Fwd: GMW:_Biotech_critics_at_risk_-_videos/broadcast/article

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GMW:_Biotech_critics_at_risk_-_videos/broadcast/article

" GM_WATCH "

Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:37:04 GMT

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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1. BROADCASAT: GMOs - Are they bad for our health?

Why aren't we finding out about it?

2.Biotech critics at risk

Economics calls the shots in the debate

3. VIDEO: Pusztai, Chapela - watch the webcast

4.VIDEO clip of Prof Nanjundaswamy:

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1. BROADCASAT

 

Tune in this Friday, February 6th, at 9am, to Wildoak Living on KZYX & Z (88.3,

90.7 and 91.5 FM or listen at www.kzyx.org)

 

GMOs (genetically modified organisms) -

Are they bad for our health?

Why aren't we finding out about it?

 

Johanna Wildoak interviews:

a. Scientist Arpad Pusztai (pronounced " are pod poos tie " ), a senior UK

scientist who tested the health impact of GMOs.

 

He was fired after presenting the results of his research, which were published

in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, and has been the target of an

international campaign of discreditation.

 

Dr. Pusztai's story was headline news in Europe for months, with reporters

camping in his driveway,

but we heard little about his findings in the US.

 

b. Mark Dowie, award winning science writer and

former publisher of Mother Jones magazine, whose articles have appeared in the

San Francisco Chronicle.

 

He recently hosted a conference in Berkeley with writer Michael Pollen (The

Botany of Desire) featuring scientists who are at risk because of their research

into genetically modified organisms (see his article below).

 

Find out what we are not being told, and why Dr. Pusztai's story may be just the

tip of the iceberg.

...............................

2.Biotech critics at risk

Economics calls the shots in the debate

 

SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, USA, by Mark Dowie

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/ING\

HT44JFS1.DTL

DATE: Jan 11, 2004

 

Four biologists from Europe and North America met face to face for the first

time on the UC Berkeley campus last month.

 

Although none of them is particularly famous as a scientist -- not one Nobel

among them -- they know each other's names and work as well as if they had been

working together for 10 years in the same laboratory. They share a painful

experience.

 

Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each made a simple but

dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same powerful industry

-- biotechnology -- that by then had become the handmaiden of industrial

agriculture and the darling of venture capitalists, who are still hoping they

have invested their most recent billions in " the next big thing. "

 

If any one of the experiments of these four scientists is proved through

replication to be valid, the already troubled agricultural arm of biotech will

be in truly dire straits. No one knows that better than Monsanto, Sygenta and

other biotech firms that have so aggressively attacked the four discoveries in

question.

 

When he was the principal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute in

Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed transgenically modified

potatoes to rodents in one of the few experiments that have ever tested the

safety of genetically modified food in animals or humans. Almost immediately,

the rats displayed tissue and immunological damage.

 

After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review and were

published in the United Kingdom's leading medical journal, The Lancet, Pusztai's

home was burglarized and his research files taken.

 

Soon thereafter, he was fired from his job at Rowett, and he has since suffered

an orchestrated international campaign of discreditation, in which Prime

Minister Tony Blair played an active role.

 

While Pusztai was fighting for his professional life, Cornell Professor John

Losey was patiently dusting milkweed leaves with genetically modified corn

pollen. When monarch butterfly larvae that ate the leaves died in significant

numbers (while a control group fed nongenetically modified pollen all survived),

Losey was not particularly surprised.

 

The new gene patched into the corn's genome was inserted to produce an internal

pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), intended to attack and kill the corn

borer and some particularly troublesome moth caterpillars.

 

What did surprise Losey was the vehement attack on his study that followed from

Novartis and Monsanto, their open attempts to discredit his work and the extent

to which mass media leapt to their support. Losey is still at Cornell, where his

future seems secure.

 

Not true of Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist in the plant sciences

department at UC Berkeley. In 2000, Chapela discovered that pollen had drifted

several miles from a field of genetically modified corn in Chiapas into the

remote mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico, landing in the last reserve of biodiverse

maize in the world.

 

If genes from the rogue pollen actually penetrated the DNA of traditional crops,

they could potentially eliminate maize biodiversity forever. In his report,

Chapela cautiously stated that this indeed might have happened. He expressed

that sentiment in a peer-reviewed study published

by Nature in November 2001.

 

After an aggressive public relations campaign mounted for Monsanto by the

Bivings Group, a global PR firm that began with a vicious e-mail attack

mounted by two " scientists " who turned out to be fictitious, Nature editors did

something they had never done in their 133 years of existence. They published a

cautious partial retraction of the Chapela report. Largely on the strength of

that retraction, Chapela was recently denied tenure at UC Berkeley and informed

that he would not be reoffered his teaching assignment in the fall.

 

When Tyrone Hayes, a UC Berkeley endocrinologist specializing in amphibian

development, exposed young frogs in his lab to very small doses of the herbicide

Atrazine, they first failed to develop normal larynxes and later displayed

serious reproductive problems (males became hermaphrodites), suggesting that

Atrazine might be an endocrine disrupter.

 

Hayes' subsequent experience differed slightly from the other panelists', but

was no less troubling to academic scientists. As soon as word of Hayes' findings

reached Sygenta Corp. (formerly Novartis) and its contractor, Ecorisk Inc.,

attempts were made to stall his research. Funding was withheld. It was a

critical time, as the EPA was close to making a final ruling on Atrazine.

Hermaphroditic frogs would not help Sygenta's cause.

 

Hayes continued the research with his own funds and found more of the same

results, whereupon Sygenta offered him $2 million to continue his research " in a

private setting. " A committed teacher with a lab full of loyal students, Hayes

declined the offer and proceeded with research that he knew had to remain in the

public domain.

 

This time he found damaging developmental effects of Atrazine at even lower

levels (0.1 parts per billion). When his work appeared in the prestigious

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sygenta attacked the study and

claimed that three other labs it contracted had been unable to duplicate Hayes'

results.

 

Hayes, who keeps his head down on the Berkeley campus, has obtained tenure and

continues to teach. But his studies that could affect approval of the most

widely used chemical in U.S. agriculture are being stifled at every turn.

 

In a public conversation attended by 500 people and Webcast to 4,000 more

worldwide recently on the Berkeley campus, Pusztai, Losey, Hayes and Chapela

shared their experiences and together explored ways to prevent similar fates

from ever happening to their peers. Their similar stories provide a unique

window into a disturbing trend in modern science.

 

None of the four complained that his science had been challenged, although in

each case it had. All science is and should be challenged. No one knows that

better than a practicing scientist, who also knows that if tenure depended on a

perfect experimental record, there would be very few tenured scientists anywhere

in the world.

 

These four men were not attacked because of flawed or imperfect experiments but

because the findings of their work have a potential economic effect. The sad

part is that the academies and other allegedly

independent institutions that once defended scientific freedom and protected

employees like Hayes, Chapela, Losey and Pusztai are abandoning

them to the wolves of commerce, the brands of which are being engraved over the

entrances to a disturbing number of university labs.

 

Mark Dowie lives in Point Reyes and teaches a science writing class at UC

Graduate School of Journalism.

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3. VIDEO: The Pulse of Scientific Freedom - watch the archived webcast

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/

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4.VIDEO clip of Prof Nanjundaswamy:

http://video1.tpt.org:8080/ramgen/smallworld/interview_nanjun.rm ... which comes

from this page of the transcript:

http://www.ktca.org/smallworld/transcript_nanjun.html

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