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Hot Potato - Don't Worry It Is Safe To Eat

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

July 15, 2003

 

 

GUEST MEDIA ALERT: HOT POTATO

 

Excerpt From ‘Don’t Worry It Is Safe To Eat – The True Story Of GM Food, BSE,

And Foot And Mouth’

 

By Andrew Rowell

 

 

As the UK government continues to wriggle over weapons of mass destruction, of

sexing up dossiers and general spin, Tony Blair argues that there is no greater

charge against a prime minister than for him to have personally falsified claims

on which to take a country to war.

 

That may be so, but another grave charge would be personally ordering the

sacking of a scientist who was involved in some of the first independent tests

on GM, especially if those tests showed evidence of harm, and also especially if

the orders came from Monsanto, via the White House. This is what Dr. Arpad

Pusztai, who raised concerns about GM food in 1998, claims happened to him.

 

Part of the recent argument between the BBC and the government concern the

claims by a single unnamed intelligence source that the government “sexed” up

one of the dossiers on Iraq. In contrast five people have said that they were

told that Tony Blair ordered the sacking of Dr. Pusztai. Here is Dr. Pusztai’s

story. It raises many unanswered questions about new Labour, its link to the

biotech industry and the safety of GM food.

 

 

Dr. Arpad Pusztai

 

As we witness the dawn of the biotech revolution, Dr Arpad Pusztai is a

scientist who is convinced that he has uncovered vital evidence that shows there

are potential major health risks with GM crops. Pusztai was catapulted from an

unknown laboratory scientist based at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen

to the forefront of a raging debate about the safety of GM foods, when he spoke

on the World in Action TV programme in 1998.

 

Overnight the Hungarian-born scientist, with some 35 years lab experience, found

himself at the centre of an international media spotlight. The controversy would

put him on a collision course with the UK and US governments, the biotech

industry and the scientific establishment. His 150-second interview lead to

Pusztai being suspended, silenced and threatened with losing his pension. His

wife, Susan Bardocz, who also worked at the Rowett for 13 years, was eventually

suspended too. Their research was locked up. Scientists and politicians alike

vilified Pusztai.

 

As we search for answers as to whether GM foods are safe, two questions stand

out. Given such a huge controversy over Pusztai’s experiments, and the

preliminary nature of their findings, why were the political and scientific

establishments so intent on rebutting him? More importantly why have the

experiments never been repeated?

 

The saga has had very personal consequences. Pusztai has suffered two heart

attacks and the saga has left him and his wife, Susan, needing permanent

medication for high blood pressure. Pusztai is still angry about the whole

affair. His only crime was to speak out, in his words, according to his

conscience: ‘I obviously spoke out at a very sensitive time. But things were

coming to a head with the GM debate and I just lit the fuse’, he says. ‘I grew

up under the Nazis and the Communists and I understand that people are

frightened and not willing to jeopardise their future, but they just sold me

down the river.’

 

His story begins in post-war communist Hungary. After the Hungarian revolution

was crushed by the communists, the young Pusztai, a chemistry graduate, escaped

to refugee camps in Austria and from there to England. By 1963, having finished

his doctorate in biochemistry and post-doctorate at the Lister Institute, he was

invited to join the prestigious Protein Chemistry Department at the Rowett

Research Institute, which has become the pre-eminent nutritional centre in

Europe.

 

Dr Pusztai was put to work on lectins, plant proteins that were going to be

central in the GM controversy years later. Over the intervening years, Pusztai

became the world’s leading expert on plant lectins, publishing over 270

scientific studies, and three books on the subject. Two books were co-written

with his wife, Susan. Pusztai became one of the Rowett’s most senior and

renowned scientists.

 

In 1995, the Scottish Office Agriculture Environment and Fisheries Department

commissioned a three-year multi-centre research programme under the

coordinatorship of Dr Pusztai into the safety of GM food. At the time there was

not a single publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the safety of GM food.

 

The scientists’ primary task was to establish credible methods for the

identification of possible human/animal health and environmental hazards of GM.

The idea was that the methodologies that they tested would be used by the

regulatory authorities in later risk assessments of GM crops. For the first

time, independent studies would be undertaken to examine whether feeding GM

potatoes to rats caused any harmful effects on their health, bodies or

metabolism.

 

The theory behind the modification of the potatoes was simple. For years Dr

Pusztai had explored the beneficial effects of lectins in foods as well as in

nutritional supplements and pharmaceutical agents. Lectins can affect the

digestive systems of insects and can act as natural insecticides. Arpad’s work

had shown that one such lectin called GNA (Galanthus nivalis), isolated from the

snowdrop, acted in this way. Pusztai had worked on the snowdrop lectin since the

late 1980s.

 

The thinking was that, if you could genetically modify a potato with the lectin

gene inside it, the potato could have an inherent built-in defence mechanism

that would act as a natural insecticide, preventing aphid attack. Because it

looked promising, the snowdrop gene had already been incorporated into several

experimental crops, including rice, cabbagesand oil-seed rape.

 

But by late 1997, the first storm clouds were brewing at the Rowett. 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.

 

 

150 Seconds That Changed The GM Debate

 

Finally in August 1998, Pusztai expressed his growing concerns on World in

Action in a 150 second interview. So what did he say? ‘We’re assured that this

is absolutely safe,’ said Pusztai. ‘We can eat it all the time. We must eat it

all the time. There is no conceivable harm, which can come to us. But as a

scientist looking at it, actively working in the field, I find that it’s very,

very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs. We have to find

guinea-pigs in the laboratory.’ Dr Pusztai had been told not to talk about his

experiments in detail, but he did say, in a sentence that would become the

centre of the controversy, that ‘the effect was slight growth retardation and an

effect on the immune system. One of the genetically modified potatoes, after 110

days, made the rats less responsive to immune effects’.

 

He continued: ‘If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat it till I see at

least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for our

genetically modified potatoes. I actually believe that this technology can be

made to work for us. And if the genetically modified foods will be shown to be

safe, then we have really done a great service to all our fellow citizens. And I

very strongly believe in this, and that’s one of the main reasons why I demand

to tighten up the rules, tighten up the standards.’

 

On the evening of the broadcast, the head of the Rowett Professor James

‘congratulated,’ Pusztai on his TV appearance, commenting on ‘how well Arpad had

handled the questions’. The following morning a further press release from the

Rowett noticed that a ‘range of carefully controlled studies underlie the basis

of Dr Pusztai’s concerns’.

 

 

The Riddle Of The Rowett

 

But it is here that the Rowett and Pusztai differ in what happened next. The day

after the programme, on the Tuesday James maintains he asked Pusztai’s staff for

the data for the 110-day experiment, which he claims they told him did not

exist. ‘I couldn’t believe it, says James, ‘I just said that this is the end of

the world for us all’. James maintains that this is the reason why Pusztai was

suspended on the Wednesday.

 

On Wednesday morning, Pusztai and Susan were told to hand over their data. All

GM work was stopped immediately and Pusztai’s team was dispersed. His three PhD

students were moved to other areas. He was threatened with legal action if he

spoke to anyone. His phone calls and emails were diverted.

 

The Rowett press machinery was adopting Orwellian overtones and beginning to

change the official story. First of all they said that Pusztai had got muddled

with the wrong potatoes, then they had said that the experiments had not been

done, but finally they reported that Pusztai had done the right experiments but

the results were not ready yet

 

Other disputed events happened on the Tuesday too. Two phone calls, Pusztai says

he was told, were put through to James from the Prime Minister’s office. One was

‘around noon, the other was slightly earlier’. He learnt this information from

two different employees at the Rowett, who could be sacked if their identities

were known. The Pusztais were also later told by someone at the Rowett,

currently in a senior management position at the Institute, that Bill Clinton

had phoned Blair and told him to sort out the problem. ‘That was the beginning

of all the trouble – Arpad was sacked as a consequence of what was said in those

phone calls,’ says a friend.

 

The events of August 1998 have always puzzled Stanley Ewen, then a top

pathologist from the University of Aberdeen who had worked with Pusztai for over

a decade. Ewen too had often wondered what caused the sudden turn-around at the

Rowett.

 

Speaking about the incident for the first time now he is retired from the

University of Aberdeen, he confirms the Pusztais’ stories, but crucially he was

told by yet another senior member of the Rowett. This makes four separate Rowett

personnel who have spoken in private about the phone calls. ‘On Tuesday, Blair

phoned the Rowett twice, although everybody denies it’, Ewen says.

 

Another ex-employee who was prepared to talk is Professor Robert Ørskov OBE.

Professor Ørskov worked at the Rowett for 33 years, and is one of the UK’s

leading experts in ruminant nutrition. He too was told about the phone calls.

Professor Ørskov says he was told that the phone calls went from Monsanto to

Clinton to Blair. ‘Clinton rang Blair and Blair rang James – you better keep

that man [Pusztai] shut up. James didn’t know what to do. Instead of telling him

to keep his mouth shut, they should have told him to say it needs more work. But

there is no doubt that he was pushed by Blair to do something.’

 

But Professor James is adamant the phone call never happened. ‘There is no way I

talked to anybody in any circumstances’ he says. ‘It’s a complete pack of lies.

I have never talked to Blair since the day of the opening of Parliament in

1997.’ This week Downing Street also called the claims “total rubbish”.

 

Although there is no proof that phone calls ever took place, Pusztai points to

other evidence about Blair and GM. It is a well-known fact that Blair had been

persuaded to back GM by Clinton, leading even the BBC to remark that in the GM

debate ‘a question mark remains over the government’s independence of pressure

from Washington’. In the mid-1990s the Clinton administration was backing the

biotech industry ‘second to none’. One White House staff member said the 1990s

were going to be the decade of ‘successful commercialization of agricultural

biotechnology products’.

 

When Pusztai spoke out in August 1998, the new Labour administration was already

beginning to shape government policy for its second term. It was looking for

drivers of the economy that could be trusted to deliver the growth and hence

results that Labour needed. Hightech industries, such as biotechnology, were to

be the central cogs of the engine that would drive the Blairite revolution, and

deliver the coveted second term. What Pusztai was saying could literally derail

an entire industry and with it many of the hopes and aspirations of New Labour.

 

 

Pusztai Backed By Colleagues

 

By the end of 1998, the Pusztai saga could have slowly subsided, with the

scientist forbidden to talk to inquiring journalists. But wherever he went,

scientific colleagues were curious to find out what had really happened to their

colleague. Although banned from talking to the press, he was not banned from

talking to other scientists outside the Rowett. In February 1999 30

international scientists from 13 countries published a memo supporting Pusztai

that was published in the Guardian which sparked a media frenzy over GM.

 

A week after the international scientists backed Pusztai, a secret committee met

to counter the growing alarm over GM. Contrary to reassurances by the government

that GM food was safe, the minutes show the cross departmental committee formed

to deal with the crisis, called MISC6, knew the reassurances were premature. It

‘requested’ a paper by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Chief Scientific

Advisor (CSA) on the ‘human health implications of GM foods’.

 

What would happen, the minutes asked, if the CMO/CSA’s paper ‘shows up any

doubts? We will be pressurised to ban them immediately. What if it says that we

need evidence of long-term effects? This will look like we are not sure about

their safety’.

 

 

The “Star Chamber”

 

That very same day – 19 February – The Royal Society publicly waded into the

Pusztai controversy saying it was going to review the evidence on GM, but

Pusztai argues it was nothing more than an attack on him.

 

‘Their remit was to screw me and they screwed me,’ he argues. ‘They have never

done it before and I had never submitted anything to them. They took on a role

in which they were self-appointed, they were the prosecutors, the judges and

they tried to be the executioners as well. I see no reason why I should have

cooperated with them in my own hanging.’

 

But hung Pusztai was. On 18 May 1999, the Royal Society issued its damning

verdict against Pusztai, at a press conference. The report said that Pusztai’s

work was ‘flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis and that no

conclusions should be drawn from it’. The same day, 18 May, the House of Commons

Science and Technology Select Committee attacked Pusztai too.

 

It is beyond coincidence that The Royal Society and the Science and Select

Committee published on the same day. Political insiders say that pressure was

put on the Science and Technology Committee and The Royal Society to discredit

Pusztai, thereby enabling the government to take control again.

 

This behind-the-scene coordination was partly revealed by a memo showing that

the government had set up a ‘Biotechnology Presentation Group’, which included

senior Ministers. A decision was taken to ‘present the government’s stance as a

single package by way of an oral statement in the House. This would allow the

government to get on the front foot’.

 

This is exactly what happened. On 21 May, just three days after The Royal

Society and Select Committee published – Jack Cunningham stood up in the House

of Commons: ‘Biotechnology is an important and exciting area of scientific

advance that offers enormous opportunities for improving our quality of life.’

 

Cunningham then laid his killer punch: ‘The Royal Society this week convincingly

dismissed as wholly misleading the results of some recent research into

potatoes, and the misinterpretation of it - There is no evidence to suggest that

any GM foods on sale in this country are harmful’.

 

 

The Lancet

 

However Pusztai and Ewen had submitted a paper to the Lancet, which was finally

published in October 1999. Ewen faxed a copy of the article to the Rowett before

publication, as Pusztai was still required to show them any papers based on his

work there. However publication was delayed by two weeks for technical reasons.

‘The rubbishing brigade had been given two weeks to do the dirty on the article.

I was almost sure they would stop it,’ says Pusztai.

 

First of all came the misinformation. ‘Scientists Revolt at Publication of

“Flawed” GM Study’, ran The Independent, ‘the study that sparked the furore over

genetically modified food has failed the ultimate test of scientific

credibility’. Connor said that the referees were against publication.

 

However four out of the six reviewers were for publication. ‘A clear majority of

The Lancet’s reviewers were in favour,’ says Richard Horton, the editor of the

Lancet. Then came the ‘threats’. Three days after The Independent article,

Richard Horton received a phone call from Professor Lachmann, the former

Vice-President and Biological Secretary of The Royal Society and President of

the Academy of Medical Sciences.

 

According to Horton, Professor Lachmann threatened that his job would be at risk

if he published Pusztai’s paper, and called Horton ‘immoral’ for publishing

something he knew to be ‘untrue’. Towards the end of the conversation Horton

maintains that Lachmann said that if he published this would ‘have implications

for his personal position’ as editor. Lachmann confirms that he rang Horton but

vehemently denies that he threatened him.

 

After the article was published, Horton and The Lancet were once again attacked

for publishing the work by the biotechnology industry and The Royal Society.

Horton likened the actions of the Royal Society to a “Star Chamber”. The

publication of The Lancet paper also had a detrimental effect on Stanley Ewen’s

long-term employment with the University of Aberdeen, and rather than get

recognition for his work, all he seemed to get was anguish.

 

‘I felt that I had done so much work that had been unacknowledged’, says the

pathologist. ‘I felt that I deserved some recognition, but this was being

blocked at a very high level by other spokespersons. It wasn’t helpful to my

career. When you do these sorts of things it is very difficult for your pension.

Because that is what it comes down to in the final analysis: money’. Eventually

he felt that he had no option left and Ewen retired on the 26 March, 2001. He

now works as a consultant to the NHS.

 

 

Why Have The Experiments Never Been Repeated?

 

But the fundamental flaw in the scientific establishment’s response is 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. Is it that it is easier to say there is no evidence to

support his claim, because no evidence exists, than it is to say that no one has

looked?

 

 

Don’t Worry It is Safe to Eat – The True Story of GM Food, BSE, and Foot and

Mouth, by Andrew Rowell was published by Earthscan on 10th July

 

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