GM cover ups - Pusztai interview in 'The Hindu'
Thanks to Viviane Lerner for forwarding this. Very interesting interview with Dr Pusztai in 'The 'Hindu'.
Hopefully this will help farmers and consumers in India see through the corruption and manipulation in modern science that is used to dishonestly promote GM crops. Congratualtions to 'The Hindu' for printing this.
It is interesting that the only time in-depth safety analyses of GM foods have been done in the UK and the US both produced similarly negative results and both studies were suppressed by governmental agencies. We know how these things work. Just read the Phillips BSE report.
Here are some excerpts from the 'The Hindu' Pusztai interview (emphasis added) plus full article below:
"I had expected that the GM potato, with 20 micrograms of a component against the several grams of other components, should not cause any problems. But we found problems. Our studies clearly show that the effects were not due to that little gene expression, but it depended on the way the gene had been inserted into the potato genome and what it did to the potato genome.
That is why industry and politicians reacted so strongly against me.... [i.e. this would have had potentially profound implications for the safety testing of ALL GM crops - NLPWessex]
In my opinion - it is an opinion and not an established fact - we have somehow destabilised the potato genome.....Now in our case as well as in the
Flavr Savr tomatoes, which is the only thing the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has ever looked from the safety point of view, and the
BT toxin potatoes investigated in Egypt, similar effects seem to have occurred. The FDA had found that the Flavr Savr tomato had caused "mild" gastritis rats. They scored the effect on a scale of 4. The effect found was between 2 and 3. Now you can decide whether one can call it mild. Even though the
FDA suppressed this information, it had to come out with its data because it was sued and I could get the data.
All these three studies found something very similar in the stomach. Some sort of proliferative response, as if you are stimulating production of something - usually acid. The FDA never went further down. But we did and so did the Egyptians. And we found , in fact, that the most useful part of the digestive tract - the small intestines where 99 per cent of useful absorption occurs - was also affected. And we took it even further down into the colon and that was affected too....
Till about June this year there is only one paper on BT cotton and it is a (chemical) compositional study and not a health effects study . I know they [the biotech industry] are doing these studies.
But why are they not publishing these studies? Only published results, preferably in peer-reviewed journals, are accessible to scientists.
They must be compelled to publish these studies. The public should know what they are doing. The question is whether the data are good enough to publish. I suspect that the data are not good enough."
Exactly the same type of cover-up was carried out by the FDA in relation to genetically modified BST used in US milk production, so there is nothing unusual about this. It is just par for the course. Corporate interests come before those of the public when corporations are funding the political establishment.
See:
http://www.natural-law.ca/genetic/NewsSept-Oct98/GENews9-18HCCoverupBrazil.html
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1527/text4.html
NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
======================================================
" http://www.the-hindu.com/fline/fl1722/17220860.htm
"
FRONTLINE, Volume 17 - Issue 22, Oct. 28 - Nov. 10, 2000
INTERVIEW
GM foods and denial of rights and choices
Interview with Arpad Pusztai.
The introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods has generated a debate
around the world, particularly in the West. Notwithstanding the fact that GM
foods have hit the market shelves in Europe and the United States, there is
growing opposition, notably in Europe, to their introduction into the food
chain. In this mounting campaign, the treatment meted out to Arpad Pusztai,
a biologist from Rowett Research Institute (RRI), Aberdeen, Scotland, by the
British scientific and political establishment has become a cause celebre.
The 69-year-old Hungary-born Pusztai, who had been working at the RRI for 36
years, was removed from service, his research papers were seized, and his
data confiscated; and he was prohibited from talking to anyone about his
research work. All this for having spoken - "all of 150 seconds," he says -
in a programme called World in Action on Granada TV in August 1998, about
his findings on the effects of GM foods that ran counter to the prevalent
scientific dogma that they were safe. He had also expressed concern that the
testing procedures to establish the safety of GM foods may not be adequate.
Pusztai's controversial experiments, which he carried out in collaboration
with his colleague Stanley W.B. Ewen, for over 30 months between 1995 and
1998, comprised the use of GM potatoes expressing the gene for snowdrop
lectin called Galanthus nivalis a gglutinin (GNA) as feed to rats. (Snowdrop
is a small white flower that hangs from a bulb and blooms in spring; lectin
is a protein normally obtained from plants that have antibody
characteristics.) This, he found, resulted in impairment in the condition of
the rats. This was a surprising finding for Pusztai, because in six years of
work with the lectin itself, he had found no toxic effect when it was mixed
with feed as a protein supplement. But when genetically expressed it showed
health effects.
Even before his work was published, based on incomplete information and
data, it was denounced at various levels, including the Royal Society and
the Parliamentary Committee on Science and Technology. Also, a campaign was
unleashed in the media to discredit Pusztai. But it was a slap in the face
of critics when Pusztai's paper got accepted for publication in The Lancet.
This, in fact, prompted a senior biologist of the Royal Society to threaten
The Lancet's editor with dire consequences. After the publication of the
paper, there was a spate of letters to The Lancet attacking Pusztai's work.
Pusztai responded adequately and forcefully.
The comments by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in response to remarks
by the President of the Royal Society, are illuminating. He wrote in
November 1998: "Aaron Klug defends the Royal Society's wish to damn Ewen and
Pusztai's work in the absence of both investigators. What he cannot defend
is the reckless decision of the Royal Society to abandon the principle of
due process in passing judgment on their work. To review and then publish
criticism of these researchers' findings without publis hing either their
original data or their response was, at best, unfair and ill-judged."
Considering the all-round assertion in scientific circles as well as by
biotechnology companies that GM foods and crops are safe, it may be shocking
to know that there are just five papers that have been published in
peer-reviewed journals until June 200 0 (Jose Domingo, Science, June 9) and
the Pusztai-Ewen Lancet paper is one of them.
Irrespective of whether Pusztai's findings stand scientific scrutiny and the
test of time, and whether GM foods are safe or not, the case reflects how
those in the citadels of science administration have abandoned ethics in
order to defend a biased agend a - in this case promoted by biotech
multinationals. It also shows how, contrary to the cardinal principles of
academic freedom and objectivity, any research that went against the
dominant view evoked collective intolerance.
Pusztai, who has authored nearly 300 research papers and nine books, says
his scientific credibility is still intact. Since the termination of his
services at the RRI, he has been offered visiting professorship in three
countries: Brazil, Hungary and Nor way but, for the present, he has decided
to stay in Aberdeen and accept short lecture tours. He was in India recently
on one such tour to attend meetings on GM foods. He spoke to R.
Ramachandran.
Excerpts from the interview:
Could you recount how the row over your research work began?
It is now over two years. With the consent of my director and my Institute I
gave a very, very short interview for television. It was all of 150 seconds.
I simply said, and this is on record, that we had done some work with one
particular GM crop - we ar e not eating this - and we found that when we fed
this to rats, we had some problems. Some of the rats were not growing as
well, some of the rats had problems in the development of the insides, the
immune system. Our concern was that, even though this is not eaten, British
public is already eating things that had not been tested by similar methods.
Because of this, as a publicly funded scientist, I should really raise my
concerns. And that was it.
What methods are you referring to?
I have been doing this kind of work for 20-odd years. Not with GM,though.
Since the War, quite literally, no food has been tested in Europe, while
this huge explosion of technology occurred. In contrast, with animal
feedstock, everything has been tested. If we are doing this with animals -
because of their economic importance - I don't really understand why we
cannot do this with human food, regardless of whether it is GM or non-GM.
With regard to GM food, we step into a totally new and different area. What
we found was against my own expectations. Because we had tested the effect
of the gene product previously and found nothing, I had thought nothing is
going to happen.
What was the gene product and how was it tested previously?
This is a lectin from snowdrop. We don't eat snowdrop, nor do we eat
bacillus thuringiensis (BT) toxin. We now have genetically modified BT corn
and BT potatoes. We don't eat a lot of these things in GM foods that are now
being sold. So it should be in o ur interest to get it properly tested.
Before we did the genetic potato work, what we did was to isolate this gene
product from the snowdrop bulb to see whether it did have any effect on the
absorption of normal diet. We have high quality animal feedstock. If you use
some animal protein like egg protein or casein from milk mixed with it, we
can measure with great precision how well they are utilised. For example,
egg albumen will be utilised with 92-94 per cent efficiency. This is very
high efficiency. Now you can do the same thing with pota toes. Does the
lectin reduce the efficiency of the diet or does it interfere with the
immune system? We tested with as high a concentration - at milligram level
per gram level. It still did not do any harm.
In case of genetic modification we need it only at a concentration that is
100-fold less. We expressed it at lower levels of micrograms per gram in the
potato and wanted to know what kind of possible effects it can have. We had
two kinds of potatoes - on e GM and the other non-GM. I had expected that
the GM potato, with 20 micrograms of a component against the several grams
of other components, should not cause any problems. But we found problems.
Our studies clearly show that the effects were not due to that little gene
expression, but it depended on the way the gene had been inserted into the
potato genome and what it did to the potato genome. That is why industry and
politicians reacted so strongly against me.
We had two successful lines, both coming from the same genetic
transformation of the parent line at the same time. They were going through
the same laboratory tests and were growing in the fields for two years done
in the South of England. And when we lo oked at the two lines, we found that
against our expectations they were different. They were different
compositionally. For example, one of the lines contained exactly the same
amount of protein as the parent line but the other line, even though it was
a s successful in protecting the plant against aphids nematodes, it
contained 20 per cent less protein. Now this was a totally unpredictable
effect.
You mean to say that genetic engineering, in addition to expressing the
foreign protein, leads to other differences as well?
Yes. Now this is well accepted that there are other unintentional changes.
Consider the human genome project. It is a great project. I'm really very
much for it. But it is totally overclaimed because it will get us about 5
per cent of the total genome be cause the genes are only about that much.
The 95 per cent, which is the junk DNA as they used to say, is not junk.
That's what controls the genome. Now you shoot at it. Now you don't know
where it is it going to land. You have a big parasitic element con taining
the construct going in and it could land anywhere.
So in the two genetically modified lines which were different, what I think
happened was that the lectin gene landed in two different places. The
question is how well you can find out what is happening. This is possible if
you know the whole sequence. No w if you don't know the sequence and you
don't know what exactly is the job of the sequence, then we cannot know. So
all the selection after genetic modification is empirical. Does it grow?
Does it do the job? Does it have enough proteins? Does it do us any harm?
This last bit has never been investigated.
In your paper you had suggested that there were problems like immune system
malfunction and growth malfunction. What do you think was the mechanism of
action?
In my opinion - it is an opinion and not an established fact - we have
somehow destabilised the potato genome. It is no longer functioning as
previously. Some of those things which make the other parts toxic (for
protection against insects, for example) are now making the tuber toxic.
This is the best we can come up with. Now this toxicity is very important.
For any food the effect can be anywhere along the alimentary canal. Now in
our case as well as in the Flavr Savr tomatoes, which is the only thing the
FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has ever looked from the safety point of
view, and the BT toxin potatoes investigated in Egypt, similar effects seem
to have occurred. The FDA had found that the Flavr Savr tomato had caused
"mild" gastritis rats. T hey scored the effect on a scale of 4. The effect
found was between 2 and 3. Now you can decide whether one can call it mild.
Even though the FDA suppressed this information, it had to come out with its
data because it was sued and I could get the data.
All these three studies found something very similar in the stomach. Some
sort of proliferative response, as if you are stimulating production of
something - usually acid. The FDA never went further down. But we did and so
did the Egyptians. And we found , in fact, that the most useful part of the
digestive tract - the small intestines where 99 per cent of useful
absorption occurs - was also affected. And we took it even further down into
the colon and that was affected too.
How do you quantitatively determine the effect?
It is a proliferative response of making more of the gut. You take out the
guts, if it weighs x grams in the control, it weighs x + y grams after
feeding with GM food.
There is mention in the literature over the Internet that Rowett had got
large funds from Monsanto.
Though they did have contracts with Monsanto, I had nothing to do with it.
What was most important is at the time when the potato business blew up,
they were also trying to set up a major research project with Monsanto and
that fell through because Monsa nto got very annoyed with Rowett. I had done
some independent work, not sponsored by any commercial concerns and that's
the reason I could speak because it was publicly funded research.
What is the mechanism of getting a project approved? Does the director or
the research council approve it before it is put before the funding body?
Because I was a very senior scientist, I negotiated it myself and Rowett
agreed to it mainly because they benefited from it. Though officially I
retired at the age of 60 in 1990, they kept me there because I was very good
at raising money. They liked me very much. This project of £1.6 million was
actually funded by the Scottish Office Department of Agriculture,
Environment and Fisheries. The programme started in October 1, 1995 and it
was supposed to have lasted till October 1, 1998. But it ended two da ys
after my great TV appearance, on August 12.
How could they suspend you just because your results were not to their
liking?
In my case it was very simple. Because I had actually retired, I had an
annual renewable contract. The only thing they had to do was not to renew my
contract. But I was suspended by August 12. I had the rest of the year to
go.
What reason was given for the suspension?
A senior scientist can be suspended only if he is suspected of cheating. But
they never actually put it in writing. Then they would have been liable and
I could have sued them.
Were there orders to not to speak to anyone?
Yes. Sure. It was in writing. There is no doubt about it.
Before your paper actually got published, the Royal Society had scrutinised
the work and had made some adverse remarks.
Now when I was gagged for seven months and there were all these media
reports about me. When the British Parliament ungagged me in order to find
out what was really happening, the Rowett in their desperation put their
internal confidential reports on the ir website. They are no longer there -
they were there for about two and a half months - because they realised it
was counter-productive. These two reports - one was an audit report compiled
by an external three-member audit committee which investigated my science
and the other one was my response to that report. But none of them was meant
for publication. In a sense, without even being published my data were in
the public domain. Those people who wanted to know did get this. They simply
downloaded. When they could no longer access it on the Web, people were
phoning me in desperation and aski