exists, let alone how to test for such risk or what to do about it. In effect, governments have authorized the commercial release of almost 50 GM crops, which were sown over 100 million acres in 1999 (71 per cent in the U.S., 17 per cent in Argentina, and 10 per cent in Canada), and yet we still don't know enough to even identify the food safety and environmental risks, let alone test for them. In a nutshell, we don't know enough about basic gene function, the complexity of metabolic pathways, and the ecological implications of even modest genetic modifications to be doing what we are doing, commercially.

As stated colloquially by Craig Venter, head of the Celera team that recently decoded the human genome, "We don't know s--t about biology." With a virtual absence of refereed support for their beliefs, industry proponents insist there is still ample evidence of the safety of GM crops, pointing to voluminous internal industry and government reports. But how credible are these reports if they are not of a sufficient calibre to be published in a refereed journal? The requirement for publishing in a refereed journal is universally accepted in the scientific community. Authors are required to submit their work to review and critical comment from peers in the field to ensure the quality and integrity of the research. This is neither academic trivia nor overblown rhetoric, but is deadly earnest. Careers have been destroyed by this very issue, strange though it may seem.

Two years ago, Arpad Pusztai (see PTV interview on this site), a world-renowned authority on plant proteins and nutrition, with nearly 300 refereed publications to his credit was fired and treated disgracefully by his own colleagues for committing the unforgivable sin of speaking publicly about his concerns about GM food safety prior to publishing his findings in a refereed journal. Pusztai had conducted meticulous studies that found organ size and intestinal integrity were hurt in rats fed potatoes that had been genetically modified to include genes from snowdrop lectin. Worse yet, rats fed plain potatoes sprinkled with snowdrop lectin did not show these effects. The study suggested that the problem related to the transgenic process, not the product. Does it seem odd to fire a scientist for expressing his concerns? Incomprehensible? Bizarre? There's more. The same Canadian proponents who just two years ago loudly affirmed Pusztai's firing because he had not published his work in a refereed journal are now loudly proclaiming the legitimacy of unpublished internal documents promoting GM safety. You can't have it both ways. Either research must be published in refereed journals to have scientific credibility, as was Pusztai's eventually, or not. And if not " if unpublished internal reports are to be accepted as credible and authoritative scientific information " one must conclude that the shameless destruction of Pusztai's career and the termination of his entire research program had little to do with refereed journal publishing, and everything to do with what he found.