3-Food: The Independent (UK) reveals details from confidential MON 863 study

[GENET <coordination@genet-info.org>]

                                  PART I
-------------------------------- GENET-news -------------------------------

TITLE:  Revealed: health fears over secret study into GM food
SOURCE: The Independent, UK, by Geoffrey Lean
        http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?
story=640430
DATE:   22 May 2005

------------------- archive: http://www.genet-info.org/ -------------------


Revealed: health fears over secret study into GM food
Rats fed GM corn due for sale in Britain developed abnormalities in blood
and kidneys

Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed
abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising
fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research
carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the
modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of
their blood.

According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems
were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food as part of the
research project.

The disclosures come as European countries, including Britain, prepare to
vote on whether the GM-modified corn should go on sale to the public. A
vote last week by the European Union failed to secure agreement over
whether the product should be sold here, after Britain and nine other
countries voted in favour.

However, the disclosure of the health effects on the Monsanto rats has
intensified the row over whether the corn is safe to eat without further
research. Doctors said the changes in the blood of the rodents could
indicate that the rat's immune system had been damaged or that a disorder
such as a tumour had grown and the system was mobilising to fight it.

Dr Vyvyan Howard, a senior lecturer on human anatomy and cell biology at
Liverpool University, called for the publication of the full study,
saying the summary gave "prima facie cause for concern".

Dr Michael Antoniu, an expert in molecular genetics at Guy's Hospital
Medical School, described the findings as "very worrying from a medical
point of view", adding: "I have been amazed at the number of significant
differences they found [in the rat experiment]."

Although Monsanto last night dismissed the abnormalities in rats as
meaningless and due to chance, reflecting normal variations between rats,
a senior British government source said ministers were so worried by the
findings that they had called for further information.

Environmentalists will see the findings as vindication of British
research seven years ago, which suggested that rats that ate GM potatoes
suffered damage to their health. That research, which was roundly
denounced by ministers and the British scientific establishment, was
halted and Dr Arpad Pusztai, the scientist behind the controversial
findings, was forced into retirement amid a huge row over the claim.

Dr Pusztai reported a "huge list of significant differences" between rats
fed GM and conventional corn, saying the results strongly indicate that
eating significant amounts of it can damage health. The new study is into
a corn, codenamed MON 863, which has been modified by Monsanto to protect
itself against corn rootworm, which the company describes as "one of the
most pernicious pests affecting maize crops around the world".

Now, however, any decision to allow the corn to be marketed in the UK
will cause widespread alarm. The full details of the rat research are
included in the main report, which Monsanto refuses to release on the
grounds that "it contains confidential business information which could
be of commercial use to our competitors".

A Monsanto spokesman said yesterday: "If any such well-known anti-biotech
critics had doubts about the credibility of these studies they should
have raised them with the regulators. After all, MON 863 isn't new,
having been approved to be as safe as conventional maize by nine other
global authorities since 2003."


                                  PART II
-------------------------------- GENET-news -------------------------------

TITLE:  When fed to rats it affected their kidneys and blood counts.
        So what might it do to humans? We think you should be told
SOURCE: The Independent, UK, by Geoffrey Lean
        http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?
story=640402
DATE:   22 May 2005

------------------- archive: http://www.genet-info.org/ -------------------


When fed to rats it affected their kidneys and blood counts. So what
might it do to humans? We think you should be told

The secret research we reveal today raises the potential health risks of
genetically modified foods. Here, environment editor Geoffrey Lean, who
has led this paper's campaign on GM technology for the past six years,
examines the new evidence. And he asks the questions that must concern us
all: why is Monsanto, the company trying to sell GM corn to Britain and
Europe, so reluctant to publish the full results of its alarming tests on
lab rats? Why are our leaders so keen to buy the unproven technology
against the wishes of consumers? And why is the man who first raised
these concerns six years ago shunned by the scientific establishment and
his former political masters?

One blustery day six years ago - at the start of The Independent on
Sunday's successful GM campaign - I travelled to Aberdeen to meet a man
who had been sent to Coventry.

Dr Arpad Pusztai was then the bogeyman of the British scientific
establishment. No less a figure than Lord May - then the Government's
chief scientific adviser, now president of the Royal Society - had
accused him of violating "every canon of scientific rectitude", and
ministers and top scientists had queued up to denounce him.

His crime had been to find disturbing evidence that the GM potatoes he
was studying damaged the immune systems, brains, livers and kidneys of
rats - and to mention it briefly in a television programme before his
research was completed and published.

His punishment was draconian; his research was stopped, his team
disbanded and his data confiscated (see box). He was ostracised by his
colleagues, forced into retirement and gagged for seven months, forbidden
to put his case. I was the first journalist to interview him at length,
spending six hours with him.

I arrived, very sceptical, at his semi-detached house in the granite
city, where he had worked for the prestigious Rowett Research Institute
for 37 years, with two handwritten pages of hostile questions. But I was
surprised by what I found.

For a start, he proved to be no wild-eyed maverick, but the world's
acknowledged top authority in his field, a small, vital, precise man with
270 papers to his name and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Far from a
headline-seeker, he was evidently a bewildered stranger to public
controversy, cautious in his language, anxious to cross every scientific
"t" before venturing a conclusion.

Perhaps most surprising of all he turned out to be, in his words, "a very
enthusiastic supporter" of genetic modification who had fully expected
his experiments - approved and funded by the Government - to give it a
"clean bill of health".

"I was totally taken aback," he told me. "I was absolutely confident that
I wouldn't find anything. But the longer I spent on the experiments, the
more uneasy I became."

One by one he answered my questions. I can't say I was totally convinced,
but I was persuaded of his integrity, and that he deserved a hearing.
Grey-faced with the strain - and just recovering from a minor heart
attack that he put down to it - he spoke of the "intolerable burden" of
being attacked by the scientific community, without being able to defend
himself, of being "vilified and totally destroyed".

As we walked to a nearby shop to photocopy some of his papers, he told me
that he believed his troubles had started with a phone call to his
employers, the Rowett Research Institute, from Downing Street. That
really did seem incredible at the time - though rather less so now after
the David Kelly affair and the revelations of the Hutton and Butler inquiries.

Some supporting evidence for his suspicion since seems to have emerged
(see box). But whatever the truth about that, this was a time when the
Government was determined to press full-speed ahead with GM technology -
and to rubbish him.

Tony Blair had just put his full weight behind modified foods, letting it
be known that he would happily eat them himself. Jack Cunningham, then in
charge of the Government's GM strategy, announced that Dr Pusztai had
been "comprehensively discredited". His office drew up secret plans -
revealed in The Independent on Sunday - to enlist "eminent scientists" to
attack him and "trail the Government's key messages".

Worse, the Government refused to undertake the normal scientific process
of repeating Dr Pusztai's experiments in order to either confirm or
disprove his findings. Top officials at the then Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food told me that it would be "wrong", "immoral" and "a
waste of money" to do so - an extraordinary attitude given the potential
threat to public health, should he be right.

In the end all these official efforts were in vain. The public settled
the argument simply by refusing to eat GM food. Before the Pusztai
controversy, 60 per cent of processed foods on supermarket shelves
contained GM material. After it the big chains fell over themselves to
remove them in the face of the consumer revolt. Eighty-four per cent of
Britons still say they will not eat them and even the most pro-GM
ministers admit there is no market for them.

Attention then moved away from the health effects of GM food to the
infinitely stronger evidence emerging on the environmental impact of GM
crops. Study after study - reported in our pages - showed that genes
escaped from them to breed superweeds and to contaminate organic and
conventional produce. Finally, the Government's own trials - widely
expected to support GM crops - found that growing most of them damaged
wildlife.

The biotech companies - in stark contrast to their confidence before the
start of our campaign - abandoned their plans to grow GM crops in
Britain. Six years ago they were awaiting imminent government approval to
grow 53 different varieties of them. Not one of these applications now
remains, and no new one is expected to be made in the near future. The
Independent on Sunday's campaign has been widely praised for its key role
in this volte-face.

Now, the focus is swinging back to GM foods - and their safety. The
European Commission is pressing for more and more of them to be allowed
to be sold in Britain and the rest of the EU. European governments are
almost evenly divided for and against them and, in the resulting
deadlock, the commission is using a loophole in the democratic process to
nod them through one by one.

The latest modified crop to come up for approval for use in food is MON
863, a modified corn already grown and eaten in the US and Canada. On
Thursday officials from EU governments were deadlocked again, making it
likely that the commission will again wave it through later in the year.

It is particularly controversial because, as we report on page one today,
secret research carried out on rats by Monsanto - which owns the corn -
suggests that eating it may damage their health.

It indicates that rats fed relatively high levels of MON 863 had smaller
kidneys and suffered potentially more harmful blood chemistry than those
on a conventional diet. Monsanto dismisses the results as meaningless and
due to chance, reflecting normal variations between rats.

Environmentalists, however, will claim that it partially vindicates Dr
Pusztai's research, and Dr Beatrix Tappeser, a top German GM official,
says that it gives "some reason for concern".

Apart from any possible implications for public health, the research data
- as in Dr Pusztai's experiments - are important because they could, if
found to be valid, challenge the whole system by which GM foods are approved.

Regulatory bodies assume that if GM crops are similar to their
conventional counterparts in a restricted number of ways - such as the
amounts of fibre and fatty acids, protein and carbohydrates, vitamins and
minerals they contain - then the chemical and genetic differences that do
exist between them will not make them more toxic. They pronounce them
"substantially equivalent" to non-GM ones and wave them through.

The official European Food Safety Authority, the Food Standards Agency in
Britain and other regulatory agencies back Monsanto's view - as does most
weighty scientific opinion. It would be extremely foolhardy to disregard
their judgements and jump to alarming conclusions.

But it would be equally foolish to dismiss the few dissident voices. For
I have found, time after time, in covering controversial environmental
issues over the past 35 years, that lone scientists, stubbornly raising
concerns in the teeth of entrenched opposition from industry and the
scientific establishment, have often proved to be right.

Professor Derek Bryce-Smith of Reading University was ridiculed and
marginalised for decades after warning of the dangers of lead in petrol
in the 1950s - but it is now being phased out all over the world. The now
much honoured Alice Stewart came under similar attack for first warning
of the hazards of radiation to the unborn child. And I well remember one
of Britain's top officials solemnly informing me a quarter of a century
ago that Dr Irving Selikoff, who did more than anyone to sound the alarm
on asbestos - now one of the main causes of premature death in Britain -
was "evil".

I have sat in the august halls of the Royal Society and been told that
acid rain caused by pollution did not exist. I have been lectured by one
of Britain's top meteorologists - now travelling the world to warn about
global warming - that the climate never changes, and that human
activities could not possibly cause it to do so. And who can forget the
constant reassurances from the political and scientific establishments
that BSE could not spread to people?

A few weeks ago my teenage daughter asked me to test her on her
environmental chemistry exam revision. As I checked her answers against
the text book, I surprised her by letting out the occasional chuckle at
its dry contents. For there, presented as indisputable fact, were many of
these once highly controversial concerns raised by dissident scientists
and roundly dismissed by the weight of scientific opinion.

It is still a long shot, and the balance of probability is still against
it, but it is not impossible that in 25 years today's apparently alarmist
concerns about the dangers of GM food will have found their way into a
new generation of text books. If so, Dr Pusztai will finally come in from
the cold.

The lone doctor who first exposed the risks to humans

It was a startling and sensational claim - a claim aired on prime-time
national television. Rats fed on genetically modified potatoes had
suffered serious damage to their immune systems and shown stunted growth.

This result, said Dr Arpad Pusztai, the scientist involved, was immensely
worrying, since it raised substantial questions about the safety of GM
food. "I find it is very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea
pigs," he remarked.

Dr Pusztai's claims - broadcast by World in Action, one of the nation's
most respected current affairs programmes - provoked one of the most
intense scientific rows of the decade.

The backlash was orchestrated by ministers, led by Jack Cunningham, then
New Labour's "Cabinet enforcer", and by the British scientific establishment.

Dr Pusztai, pictured, was a world authority on the subject, and his
remarks, in August 1998, had come at a crucial time for Tony Blair. It
ignited a public debate on the safety of GM foods, at a time when the
Prime Minister was committing the UK to take a leading role in the bio-
tech revolution.

That brief interview left Dr Pusztai's career in ruins.

That Monday evening, Professor Philip James, the head of Dr Pusztai's
research centre, the Rowett Research Institute, had congratulated the
Hungarian scientist on his television appearance.

Over the next 48 hours, Dr Pusztai and some of his colleagues allege that
Professor James took two angry calls from Downing Street - a claim the
professor denies. Yet by Wednesday, the Rowett had retracted Dr Pusztai's
findings.

Its senior officials alleged the Hungarian had admitted he had
misrepresented his findings. Rather than being fed GM potatoes, they
claimed, the rats were given ordinary potatoes spiked with a protein
which the extra genes might have made.

They also stated these were preliminary findings which had not gone
through normal peer-review. In short, said Professor James, Dr Pusztai
should not have gone public.

Dr Pusztai still refutes these charges. His study was funded by the
Scottish Office's agriculture department. His research was designed to
test the environmental safety of using GM potatoes with a toxin, lectin,
added.

In 2001, he told a Royal Commission on GMOs in New Zealand it was the GM
potatoes that produced the startling finding. The Rowett's tests showed
that the GM potatoes were "significantly different" from normal potatoes.
Yet, in May 1999, a panel of Royal Society-appointed toxicologists
branded his research flawed.

And that was enough for Dr Cunningham to re-enter the debate. Dr
Pusztai's findings were "not valid", he said.

But Dr Pusztai may yet emerge as a prophet. The revelations about
Monsanto's secret GM corn research may confirm that this pro-GM scientist
has become a hero of the anti-GM movement.

Severin Carrell and Andy Rowell


                                  PART III
-------------------------------- GENET-news -------------------------------

TITLE:  How the technology works, and what it promises
SOURCE: The Independent, UK, by Tom Anderson
        http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?
story=640400
DATE:   22 May 2005

------------------- archive: http://www.genet-info.org/ -------------------


How the technology works, and what it promises

What is it?

Genetically modified (GM) food is produced from plants or animals that
have had their genetic material altered by scientists. Scientists are
able to extract genes from organisms with desirable properties - such as
a particular colour or resistance to a disease - and transfer them to
another organism.

The process has sharply divided opinion, between those who believe the
technology will enhance our lives and those who fear it will prove an
advance too far. By far the most commonly modified organisms are crop
plants. But the technology has been applied to almost all forms of life,
from pets that glow under UV light to bacteria that form HIV-blocking
"living condoms", and pigs bearing spinach genes.

If GM lives up to the opinions of its most enthusiastic supporters, it
could reduce the use of pesticides and fertilisers, allow people to farm
in harsh environments and increase crop yields. It could also make our
food healthier and more nutritious to eat.

When did it begin?

Investment began pouring into the fledgling biotechnology industry in the
late 1970s, amid huge excitement about the new technology and potentially
enormous profits. Then in 1981, Monsanto, famous for its Round Up brand
of herbicide and a pioneer in the field, started a biotech unit of its own.

The first transgenic plant - a tobacco plant resistant to antibiotics -
was created in 1983. It was another 11 years before the first commercial
GM plant in the United States - a delayed-ripening tomato - and another
two years (1996) before a GM product - Zeneca's tomato paste - hit
British supermarkets. In 1993 the US Food and Drug Administration
declared GM food was "not inherently dangerous", clearing the way for
biotech companies to begin marketing genetically modified seed.

How much is it worth?

The global value of the GM crop market is projected at more than £2.8bn
for 2005. The estimated global area of crops for 2004 was 200 million
acres. But the biotech companies aren't yet making the profits they
envisaged because the key European market eludes them.

Europe remains as hostile as ever to the idea of modified food, and
analysts are warning of a possible trade war with the US over the
labelling of GM food.

What foods are available?

In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture reported that 101.5 million
acres of GM crops were planted in the United States. It has been
estimated that 75 per cent of processed foods in the US contain some GM
ingredients.

They include Bac-Os, bacon-flavoured soya bits, and Schwartz salad
topping, a seasoning for salads, which uses bacon-flavoured GM soya chunks.

Even Cheshire cheese, made for vegetarians, uses a GM-derived enzyme.

In Britain, hostility to the technology has persuaded all the main
supermarkets and manufacturers to withdraw GM ingredients, although
genetically altered food may be available in some imported products.


                                  PART IV
-------------------------------- GENET-news -------------------------------

TITLE:  The GM lobby must not play politics with our health
SOURCE: The Independent, UK, Comment
        http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp?
story=640362
DATE:   22 May 2005

------------------- archive: http://www.genet-info.org/ -------------------


The GM lobby must not play politics with our health

Imagine that a leading scientist in his field carried out official,
government-funded research that gave reason to believe that 60 per cent
of our processed foods might threaten human health. In any civilised
country, research would be organised while precautionary action would be
taken to inform the public in a non-alarmist way and to minimise any risk.

Dream on. When Dr Arpad Pusztai reported seven years ago that genetically
modified potatoes seemed to damage the immune systems and vital organs of
rats - raising concern about the then ubiquitous GM soya in our food - he
was persecuted, his research halted and there was a concerted attempt to
rubbish it. As a result, the public rushed to spurn GM food, forcing
supermarkets to strip it from their shelves. Even now 17 out of every 20
Britons will not touch it.

Now history may be about to repeat itself. Another study, this time by
the giant biotech firm Monsanto, again raises a possibility that a GM
food may damage laboratory rats. The company dismisses any suggestion
that the modified corn could pose any hazard either to rats or people, as
do the European, British and other regulatory bodies. On Thursday,
Britain, France, Germany and seven other EU countries even voted to allow
it to be used in food sold and eaten throughout the Continent. But at
Monsanto's insistence, the full study itself is being kept secret.

It is hard to see why. The study is about public safety after all; if it
does contain any commercially sensitive material about Monsanto's
manufacturing processes, this could be deleted. High stakes could be
involved; the health of many millions of people on the one hand, the
health of much of US agriculture - which helps to feed the world - on the
other. It is essential that the public and independent scientists are
able to assess the risks, or the absence of them, for themselves.

This newspaper has long led, and reflected, public scepticism about GM.
We believe that the risks of current modified crops, mainly to the
environment, far outweigh any advantages. But we also believe that one
day some may be developed that could enormously benefit humanity.

If the public remains hostile to the technology, however, any such
opportunities will be missed. And it can hardly be blamed for being so,
when it believes - justly or not - that the biotech industry has always
got something to hide.




--


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