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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 and Media Lens
July
17, 2003
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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?
Andrew Rowell is a freelance
writer and investigative journalist. He has over a dozen years experience
writing on political, environmental and health issues. He is the author of Don’t
Worry It is Safe to Eat The True Story of GM Food, BSE, and Foot and Mouth
(Earthscan Press). Visit his website: http://www.andyrowell.com.
Media Lens is UK based media watchdog group (www.medialens.org).
Feel free to respond to Media Lens alerts: editor@medialens.org