GMW: SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF GM SAFETY SCANDAL

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GMW: SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF GM SAFETY SCANDAL

" GM WATCH " <info

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:50:42 +0100

 

 

 

 

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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Much of the information below comes from 'Don't Worry: Its Safe To Eat'

by Andy Rowell. [Earthscan, 2003, ISBN 1853839329]. See also:

http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=113

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SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF GM SAFETY SCANDAL

 

Seven years ago today 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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