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Edited on Fri Oct-15-10 12:38 PM by proverbialwisdom
ARTICLE #1 http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11311-scientific-american-condemns-restrictions-on-gm-researchDO SEED COMPANIES CONTROL GM CROP RESEARCH? Scientific American, Editorial, August 2009 edition, published 21 July 2009 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research"...Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering. "It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough," wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), "but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how 'friendly' or 'hostile' a particular scientist may be toward technology."
Shields is the spokesperson for a group of 24 corn insect scientists that opposes these practices..."
ARTICLE #2
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11573-gm-industrys-strong-arm-tactics-with-researchers-nature-biotechnology-
GM industry's strong-arm tactics with researchers - Nature Biotechnology
Monday, 12 October 2009 16:25
Under Wraps
NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY, VOLUME 27, NUMBER 10, October 2009
http://www.emilywaltz.com/Biotech_crop_research_restrictions_Oct_2009.pdf
"The increasingly fractious relationship between public sector researchers and the biotech seed industry has come into the spotlight in recent months. In July, several leading seed companies met with a group of entomologists, who earlier in the year had lodged a public complaint with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over restricted access to materials. In a letter to the EPA, the 26 public sector scientists complained that crop developers are curbing their rights to study commercial biotech crops. "No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions involving these crops ," they wrote.
In turn, the seed companies have expressed surprise at the outcry, claiming the issue is being overblown. And even though the July meeting, organized by the American Seed Trade Association in Alexandria, Virginia, did result in the writing of a set of principles for carrying out this research, the seed companies are under no compunction to follow them. "From the researchers’ perspective, the key for this meeting was opening up communication to discuss the problem," says Ken Ostlie, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, who signed the complaint. "It will be interesting to see how companies implement the principles they agreed upon."
What is clear is that the seed industry is perceived as highly secretive and reluctant to share its products with scientists. This is fueling the view that companies have something to hide..."
ARTICLE #3
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12567-scientists-under-attack-film-review
Wednesday, 13 October 2010 14:59
Scientists under attack: Genetic engineering in the magnetic field of money
By Bertram Verhaag
Review by Claire Robinson
Billed as "a political thriller on GMOs and freedom of speech", this film by the German film-maker Bertram Verhaag tells the stories of two scientists, Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Ignacio Chapela, whose research showed negative findings on GM foods and crops. Both suffered the fate of those who challenge the powerful vested interests that dominate agribusiness and scientific research. They were vilified and intimidated, attempts were made to suppress and discredit their research, and their careers were derailed.
Pusztai found that the internal organs of rats fed GM insecticidal potatoes either increased in size or did not develop properly compared with controls. His experiments turned up no less than 36 significant differences between GM-fed and non-GM-fed animals. Pusztai, encouraged by his research institute, gave a 150-second interview on British TV in which he summarised his findings and said it was unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs for GM foods.
For two days, Pusztai was treated as a hero by his institute. But following a phone call from UK prime minister Tony Blair to the institute's head, Pusztai was fired and gagged under threat of a lawsuit. His research team was disbanded and his data were confiscated. Lies were circulated about his research that he could not counter due to the gagging order, lifted only later when he was due to appear before a Parliamentary Committee. For Pusztai’s co-researchers, the gagging order remains in place for life.
Pusztai's results threatened the GM industry because they showed that it wasn't the insecticide engineered into the potatoes that damaged the rats, but the genetic engineering process itself. So the problem wasn't just with these GM potatoes but potentially with all GM foods on the market. The only solution for the industry and its friends in government was to shoot the messenger.
Traumatic though this was for Pusztai, it wasn't the biggest shock he had to face regarding GM foods. That came when he was asked to review safety submissions from the GM industry for crops we were already eating – and found that they were scientifically flimsy. "That was a turning point in my life," said Pusztai. "I was doing safety studies; they were doing as little as possible to get their foods on the market as quickly as they could."
Another scientist whose run-in with the GM industry is featured in the film is Ignacio Chapela, a molecular geneticist at UC Berkeley. His research, co-authored with David Quist and published in the journal Nature, revealed that Mexican maize had been contaminated with GM genes. The finding was explosive because Mexico is the centre of origin for maize and the planting of GM maize there was illegal.
Chapela found himself the target of a vicious internet campaign condemning him as more of an activist than a scientist and claiming that his paper was false. Nature's editor published a partial retraction of the paper. As Chapela points out in the film, the editor's action flew in the face of scientific method. In the normal way of things, a journal editor publishes a study that he and peer reviewers judge to be sound. It is for subsequent published studies to confirm or correct the findings. It is not for the editor to state that he would not have published a study had he known then what he knows now – without the benefit of further peer reviewed scientific input. The editor's move showed how the GM industry is rewriting the rules of science for its own ends.
To add insult to injury, the internet campaign against Chapela turned out not to have been initiated and fuelled not by his scientific peers but by fake citizens, "sockpuppets" invented by the Bivings Group, a public relations firm contracted by Monsanto.
Scientists Under Attack goes on to show how the GM industry has blocked the evolution of scientific knowledge. When Russian scientist Irina Ermakova's study found high mortality rates and low body weight in rats fed GM soy, and when Austrian government research found that decreased fertility in mice fed GM maize, the industry carried out its usual campaign of vilification. If the industry were interested in scientific truth, it would push for studies to be repeated with the alleged "flaws" corrected. But this never happens. Instead, GM companies use their patent-based ownership of GM crops to deny scientists access to research materials – the GM crop and the non-GM parent line control. So the original research showing problems with GM crops is buried under a deluge of smears and follow up studies are not done. For the public, the difficulty and expense involved in accessing full research papers makes it hard to find where the truth lies.
The film also highlights an extreme example of the corporate takeover of science – at University of California, Berkeley (UCB), where Chapela is a professor. In 1998, UCB entered into a $25 million research partnership with biotech company Novartis (now Syngenta). The deal provoked angry debate on campus and was criticized by a number of faculty members, including Chapela. Then in 2007, UCB entered into a $500 million research deal with oil giant BP. The partnership was negotiated in secret, without consultation even within the university. In return for its money, BP gained access to UCB’s researchers, control over the research agenda, and co-ownership of commercial rights over inventions. Chapela says of BP, "They decide what is called science."
The partnership was later spun as one of BP's "beyond petroleum" projects that would take us out of the age of dirty oil and into the new age of solar and renewable energy. But the small print makes clear that the deal focuses on genetic engineering for biofuels – proprietary technologies that will be patented and owned by BP.
Most of us think of the enclosure of knowledge by industry interests in the abstract – as figures on a balance sheet, and conflicts of interest lurking in the darker corners of scientists' psyches. But as Scientists Under Attack memorably shows, at UCB it's played out on the physical level. UCB is a divided campus, reminiscent of Berlin before the Wall came down. There is the public area, which looks like everyone’s idea of a pleasant university campus. Then, enclosed in high-security fencing and ringed with “no entry” signs, there is the privatized area, the part of the university that’s been co-opted by BP. No amount of reading about the UCB-BP deal can prepare you for the sight of what was once a great public university being turned into something resembling a top-secret military installation.
Seemingly, the culture of the university has changed along with its alignment. Once a celebrated centre of free speech and academic debate, UCB has become a place where tree-sitting students peacefully protesting against the felling of old oaks on campus are caged inside three rows of high-security fencing. In contrast, the university's colony of (not very dangerous) hyenas are judged only to need two.
UCB has dealt harshly with critics of its deals with industry. In 2003, five years after Chapela's protest against the Novartis deal and two years after publication of his Mexican maize findings, he was denied tenure. The university only backed down after Chapela threatened to sue. In Scientists Under Attack, he says: "In genetic engineering, one question means one career. You ask one question, you get the answer. You might or might not be able to publish it. That's the end of your career. What's unique in my case is that I survived."
Chapela adds that the most powerful censorship does not come directly from the GM industry but from closer to home: "It's in the consciousness of the scientist. You censor yourself." In other words, it's not so much that the GM industry has taken away our power, but rather that we've given it away.
While some sectors of the scientific community remain silent in the face of GM industry dominance, nature is proving a tougher opponent. GM monocultures worldwide are threatened by the rapid spread of glyphosate-resistant superweeds. Here again, no amount of reading about the issue can match the visual impact of weeds effortlessly smothering a field of GM soy plants in Brazil. Only a few years previously, as part of the marketing drive for GM soy, farmers had been invited to a party with free booze. They were told to arrange their hoes in a circle and ritually burn them. The idea was that hoes were redundant because weeds could be controlled with glyphosate. Now, glyphosate no longer works and farmers are being forced back to hoeing.
The message about who is really in charge is underlined by public interest attorney and activist Andrew Kimbrell, who is interviewed fishing for trout in a river. He points out that trout eat caddis-flies, which can be killed by Bt maize toxin leaching into rivers. Kimbrell says the GM industry follows a linear economic model based on a drive towards more and more production, regardless of the cost to nature and ourselves. He says this model of progress is a delusion: "Everything is made from the earth – these clothes, this camera, this fly rod. There is only one economy – the one that we see around us right now. The other economy, of capital and technology and the stock market, is all made up in our heads."
Kimbrell concludes the film by saying that industry hasn't grasped that we need to evolve into a stable economy enmeshed in ecology: "We are going to have to follow the laws of nature and not the artificial laws of any technology. The salmon come back to where they were born to spawn and die, and then the young come out. It's not linear, it's a life-giving circle."
ARTICLE #4
Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine
Dr Stanley WB Ewen FRCPath,Arpad Pusztai PhD
The Lancet - 16 October 1999 ( Vol. 354, Issue 9187, Pages 1353-1354 )
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(98)05860-7
ARTICLE #5:
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/2987-seventh-anniversary-of-gm-safety-scandal
Seventh anniversary of GM safety scandal
Wednesday, 10 August 2005 11:17
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...
...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 , but that in 1999, everyone agreed that more work was needed. Three years later, that work remains to be undertaken... 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.
ARTICLE #6
A seedy restriction on research
Clive Cookson (Science Blog)
Financial Times, August 11 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c548253a-860e-11de-98de-00144feabdc0.html
"...Et tu, Brute?
A correspondent for an agricultural trade publication noted that nobody in the biotech industry could provide him with a single example of any other kind of product on the market that was protected in the way GM seeds were from scientific scrutiny.
And the science correspondent of the Financial Times - another solidly pro-GM publication - complained, 'Imagine pharmaceutical companies trying to prevent medical researchers comparing patented drugs or investigating their side-effects - it is unthinkable. Yet scientists cannot independently examine raw materials in the food supply or investigate plants that cover a lot of rural America'.
An article in Nature Biotechnology noted how even when research critical of GM did get published it was met by a wall of apparently orchestrated, ad hominem and unfounded attacks by GM proponents who, in the words of an editor for the Entomological Society of America, 'denigrate research by other legitimate scientists in a knee-jerk, partisan, emotional way that is not helpful in advancing knowledge and is outside the ideals of scientific inquiry'.
And it wasn't just scientific enquiry that Monsanto was exposed as strangling. An Associated Press investigation reported on confidential Monsanto contracts showing how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and aggressively protecting its multibillion-dollar market dominance..."
ARTICLE #7
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/anniversary-of-a-whistleb_b_675817.html
Anniversary of a Whistle Blowing Hero
by Jeffrey Smith
August 9, 2010 01:40 PM
ARTICLE #8
http://us.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68C39320100913?ca=rdt
Industry has sway over food safety system: study
Mon, Sep 13 17:26 PM EDT
By Christopher Doering
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The food industry is jeopardizing U.S. public health by withholding information from food safety investigators or pressuring regulators to withdraw or alter policy designed to protect consumers, said a survey of government scientists and inspectors..."
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/food-safety.html?utm_source=SP&utm_medium=head&utm_campaign=SP-fda-survey-10-13-2010-head
Voices of Federal Food Safety Scientists and Inspectors
Survey: FDA and USDA Scientists (2010)
ARTICLE #9
http://e360.yale.edu/content/print.msp?id=2273
Companies Put Restrictions On Research into GM Crops
"A battle is quietly being waged between the industry that produces genetically modified seeds and scientists trying to investigate the environmental impacts of engineered crops. Although companies such as Monsanto have recently given ground, researchers say these firms are still loath to allow independent analyses of their patented and profitable seeds.
by Bruce Stutz
In February 2009, frustrated by industry restrictions on independent research into genetically modified crops, two dozen scientists representing public research institutions in 17 corn-producing states told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the companies producing genetically modified (GM) seed "inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good" and warned that industry influence had made independent analyses of transgenic crops impossible.
Unprepared for the scientists' public protest and the press accounts that followed it, the industry, through its American Seed Trade Association (ASTA), met with crop scientists. Late last year, ASTA agreed that, while still restricting research on engineered plant genes, it would allow researchers greater freedom to study the effects of GM food crops on soil, pests, and pesticide use, and to compare their yields and analyze their effects on the environment..."
ARTICLE #10
http://www.gmwatch.eu/component/content/ar...ey-bee-research
GM crops and honey bee research
Monday, 26 October 2009 14:50
Interview by Christof Potthof with the bee researcher Prof. Dr. Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, University of Halle-Wittenberg.
<...> Prof. Kaatz: Before starting the project with the Bt plants we had already done some research on possible hazards to the health of honey bees due to genetically modified herbicide resistant oil-seed rape (canola) and maize plants. We did not find anything negative here.
Apart from this we also investigated whether the genes that come from the pollen of the plants could be transferred to honey bees. This is called horizontal gene transfer. Our first step was to find out if genes from the plants could be transferred to the microorganisms in the digestive tract of the honey bees. Later on we aimed to determine how high the probability was that the honey bees incorporate the genes themselves. One must consider that the crossover of genes is one of the principal mechanisms of evolution. It happens in very many groups of organisms.
It was more a fundamental question of scientific principles than a practical problem. We cultivated the microorganisms with the pollen and the result was that the microorganisms had indeed taken up the pat gene. In the debate on genetic engineering it had always been said that one thing that could never happen was the horizontal transfer of newly inserted genes. We presented the results to the Nature journal and got two expert opinions. One was very positive, thinking it could be published immediately.
The other thought we should do an additional analysis, a so-called Southern blot which would further verify our results. Then he would back publication. We said, "We'll do that." We did the Southern blot and submitted the article again in the belief that there was now nothing in our way. For a long time we heard nothing at all from the editorial team at Nature but in the meantime we were visited by a ZDF (German public television channel) team who asked us about our research. At the time we told them that nothing could be broadcast until an agreement had been reached with Nature and the article had been published. They nevertheless did broadcast a television programme. It was even on the news – all before we had had a final decision from Nature. We intervened strongly whereupon one of the ZDF team said, "Wait a minute, don't you know that your article has been rejected." Until that moment we had had no idea. When we asked him how he knew he said that he had spoken to some people at Monsanto and they had told him. Naturally I was shocked. It is good that they get to know these things, but I find it awful that they should know before the authors know.
Christof Potthof: How extraordinary!
Prof. Kaatz: Well, you know that when the person making the decision has contacts to Monsanto says something ... good. But the editorial team – since they were the only ones to have had both reports - that they pass this on, I find that very annoying. Such a highly respected journal. They shouldn't need to do that. In fact such a review process should first and foremost be.....(falters)
Christof Potthof: ....discreet?
Prof. Kaatz: ....very discreet.
Christof Potthof: You probably don't know the names of either of these editors, do you?
Prof. Kaatz: No.
Christof Potthof: Do they know your name?
Prof. Kaatz: Yes, they get the paper and then of course they know the names of the authors. It is not anonymous. Unless you insist. Sometimes that happens. In sensitive cases. I didn't think our data was so sensitive. We have repeated the experiment. And we have been able to prove that horizontal transfer occurs with a whole series of microorganisms of different kinds. (....)
Christof Potthof: Were your findings published somewhere else later on?
Prof. Kaatz: No, not yet. Since they are something no one wants to hear it is difficult to find an adequate place for them. (....)
ARTICLE #11
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11801-pusztai-to-receive-stuttgart-peace-prize-
Pusztai to receive Stuttgart Peace Prize
Friday, 11 December 2009 10:52
We've just heard that Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Susan Bardocz will be presented with this year's Stuttgart Peace Prize. The award is for their tireless advocacy for independent risk research. Both have made an essential contribution to a broader understanding of the dangers of genetic manipulation. The award also honours their courage and scientific integrity as well as their undaunted insistence on the public's right to know...
...more.
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