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For Dr. Arpad Pusztai, two and a half minutes was all it took to end a 36-year career.

“It was timed. It was 150 seconds,” Pusztai says of his August 1998 appearance on the British television program World in Action. “All I said was that we had come across a bizarre surprise finding when we ran experiments to test what happened to animals who ate genetically modified potatoes. Then the whole world caved in around me.”²

Pusztai, a mild-mannered research biologist, is the son of a highly decorated Hungarian war hero who led the resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II. “They put a high price on his head, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he knew was right,” Pusztai recalls. His father was equally outspoken against the communist regime that took power at war’s end, and when the Soviet army invaded Hungary in 1956 to crush a citizen uprising, young Arpad fled the country. By then he had already established a name for himself as a scientist, and after several months of living in Austrian refugee camps, he accepted a scholarship from the Ford Foundation that enabled him to live and study where he wanted. He selected England, he recalls now with some irony, because he believed it was a tolerant country.

After completing his doctorate in London’s Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine, Pusztai was recruited to work at the prestigious Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he published more than 270 scientific papers and became known as the world’s leading expert on lectins, a class of carbohydrate-binding proteins. Lectins are present in most plants, especially cereals, potatoes, and beans. Some lectins are toxic, but others are safe for humans and other mammals. During the late 1980s, Pusztai spent six years studying a particular type of lectin taken from snowdrop bulbs. The “snowdrop lectin,” also known as GNA, killed insect pests but proved safe even when fed to test animals in high concentrations. Pusztai’s research therefore attracted intense interest as a possible safe way to develop genetically modified food crops that would resist insects but remain safe for human consumption. Pusztai’s ability to attract research funding was considered so valuable that he was asked to stay on at Rowett after retirement age. In 1995, his expertise helped the Rowett Institute beat out 27 contenders to win a government contract to “identify genes . . . which will be suitable for transfer into plants to enhance their resistance towards insect and nematode pests, but will have minimum impact on non-target, beneficial organisms, the environment, livestock fed on these plants, and which will present no health risks for humans.”

“When we started the project in 1995, we ran a search for biological testing papers on genetically modified foods,” Pusztai recalls. “There were none, so we did more searches from time to time.” In 1996, he finally found a study published in the Journal of Nutrition. It was written by B. G. Hammond, a scientist with Monsanto, the company that leads the drive to develop genetically modified foods. After feeding Monsanto’s genetically modified “Roundup Ready” soybeans to rats, catfish, chickens, and cows, Hammond concluded that the modified soya had the same nutritional value as conventional soybeans.³ Methodologically, however, Pusztai thought Hammond’s paper was weak. “The main problem is they were using mature animals which are not forming body tissues and organs,” he said. “Adults only need a small amount of protein because their bodies are in equilibrium, in homeostasis. But a young growing animal needs a great deal more protein because it’s laying down muscle and tissues and forming its organs. Moreover, there was only a small proportion of raw genetically-modified soya in their diet—about seven percent. It was obvious that the study had been designed to avoid finding any problems. Everybody in our consortium knew this. I thought that GNA—the snowdrop lectin—should be much better. If we could show that the snowdrop lectin was safe in genetically modified potatoes, we would be real heroes.”

At the time Pusztai’s own feeding experiments began, he considered himself a “very enthusiastic supporter” of gene technology. He fully expected to issue a clean bill of health to the genetically modified potatoes that he was testing. The longer the experiments continued, however, the more concerns arose.

Pusztai’s experiments involved feeding potatoes to four different groups of rats. A control group was fed on regular, unmodified potatoes. Two other groups were fed on different strains of potatoes that had each been genetically engineered to produce the snowdrop lectin. The fourth group was fed potatoes that had not been genetically modified, but which had been spiked with the snowdrop lectin through conventional, non-genetic means. As expected, the rats that ate unmodified potatoes did well, as did the rats in the fourth group that ate lectin-spiked potatoes.

To Pusztai’s surprise, however, the rats fed on genetically modified potatoes showed a variety of unexpected and troubling changes in the size and weight of their body organs, including smaller livers, hearts, and brains. Pusztai’s research team also found evidence of weakened immune systems. “Feeding transgenic potatoes to rats induced major and in most instances highly significant changes in the weights of some or most of their vital organs,” he concluded. “Particularly worrying was the partial liver atrophy . . . Immune organs, such as the spleen and thymus were also frequently affected.”⁴

“I was totally taken aback; no doubt about it,” Pusztai recalled. “I was absolutely confident that I would not find anything, but the longer I spent on the experiment the more uneasy I became. I believe in the technology. But it is too new for us to be absolutely sure that what we are doing is right.”⁵

Unmodified potatoes were harmless by themselves. The snowdrop lectin was also harmless by itself, or when added directly to potatoes. In fact, Pusztai’s previous research had shown that rats suffered no harmful effects even when fed 1,000 times the amount of snowdrop lectin that appeared in his genetically modified potatoes. It appeared, therefore, that something about the genetic engineering process had produced the unexpected result. It was a troubling observation that raised more questions than it answered, and Pusztai felt that more research was needed. As his concerns emerged, however, questions began to be raised about Pusztai’s research methodology. A government immunologist was brought in to inspect his work. She found no flaws, but his requests for further government funding were turned down.

Initially, the Rowett Research Institute agreed with Pusztai that something should be done to drum up funding so that further research could be conducted into the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods. In June 1998, with the Rowett’s approval, Pusztai agreed to the TV interview with World in Action. “My appearance was to highlight the need for a case-by-case program of biological testing of all GM foodstuffs,” he said. The interview was recorded seven weeks prior to broadcast, with the Institute’s public relations officer present as an observer. “If the Rowett had any qualms about the content of the TV program, they had seven weeks to stop it,” Pusztai said. “I kept to our agreement and only talked about the necessity of biological testing of GM foodstuffs before they were accepted into the human food chain. No experimental details or even the identity of the gene used were mentioned by me in the program. It was thought at the time, and the Rowett agreed with me, that our short- and long-term nutritional and immunological work with our two distinct lines of GM potatoes could have been a good starting point for a biological testing program. In the TV program I said that GM science might bring benefits, but only if we got it right and made sure that the GM foodstuffs were safe by testing them thoroughly and handling everything transparently.”

The interviewer posed a couple of difficult questions. Did Dr. Pusztai feel concerned about the lack of safety testing of GM foods? “I could answer but two things: either yes or no,” Pusztai said. “I am afraid I have never learned to lie, so I said yes.” Would he personally eat his own genetically modified potatoes? Pusztai answered in the negative, noting that it is “very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”

In the weeks immediately following the taping and even up until the time of the broadcast, the Rowett Research Institute seemed happy with the publicity. Its director, Professor Philip James, even called Pusztai’s wife after the broadcast to express his congratulations on how well he had handled the interview. Then suddenly, two days after the broadcast, everything changed. Pusztai knew he was in trouble when he was called into the director’s office. Professor James was sitting stern-faced, flanked by Rowett’s personnel manager and an attorney. He handed Pusztai a news release, which stated that he had been suspended from work “and he will now retire from the Institute.”⁶

“I was suspended for 12 days and then returned to the Rowett to finish off the rest of my year’s contract,” Pusztai said. “When I got to my laboratory I found the computers sealed, the desks locked and all my papers taken away. Worse, no one was speaking to me. All my former colleagues acted as though I didn’t exist. When I went into the coffee room they would turn their backs on me.”⁷

“Suspended,” in other words, was a not-so-polite euphemism for being fired. And it wasn’t just Pusztai who was getting the sack. His experiments were abruptly terminated, his data confiscated. His potatoes were seized, his 18-member scientific team was disbanded, and his research designed to shed light on the safety of genetically modified foods was stopped in its tracks.

“I am not sure how the Con A story came about, but I can assure you it did not originate with me,” Pusztai says. “I have been doing experiments with lectins, including Con A, in a gut context for 25 years. I more or less created this field of study, and I do not take very kindly to the idea that I did not know whether I talked about Con A or GNA. I must say I was very surprised when the few reporters I spoke to questioned me about our Con A studies.”⁸

One of the first mentions of the Con A lectin seems to have come from Dan Verakis, a spokesman for Monsanto. On the morning of August 10, just prior to the broadcast of the World in Action interview, Pusztai did a separate live interview in which Verakis also participated. “I was surprised when I heard him say that we should not have used the gene of the toxic protein from the South American jackbean,” Pusztai recalls.

Later that morning, he returned to the Rowett Research Institute. “By that time all the phones were ringing, and secretaries were logging phone calls,” he says. “I was tired and therefore Professor James kindly suggested that I was not to give more interviews.” Although Pusztai did not realize it at the time, his interview on the morning of August 10 would be the last time he was allowed to speak publicly for six months.

Over the course of the next two days, the Rowett Institute’s correspondence with journalists came from Professor James himself or from other staff members who inexplicably repeated the Con A confusion. A news release issued by the institute on August 10 stated that Pusztai’s experiments used “the potent insecticidal lectin Concanavalin A.” This official line became the basis for news stories titled “Scientist’s Potato Alert Was False, Laboratory Admits,” and “Doctor’s Monster Mistake.” The Times of London described the situation as follows:

The data to which Dr. Pusztai had referred, first in an interview with World in Action and then with the Times and other media, did not involve genetically modified potatoes. Rather, it involved feeding trials in which a protein from the jack bean, a lectin, was added to a potato-based feed. Since this lectin is known to harm the immune system, the damage was not surprising.

The institute does intend to carry out feeding trials with a potato modified by inserting the gene for this lectin, called Con A, but has yet to start. It said it “regrets the release of misleading information about issues of such importance to the public and the scientific community.” Professor Philip James, the director, had suspended Dr. Pusztai from all responsibility for the studies, and put Dr. Andrew Chesson, head of research, in charge.

Dr. Colin Merritt of Monsanto, the leading company involved in gene-modified crops, said: “It seems the researcher leading this programme was out of the country . . . Meanwhile, Dr. Pusztai had gone to the media. Basically he has picked up non-genetically modified potato data, in which the naturally occurring poison Con A has been added, and read that as the effect of transgenic modified potatoes. It is an awful mistake and these revelations are absolute dynamite.”⁹

The only problem with this explanation is that every important fact in it was false. Pusztai’s experiments had used genetically modified potatoes. The Con A lectin is indeed poisonous, but Pusztai was not experimenting with Con A. He had used the snowdrop lectin, GNA. If Professor James had only shown him the news release before sending it out, Pusztai says, he could have corrected the mistake. The Rowett Research Institute would eventually admit that its news release was wrong, but by then the damage had already been done. Its errors would continue to appear in some news stories for more than a year after they were publicly retracted.

“We have never done any experiments with GM-potatoes expressing the gene of Concanavalin A,” Pusztai says. “I still do not know and cannot make up my mind whether the Director was telling the world about Con A in his Press Releases on August 10 to discredit me or just did this out of ignorance, but the effect was the same. When I had to say that there were no such experiments I was regarded as a bumbling idiot, a thief or a cheat. The strategy, if I can assume him to be clever enough, was to put something into my mouth that was manifestly wrong and then to shoot me down for it.”¹⁰

The Con A misunderstanding reverberated for months afterward as the basis for all sorts of confused and misleading news stories. “Instead of rodents fed with genetically altered potatoes, Dr. Pusztai had used the results of tests carried out on rats treated with poison,” reported the Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail.¹¹

“Lectins are a known poison; of course if they were in the potatoes you would expect an effect,” wrote Charles Arthur, technology editor of the London Independent.¹²

Sir Robert May, the British government’s chief scientist, also echoed the Con A fallacy. “If you mix cyanide with vermouth in a cocktail and find that it is not good for you, I don’t draw sweeping conclusions that you should ban all mixed drinks,” he told a radio interviewer.¹³

In addition to misrepresenting Pusztai’s research, Professor James spun out a series of subtle slurs on his competence and character, describing Pusztai as “an outstanding scientist who has done good work but who had got himself in a terrible fix.” James hinted that Pusztai was suffering from senility, describing his thinking as “muddled” and saying that he was “on the verge of collapse,” “gibbering,” and “absolutely mortified. He is holding his hands up and is apologizing,” James said, which was another falsehood. “I am desperate that dear old Arpad Pusztai maintains his scientific credibility,” he would say at another point. “I am desperate to protect him.”¹⁴

Publicly, Pusztai was unable to respond to any of these statements for the simple reason that the Rowett Research Institute had used restrictive clauses in his employment contract to impose a gag order preventing him from speaking out. Like tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, he risked forfeiting his pension if he spoke to reporters. Professor James would claim later that the restrictions on Pusztai were justified because “he was exhausted and not used to dealing with the media. He was naïve and overwhelmed and therefore I relieved him of any press relations. I was amazed when I was accused of gagging him.”¹⁵ Pusztai, however, has copies of letters from James threatening him with court action if he spoke to the press. His wife, Susan, who was also a scientist at Rowett, was forbidden from speaking with reporters or even being photographed. “All my life I have been afraid of people who said they were helping me. I grew up under a communist regime, and they told me they also had my best intentions at heart,” Pusztai said. “I didn’t believe them and escaped as a political refugee. Unfortunately I couldn’t escape from Professor James. . . . For the first time in my life I was deprived of my right of self-defense. My restrictive contract prevented me saying the things necessary to defend myself.”¹⁶

As public controversy continued to swirl, the Rowett Research Institute established a four-scientist “audit committee” to review Pusztai’s work. Normally an audit of this type is performed only if there is reason to suspect actual scientific fraud. The Rowett’s committee found no such evidence and confirmed that he had indeed been working with potatoes genetically modified to contain the snowdrop lectin. The committee disagreed, however, with the conclusions that Pusztai had drawn from his data. The Rowett gave Pusztai three days to write a reply to the audit committee, while continuing to deny him access to his own data. It then posted the text of its audit report on the Internet, along with Pusztai’s reply, which it described as “unpublishable”—that is, insufficiently rigorous for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Pusztai agrees, pointing out that this is hardly surprising given the limitations under which he was forced to produce it.¹⁷

Prevented from speaking directly to the media, Pusztai sent a letter to a friend, which was then passed on to journalists. In the letter, he noted that the Rowett Research Institute, during testimony about his work before a government review committee, had provided the conclusions of its own audit report while neglecting to inform the committee of the existence of Pusztai’s rebuttal. By then, two months had passed. Rowett had said it would “consider” his rebuttal, but had made no reply. When he pressed further, he was told to write up his data as scientific papers and submit them to Professor James, who would decide whether they could be submitted for publication in scientific journals. Even if James would give approval—obviously a big if—this process would have taken at least six to eight months. “But for someone like me, with my destroyed scientific reputation, it may take considerably longer. So, I am sure it is another delaying ploy,” Pusztai stated in the letter to his friend.¹⁸

Since Pusztai’s contract with the Rowett Research Institute prevented him from publishing his findings on his own, he passed some of his samples for evaluation on to Dr. Stanley Ewen, a pathologist at Aberdeen University. Ewen carried out his own measurements and agreed with Pusztai’s findings. Finally, in February 1999, a 20-member international scientific panel went on record in support of Pusztai. Only then did the Rowett Institute lift the gag order so that he could begin to speak publicly on his own behalf. Without permission from the Institute, however, he was still unable to publish. As a sort of scientific end run around this restriction, Ewen wrote up his own appraisal, which was eventually published in October with Pusztai as coauthor in the Lancet, England’s leading medical journal.

As someone who had built a good portion of his career laying the scientific groundwork for the development of genetically modified foods, Pusztai now found himself in a situation where his primary defenders were environmentalists, organic food advocates, and other stalwart opponents of biotech foods. “I have landed up in no-man’s land. It is not a comfortable place to be,” Pusztai stated. “I am in a situation I cannot get out of now. I feel responsible to keep going because I am the only one with data that shows there are problems. I have a choice: apologize for being incorrect or keep going, and I know I am correct.”¹⁹

In Europe, the public’s concerns in this regard are particularly acute as a consequence of the “mad cow disease” scandal in England, which erupted in 1996 when government ministers and scientists reversed more than a decade of denial by admitting that a fatal brain disease in cows had begun to infect humans.²¹ Formally known as “bovine spongiform encephalopathy,” or BSE, mad cow disease kills its victims by filling their brains with microscopic spongelike holes. Prior to the 1980s, BSE had never been identified in British cattle. It reached epidemic levels in the British cattle population due to an innovation in animal feeding practices—the widespread use of “rendered animal by-products” as feed supplements. Rendering consists of cooking the inedible remains of slaughtered animals. Some researchers believe mad cow disease originated when cows were fed the rendered remains of sheep that were infected with a BSE-like disease called scrapie. Whether this theory is correct or not, scientists who have studied the disease agree that the practice of feeding rendered cows back to other cows is what enabled mad cow disease to spread and multiply into an epidemic. In its eagerness to use every bit of protein from slaughtered animals, agribusiness had created a cannibalistic feeding loop. “It happened when, for economic reasons, herbivores were fed offals derived from other species, something they would never eat in nature,” says developmental biologist Stuart Newman. “Basically, commercial interests forced the crossing of biological boundaries, leading to a new disease.”

The practice of feeding rendered animal protein back to cattle is actually a fairly low-tech procedure. As innovations go, it is simplicity itself compared to the complexity and scope of changes being considered and introduced into our food as a result of new scientific discoveries such as chemical antibiotics and pesticides, fake fats, and fake sweeteners. Of all these innovations, genetic engineering is the most radical and innovative procedure, the most complex, and the least understood even by scientists. For European consumers, the mad cow outbreak marked a warning shot across the bow, an example of the unpredictable dangers inherent in scientific efforts to tamper with their foods. Arpad Pusztai’s 150 seconds of fame came at a time when European opinion was turning sharply in favor of greater caution and greater safety, and his saga added further fuel to the fires of an already growing debate about the wisdom of introducing genetically modified organisms into the human food supply. Monsanto and the other commercial interests seeking to profit from biotech foods regard this debate as an example of unwarranted public hysteria, driven by fear-mongering activists and media sensationalism. “Everybody over here hates us,” lamented Dan Verakis, Monsanto’s chief European spokesman, in February 1999.²²

The public’s concern reflects the arrogance with which the biotech industry has attempted to manipulate public opinion and awareness. In July 1999, the journal Science published a comparison of news coverage in Europe versus the United States on the subject of biotechnology and concluded that while Europeans were more scientifically literate than their U.S. counterparts, they were “more likely than Americans to perceive GM foods as menacing or dangerous based on scientifically inaccurate assumptions.”²³

Many of the public’s concerns in fact go beyond narrow issues of scientific interpretation or technical expertise. The Pusztai case, for example, raised questions about the political effect of the interlocking relationships between research institutions and their government and corporate sponsors. The Rowett Research Institute receives a small percentage of the funding for its research through contract arrangements with Monsanto. More important, 90 percent of its funding comes from the British government, which at the time of the Pusztai controversy was aggressively courting biotech investments. “We now have to recognize a new sort of scientist, and with it a new sort of science,” observed one commentator at the time. “The scientists working for publicly funded institutions are . . . hired and fired by convenience, they are assigned tasks set by their bosses, and they have few rights, or none, to the intellectual property of their work. And their employers may be engaged in work that involves risks, small, great or unquantifiable. If the scientist-worker doesn’t like it, he can, like Pusztai, choose to be a whistle-blowing martyr or he can search for another career. The difference in the situation of the ‘independent’ university-based scientists is only of degree, not of kind; they all need grants. And, as the GM affair shows so clearly, industry-based scientists have influence in high places—they move in the corridors of government. What then is the price of criticism?”²⁴

Many of the battle lines in the biotech food debate were drawn during Monsanto’s PR and lobbying campaign to win approval for recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a controversial product that, when injected into dairy cows, can induce them to produce more milk. In 1986, Wisconsin dairy farmers led by fifth-generation milker John Kinsman formed an alliance with biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin to oppose rBGH, and by 1988, the anti-rBGH coalition had come to include family farm organizations, consumer groups, and animal welfare activists. One thing that these groups easily agreed upon was the need for safety testing and mandatory consumer labeling so that individual consumers could decide for themselves whether or not to purchase rBGH-treated milk. As early as 1986, however, industry surveys showed that labeling milk from cows treated with the drug would lead to consumer rejection. Not content with escaping from mandatory labeling, Monsanto tried to make it impossible for anyone to voluntarily put labels on milk from cows that had not been injected with rBGH. When some states and several dairies tried to label their products as rBGH-free, Monsanto threatened to take the dairies to court and backed up the threat by actually filing suit against two of them.

The Washington, D.C.-based PR and lobby firm of Capitoline/ MS&L brought together drug and dairy industry groups in an ad hoc network called the Dairy Coalition, comprising university researchers funded by Monsanto, as well as carefully selected “third party” experts. Participants included:

• The International Food Information Council, which calls itself “a non-profit organization that disseminates sound, scientific information on food safety and nutrition to journalists, health professionals, government officials and consumers.” In reality, IFIC is a public relations arm of the food and beverage industries, which provide the bulk of its funding. Its staff members hail from industry groups such as the Sugar Association and the National Soft Drink Association, and it has repeatedly led the defense for controversial food additives including monosodium glutamate, aspartame (Nutrasweet), food dyes, and olestra.

• The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, representing the top executive of every department of agriculture in all 50 states.

• The American Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful conservative lobby behind the movement to pass food disparagement laws like the one under which Oprah Winfrey was sued in Texas.

• The American Dietetic Association, a national association of registered dietitians that works closely with IFIC and hauls in large sums of money advocating for the food industry. Its stated mission is to “improve the health of the public,” but with 15 percent of its budget—more than $3 million—coming from food companies and trade groups, it has learned not to bite the hand that feeds it. “They never criticize the food industry,” says Joan Gussow, a former head of the nutrition education program at Teachers College at Columbia University. The ADA’s website even contains a series of “fact sheets” about various food products, sponsored by the same corporations that make the products (Monsanto for biotechnology; Procter & Gamble for olestra; Ajinomoto for MSG; the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers for fats and oils).²⁶

• The Grocery Manufacturers of America, the country’s leading trade association for the food and beverage industries. Its member companies account for more than $460 billion in sales annually in the United States. GMA itself is a lobbying powerhouse in Washington, spending $1.4 million for that purpose in 1998.

• The Food Marketing Institute, a trade association of food retailers and wholesalers, whose grocery store members represent three-fourths of grocery sales in the United States.

In the campaign for rBGH approval, its proponents engaged in extensive media monitoring to detect and attack unsympathetic journalists. In 1989, the PR firm of Carma International was hired to conduct a computer analysis of every story filed on rBGH, ranking reporters as friends or enemies. This information was used to reward friendly reporters while complaining to editors about those who filed reports that were deemed unfriendly. Leaked internal documents from the Dairy Coalition reveal how journalists who failed to toe the line have been handled. On February 8, 1996, dairy officials wrote Mary Jane Wilkinson, assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe, to complain about an upcoming food column by freelance writer Linda Weltner. In her column, Weltner cited concerns about rBGH expressed by Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois and author of the prizewinning 1978 book The Politics of Cancer, as well nine other books and 280 scientific articles. Epstein has been a leading critic of rBGH and the use of growth hormones for fattening cattle in feedlots and has consulted on these topics for the European Community, on whose behalf he testified during hearings before the World Trade Organization.

“On [January] 23rd, [Dr.] Samuel Epstein . . . made unsupported allegations linking milk and cancer,” the letter stated. “We’re concerned that Ms. Weltner will give Epstein a forum in the Boston Globe to disseminate theories that have no basis in science.” The letter smeared Epstein as a scaremonger with “no standing among his peers in the scientific community and no credibility with the leading health organizations in this country.” It noted that “others in the news media who attended Epstein’s press conference or reviewed his study—such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington Post—chose not to run this ‘story.’ . . . USA Today was the only newspaper to print these allegations and we recently held a heated meeting with them.”²⁷

Another internal dairy industry document described the handling of USA Today health reporter Anita Manning, whose article on the subject offended rBGH lobbyists. “On Wednesday representatives of the Dairy Coalition met with reporter Anita Manning and her editor at USA Today. When Manning said that Epstein was a credible source, the Dairy Coalition’s Dr. Wayne Callaway pointed out that Epstein has no standing among the scientific community. . . . When Manning insisted it was her responsibility to tell both sides of the story, Callaway said that was just a cop-out for not doing her homework. She was told that if she had attended the press conference, instead of writing the story from a press release, she would have learned that her peers from the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press chose not to do the story because of the source. At this point Manning left the meeting and her editor assured the Dairy Coalition that any future stories dealing with [rBGH] and health would be closely scrutinized.”²⁸

A February 1996 internal document of the Dairy Coalition notes that “the Coalition is convinced its work in educating reporters and editors at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Associated Press led to those organizations’ dismissal of Samuel Epstein’s pronouncements that milk from [rBGH] supplemented cows causes breast and colon cancer. They did not run the story.”²⁹

The same document tells of knocking New York Times food reporter Marian Burros off the beat entirely. “As you may recall,” it stated, “the Dairy Coalition worked hard with the New York Times last year to keep Marian Burros, a very anti-industry reporter, from ‘breaking’ Samuel Epstein’s claim that milk from . . . supplemented cows causes breast and colon cancer. She did not do the story and now the NYT health reporters are the ones on the [rBGH] beat. They do not believe Epstein. Marian Burros is not happy about the situation.”³⁰

In Florida, Monsanto’s attorneys intervened in 1997 when investigative reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre attempted to air a critical story about rBGH. Their investigation, conducted for Tampa Bay Fox network affiliate WTVT, made a series of disturbing claims about Monsanto and its product:

• Bovine growth hormone was never adequately tested before FDA allowed it on the market. A standard cancer test of a new human drug requires two years of testing with several hundred rats. But rBGH was tested for only 90 days on 30 rats. Worse, the study has never been published, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has refused to allow open scientific peer review of the study’s raw data.

• Some Florida dairy herds grew sick shortly after starting rBGH treatment. One farmer, Charles Knight, reported losing 75 percent of his herd and said that Monsanto and Monsanto-funded researchers at University of Florida withheld from him the information that other dairy herds were suffering similar problems.

• Interviewed on camera, Florida dairy officials and scientists refuted Monsanto’s claim that every truckload of milk from rBGH-treated cows is tested for excessive antibiotics.

• A visit by Akre to seven randomly selected Florida dairy farms found that all seven were injecting their cows with the hormone. Wilson and Akre also visited area supermarket chains, which two years previously had promised to ask their milk suppliers not to use rBGH in response to consumer concerns. In reality, store representatives admitted that they have taken no steps to assure compliance with this request.³¹

• Finally, the story dwelt heavily on concerns raised by scientists such as Epstein and Consumers Union researcher Michael Hansen about potential cancer risks associated with “insulin-like growth factor one” (IGF-1). Treatments of rBGH can lead to significantly increased levels of IGF-1 in milk, and recent studies suggest that IGF-1 is a powerful tumor growth promoter.

The resulting story, a four-part series, was cleared by management and scheduled to begin airing on Monday, February 24, 1997. As part of the buildup to network ratings sweeps, the story was already being heavily promoted in radio ads when an ominous letter arrived at the office of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, the former Republican political operative who now heads Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network news. The letter came from John J. Walsh, a powerful New York attorney with the firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, who accused the reporters of bias and urged the network to delay the story to ensure “a more level playing field” for Monsanto’s side. “There is a lot at stake in what is going on in Florida, not only for Monsanto but also for Fox News and its owner,” Walsh wrote.³²

“Monsanto hired one of the most renowned lawyers in America to use his power and influence,” Wilson says. “Even though our stories had been scheduled to run, even though Fox had bought expensive radio ads to alert viewers to the story, it was abruptly cancelled on the eve of the broadcasts within hours of receiving the letter from Monsanto’s lawyer.”

Initially, the story was postponed for a week. Akre and Wilson offered to do a further interview with Monsanto and supplied a list of topics to be discussed. In response, Walsh fired back an even more threatening letter: “It simply defies credulity that an experienced journalist would expect a representative of any company to go on camera and respond to the vague, undetailed—and for the most part accusatory—points listed by Ms. Akre. Indeed, some of the points clearly contain the elements of defamatory statements which, if repeated in a broadcast, could lead to serious damage to Monsanto and dire consequences for Fox News.”

What followed next, according to Wilson and Akre, was a grueling nightmare of perpetual delays and station-mandated rewrites—73 in all, none of which proved satisfactory to station management. “No fewer than six air dates were set and cancelled,” Wilson recalls. “In all my years as a print and radio and local and national television reporter, I’ve never seen anything like it.” When the reporters balked at some of the station’s proposed changes—such as deleting Epstein’s warning of cancer risks—they say the station’s general manager notified them they would be fired for insubordination within 48 hours and another reporter would make the requested changes.

“When we said we’d file a formal complaint with the FCC if that happened,” says Wilson, “we were not fired but were each offered very large cash settlements to go away and keep quiet about the story and how it was handled.” The reporters refused the settlement, which amounted to nearly $200,000, and ultimately were fired in December 1997.

In the early 1990s, biotech promoters lobbied intensely and successfully to prevent genetically modified foods from being labeled as such. In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decreed that GM foods are substantially equivalent to conventional foods. Under FDA rules, a new food must be thoroughly tested unless it falls into a category of foods that FDA terms “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS). By declaring that biotech foods are equivalent to the conventional variety, FDA deemed them GRAS and therefore exempt from mandatory safety testing or special product labeling. Government regulators rely on biotech companies to do their own voluntary safety tests and also determine themselves if the product in question is GRAS.³⁴ One of the key decision-makers who helped draft FDA’s policy was Michael Taylor, previously an attorney for Monsanto. After the policy was written, in fact, Taylor left the FDA and eventually went back to work for Monsanto.³⁵

Rather than subject the merits of GM foods to open public debate, industry has tried to get the products quickly on the shelves and then deal with public opinion after the innovation has already become an accomplished fact. Until fairly recently, this strategy appeared to be succeeding. The first large-scale commercial plantings of transgenic crops went into the ground in 1996, and by 1998, they covered nearly 69 million acres in eight countries, not including China. In 1999, about a third of the U.S. corn crop and more than half of the soybeans planted were estimated to be genetically engineered varieties.³⁶ Gene-altered products allowed on the market include cottonseed oil, canola, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet peppers, squash, sunflowers, milk (from rBGH-treated cows), and chymosin, an enzyme commonly used in hard cheese. Corn and soy in particular are widely disseminated in processed foods as sweeteners, oils, texturizers, fillers, and extenders. As a result, American consumers have been eating increasing amounts of genetically engineered food—mostly without their knowledge or consent—because the food has not been labeled as such.

A 1999 industry-sponsored opinion poll found that 62 percent of Americans were still unaware that GM foods were already widely marketed. Tom Hoban, a sociology professor at North Carolina State University who has done extensive opinion polling for the biotech industry, likes to poke fun at the purported ignorance of the general public. “Lots of American consumers probably don’t know seeds are involved in agriculture—they don’t even know farms are involved in agriculture,” he quipped at a June 1998 meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Hoban sees such public ignorance as a great opportunity for industry to “proactively educate” consumers. Ultimately, he says, industry will win as GM-free products become difficult to find on store shelves. “Everybody’s going to be using biotech foods pretty soon, so there won’t be a lot of alternatives,” he said.

In Europe, however, this disdain for the consumer backfired badly. Genetically modified tomato puree was one of the first biotech foods to reach British supermarket shelves. As in the United States, its introduction was marked by little fanfare. By the time that Professor Pusztai appeared on World in Action, however, consumers in England and other parts of Europe were realizing that they were eating GM food, and they were starting to resent it. According to the Wall Street Journal, Monsanto shot itself in the foot in 1998 when it not only refused to label but “decided to make a point of not segregating genetically modified soybeans from regular soybeans for the European market. It wasn’t Greenpeace but the supposedly responsible leaders of the supermarket industry who led the backlash. Malcolm Walker, head of the Iceland grocery chain, posing as the defender of ‘consumer choice,’ denounced Monsanto in ads and interviews. At Safeway, Chairman David Webster stormed a podium in 1999 to declare that his company was “fighting back against the tide of genetically modified foods and ingredients hitting UK shelves.”³⁷

By the fall of 1998, Monsanto’s own research showed that it was losing the battle for public opinion in Europe. An internal report by opinion pollster Stan Greenberg showed that the company’s pro-biotech advertising campaign had been “overwhelmed” by the public backlash. Monsanto’s refusal to label bioengineered products had even angered senior executives from leading British supermarket chains. “The latest survey shows an ongoing collapse of public support for biotechnology and GM foods,” Greenberg wrote. “At each point in this project, we keep thinking that we have reached the low point and that public opinion will stabilize, but we apparently have not reached that point. The latest survey shows a steady decline over the year, which may have accelerated in the most recent period. . . . The number saying that these products are ‘unacceptable’ has sky-rocketed: 35 percent last year, rising to 44 percent before the summer and to 51 percent now.” The only positive indicators, Greenberg said, were poll results showing that politicians and government scientists continued to side with the company. Their support was key, he noted, since Monsanto’s strategy was focused on winning over “a socio-economic elite” consisting of members of parliament and “upper-level civil servants.”³⁸

A newspaper opinion poll released that same month found that 68 percent of the respondents were worried about eating genetically modified foods. In March 1999 another poll found that “nine out of ten shoppers would switch supermarkets to avoid genetically modified food.” The Church of Scotland issued a study condemning the “unethical” practices of transnational biotech corporations. “There is indignation from people that they are not being given a choice,” said church spokesperson Donald Bruce. “It smacks of imperialism—but instead of a Boston Tea Party, this time we could have a Rotterdam Soya Bean Fest with soya and maize dumped into the North Sea.”

As resistance grew, supermarket chains throughout Europe began bowing to consumer pressure by pulling genetically modified foods from their shelves. In April 1999, even Unilever, England’s largest food manufacturer and itself an investor in biotech research, was driven by hard economics to announce that it would remove GM ingredients from its products. “The announcement started a week-long stampede by leading companies, all household names,” stated the London Independent. The day after Unilever’s capitulation, Nestlé followed suit, as did England’s leading supermarket chains, including Tesco, Sainsbury, Safeway, Asda, and Somerfield. “When these phase-outs are complete, no major supermarket brands will continue to contain GM ingredients,” the Independent noted. “It’s an extraordinary reversal from the rapid, silent, expansion of GM foods—from nothing to 60 percent of the products on supermarket shelves in less than three years.”³⁹

An internal report by the Deutsche Bank, Europe’s largest, recommended that investors sell their holdings of ag biotech stocks. “In the past month,” the report noted, “a senior manager at a European-based chemical giant expressed serious reservations to us about the benignness of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and said that given a choice, he would select non-GMOs any day. By the way, the company he works for is actively involved in ag-biotechnology.”⁴⁰

The campaign came under immediate attack, however, from international agencies that actually work on hunger issues. “This is a technology that’s being developed for profit. It is not to any degree going to help with world poverty,” said Isabel McCrea of Action Aid, one of England’s largest overseas development agencies. “We are appalled by the cynical use of that argument by the industry to convince northern consumers that this is a technology that they should accept,” she added.⁴²

Biotech advocates claim that genetically engineered crops will be good for the environment by reducing the need to use environmentally toxic pesticides and fertilizers. So far, however, the opposite may be true. The vast majority of genetically modified crops currently on the market have been modified to either withstand herbicide (so that more can be sprayed) or produce their own insecticide. For Monsanto, of course, herbicide-tolerant crops create the perfect opportunity for marketing tie-ins. Not only do they get to charge farmers premium prices for their patented, genetically modified seeds, they also get to sell more weed-killing chemicals. In 1999, more than half of the U.S. soybean crop was “Roundup Ready”—genetically engineered to survive spraying with Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup. However, an independent analysis of 8,200 university research trials by Dr. Charles Benbrook found that contrary to Monsanto’s promised advantages, yields of herbicide-resistant GM soybeans were 5 to 10 percent lower than comparable conventional varieties. Benbrook, a former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences Council’s Board on Agriculture who now works as an independent consultant, reported that lost production due to this yield drag amounted to an estimated 80 to 100 million bushels in 1999. Benbrook also noted that nobody is testing the crops for increased pesticide residues. The EPA, moreover, has raised the allowable residue limits for Roundup on soybeans and cotton.⁴³

Some genetically modified crops do require fewer chemical pesticides—at least in the short term. The most common way to accomplish this is through the insertion of a gene that causes the plant to produce bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which has been used for decades by organic farmers as a natural pesticide. Like Pusztai’s snowdrop lectin, the Bt toxin has been tested and used for a long time with no reported harmful effects to humans, but it destroys the digestive tracts of certain very pesky insects. Biotech companies have successfully spliced the Bt gene into corn, cotton, canola, potatoes, and rice. Monsanto’s New Leaf potato, for example, is legally registered as a pesticide with the U.S. Environmental Projection Agency because it contains the Bt gene, making it toxic to Colorado potato beetles. The Novartis company’s Bt corn is similarly deadly to European and Southwestern corn borers, caterpillars that mine into cornstalks and cause up to $1 billion worth of crop losses annually.

Enabling a plant to make its own insecticide may seem like a good idea, but it poses problems of its own. Organic farmers have applied Bt sparingly to their crops as a natural pesticide of last resort, but insect exposure was short-lived, and far fewer acres were sprayed than currently are planted with Bt crops, which are now planted on about 20 million acres in the United States alone. Moreover, Bt crops typically express the toxin in every cell of the plant. The widespread use of conventional pesticides has led to the emergence of more than 500 types of pesticide-resistant insect since 1945, and biologists who study bugs expect that the widespread introduction of Bt into the environment will create similar selection pressures that speed the emergence of Bt-resistant pests. If Bt-resistant pests emerge, organic agriculture will lose one of its most effective, time-honored tools, making it harder and more expensive to control insects without the use of synthetic chemical sprays.⁴⁴

Plant biologists also worry that pollen from genetically modified crops is spreading the genetically inserted traits to closely related weeds. Rice with the Bt gene, for example, might pollinate wild grasses that are close relatives. This could make the weeds pest-resistant and help them multiply. Similarly, the use of Roundup Ready crops might create herbicide-resistant “superweeds.” Even commercial crops can become weeds if they turn up in unwanted places, which is what happened to Charles Boser, a Canadian farmer who found to his dismay that some of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola had drifted from a neighbor’s farm into a field that he was trying to fallow. Boser, who was not trying to grow canola, tried unsuccessfully to kill the plants with two applications of herbicide before finally calling Monsanto in frustration. “Take your product and get it the hell off of my land is exactly what I told them,” Boser said. “I don’t want the stuff.” Monsanto dutifully complied, hiring workers to pick the plants out of Boser’s field by hand and compensating him for the additional costs of spraying that he had incurred.

The issue of allergenicity is another health concern with GM crops. In 1995, the Pioneer Hybrid seed company added a Brazil nut gene to soybeans in hopes of achieving a more nutritional balance of proteins. Pioneer Hybrid abandoned the project after tests on the transgenic soybeans revealed that they could induce potentially fatal allergies in people sensitive to Brazil nuts. We can feel thankful that Brazil nuts contain a known allergen, so researchers knew what to look for. However, many of the other foreign genes now being inserted into foods are taken from viruses, bacteria, and insects, and they produce proteins that have never before been part of the human food supply. Are they toxic? The only way to find out would be to test them rigorously, first on animals and then on volunteer human subjects. By deciding that GM foods are “substantially equivalent” to normal foods, the FDA has left it up to industry to decide when and if such testing will ever be done, an approach that “would appear to favor industry over consumer protection,” according to the New England Journal of Medicine.⁴⁵

The risk of introducing unpredictable hazards into foods is inherent in the use of recombinant DNA technology. Genetic manipulations are frequently described as “gene splicing,” a term that obscures much of the uncertainty and imprecision of the process. It evokes the idea that gene manipulators are doing something akin to splicing a movie—an exacting process in which film is secured firmly on a cutting board, giving the editor complete control over which frames of the film are removed or added and in which order. By contrast, one common gene-splicing technique uses a patented “gene gun” that shoots little metal slivers that have been coated with DNA taken from one organism into the cell of another organism. If all goes well, the genes slip off the metal “transports” and are incorporated into the DNA in the cell of that organism, but no one can predict where the new gene is going to land within the genome of the targeted organism. It may attach to the site of any chromosome, or may attach in the middle of another gene and interfere with the normal functioning of the cell.

“These positioning effects are not simple to predict,” Pusztai says. “Think of William Tell shooting an arrow at a target. Now put a blindfold on the man doing the shooting, and that’s the reality of the genetic engineer when he’s doing a gene insertion. He has no idea where the transgene will land in the recipient genome.” In his experiments with transgenic potatoes, Pusztai observed the imprecision of the technique firsthand. “We had two transgenic lines of potato produced from the same gene insertion and the same growing conditions,” he says. “We grew them together along with the parent plant. With our two lines of potato, which should have been substantially equivalent to each other, we found that one of the lines contained 20 percent less protein than the other. So the two lines were not substantially equivalent to each other. But we also found that these two lines were not substantially equivalent to their parent. This demonstrates that the unpredictability is inherent in the genetic manipulation process on a case by case basis—and also at the level of every single GM plant created.”

Biotechnologists compare DNA to the digital codes that make up computer software, but computer programs are vastly simpler and better-understood than the genetic codes inscribed in DNA. According to Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, genetic codes are more like an interacting ecosystem than a linear computer program. “You can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1998. “We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.”⁴⁶

“I had a very severe itch around my head and then my ears,” Stefani said. “Then it went all the way down my body. I thought I was allergic to some kind of soap. I changed all my laundry soap and all my bath soap but it didn’t help. I itched so bad that in my sleep, I’d be digging in my ears and make my ears bleed.”⁴⁷

After the itching came aches and pains throughout her body. Stefani started losing her hair. Her skin felt hot to the touch. She began having severe muscle spasms and was admitted to a hospital. Doctors at first were baffled. She was one of thousands of people throughout the United States suffering from a previously unheard-of disease that eventually came to be called “eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome,” or EMS. Of the 5,000 people affected by the disease, 37 died and 1,500 were left permanently disabled with symptoms including paralysis and neurological problems, painful swelling and cracking of the skin, memory and cognitive deficits, headaches, extreme light sensitivity, fatigue, and heart problems. Bea Stefani still suffers severe pain, is no longer able to golf or ride a bicycle, and will probably have to take medication for the rest of her life. As EMS victims go, however, she was relatively lucky. At least her heart was spared, and she can breathe without a respirator.⁴⁸

What shocked victims the most was the discovery that the cause of their disease came from the health food store. Their L-tryptophan, it turned out, was not as “natural” as the label had led them to believe. It was in fact one of the first genetically engineered dietary products to reach consumers.

Several different companies manufacture L-tryptophan, but the people who developed EMS had been consuming one particular brand made by Showa Denko, Japan’s third-largest chemical company. Showa Denko had safely manufactured L-tryptophan for many years previously using fermentation, which involves growing a large number of bacteria in a nutrient medium, similar to making a yogurt culture. To increase production, they introduced genetically modified bacteria that express higher quantities of tryptophan. Unfortunately, the modified process also apparently created a highly toxic tryptophan breakdown product. According to a study published in Science, Showa Denko’s product was contaminated with a “novel amino acid” not present in conventional tryptophan.⁴⁹ The contaminant occurred in trace quantities and, because of its similarity to tryptophan itself, was difficult to detect or remove through filtration. Once ingested, however, it apparently overstimulated the body’s immune system, causing it to attack nerves and other body tissues. This immune system attack was what caused one of the disease’s most horrifying signatures: “ascending paralysis,” in which a person loses nerve control of the feet, followed by the legs, then bowels and lungs, finally requiring a respirator in order to breathe.

The Food and Drug Administration responded to the EMS outbreak by banning over-the-counter sales of L-tryptophan—not just Showa Denko’s brand, but all brands.⁵⁰ EMS victims sued the company for an estimated $2 billion dollars in damages, and Showa Denko has quietly settled these cases out of court. On several occasions, FDA officials have downplayed or denied evidence linking the disaster to genetic engineering. If pressed, they will usually stress that such a link has not been proven. It has also never been disproven.⁵¹

Suppose for a moment that genetic engineering should introduce something like the L-tryptophan contaminant into your corn bread or the tomato that sits atop your salad. Were this to happen, standard food safety analyses will not detect it. They can detect the presence of known toxins based only on known properties of preexisting food. The “novel amino acid” in genetically engineered tryptophan was not a known toxin. By the standard that the FDA uses to regulate genetically modified foods, your killer tomato would be “substantially equivalent” to a safe one.

Moreover, industry’s refusal to countenance labeling of genetically engineered foods creates an additional risk. The labeling and packaging of L-tryptophan made it possible for the Centers for Disease Control to trace the link between Showa Denko’s contaminated product and eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. In the absence of labeling for genetically modified products, however, it is impossible to determine who has been eating mutant soybeans and who has been eating natural ones. If something toxic enters the food supply, tracing it to its source will be difficult if not impossible.

“One of the ironies of the development of this issue is the contrast between the enthusiasm of food producers to claim that their biologically engineered products are different and unique when they seek to patent them and their similar enthusiasm for claiming that they are just the same as other foods when asked to label them,” notes Julian Edwards, the director general of Consumers International.⁵³ From the point of view of companies like DuPont, Novartis, and Monsanto, the ability to patent and therefore exert corporate control over life itself is the true magic that makes biotechnology worthwhile. Genetic engineering turns seeds themselves into “intellectual property,” so the farmers using the seeds don’t own the right to save seeds from their harvest for use in the next planting. Monsanto likes to use the analogy of renting a car—at the end of the rental period, the car is returned.⁵⁴ This new arrangement makes it illegal for farmers to engage in the time-honored practice of saving seeds, a practice that is especially common in the Third World. In the United States and Canada, Monsanto has pursued this concept to the point of hiring private investigators to swipe plants from farmers who didn’t buy their seeds to see if they are planting Monsanto’s transgenic varieties. Monsanto has also encouraged its farmers to snitch on neighbors they suspect of planting transgenics without paying for them. In Canada, Monsanto sued Percy Schmeiser, an elderly farmer, for intellectual property theft. He swears he never planted Monsanto’s transgenic seed, yet it showed up in his field, quite possibly through genetic drift—that is, contamination of his crops by windblown, genetically engineered pollen.

To tighten the noose even further, in May 1998 Monsanto acquired a technology that anti-biotech activists quickly dubbed “the Terminator.” Developed with your tax dollars by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Terminator (known formally as the “Technology Protection System”) is a genetic construct that, once fully developed, can be spliced into any crop, rendering all of the plants infertile in the second generation. This makes it the ideal platform for companies to introduce patented genetic traits they don’t want farmers to save from season to season, thus enabling Monsanto to enforce its “rights” without the use of strong-arm tactics. “The Terminator will allow companies like Monsanto to privatize one of the last great commons in nature—the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years,” observed the New York Times.

After the Terminator Technology became a lightning rod for public outrage, Monsanto announced in late 1999 that for the time being it would suspend plans to commercialize the technology—over the objections, it should be noted, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As co-owner of the Terminator patent, the USDA wants to see the technology move forward so it can recoup the money it invested to develop it. Now research is proceeding into an alternative that has been dubbed the “Traitor technology”—a sort of “Terminator II” that disrupts plant reproduction until sprayed with an activator chemical.

Terminator-like technologies pose a threat even to farmers who don’t use the seeds. “Pollen from crops carrying the new trait will infect the fields of farmers who either reject or can’t afford the technology,” says Neth Dano, director of the Philippines-based SEARICE, an organization that works with farmers in Southeast Asia. “When farmers reach into their bins to sow seed the following season they could discover—too late—that some of their seed is infertile.” Monica Opole of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Program in Kenya agrees. “Farmers could find that their neighbor bought the technology and it cross-pollinated into their field, leaving them with dead seeds,” she warns. “Who knows how this technology will interact with nature, especially as it spreads out over time and inevitably crosses with farmers’ varieties?”⁵⁵

“No foods in history have been subjected to as much scrutiny in advance by the federal government as those improved through biotechnology,” claims Michael J. Phillips, who himself created controversy when he left his position as director of a National Academy of Sciences panel that was reviewing the safety of GM foods to become executive director of the industry’s main lobby group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In reality, not only are biotech foods exempt from special health safety testing and labeling, testing for their environmental safety is equally lax. It is up to the USDA to ensure that genetically modified crops are ecologically safe. In 1999, however, the New York Times reported that the agency has not rejected a single application for a biotech crop and that many scientists say “the department has relied on unsupported claims and shoddy studies by the seed companies.”⁵⁶

Far from being antagonists, government agencies and the biotech companies they regulate often appear to be a club of elite insiders, accustomed to having their way and suspicious of “outsiders” (i.e., the general public) who try to influence or question their decisions. And they have good reason to be suspicious, because their own opinion research has told them that the public’s opinion of biotech foods is sharply opposed to their own. In 1997, an opinion poll conducted by biotech giant Novartis found that 93 percent of Americans were in favor of labeling biotech foods. Other polls conducted in recent years by the USDA and Time magazine reached roughly similar conclusions. Scores of environmental, consumer, family farm, and animal welfare groups have been campaigning, litigating, protesting, publicizing, and writing letters about the issue. In 1998, when the USDA issued a proposal that would have allowed GM foods to be classified as “organic,” 275,000 people sent the agency letters opposing the proposal.

Government and industry insiders rationalize the gulf that separates them from popular opinion by dismissing citizen concerns with the usual rhetoric about the public’s ignorance. Terms such as “Luddite” and “loony” abound as the biotechnicians compete among themselves to see who can express the most contempt for the intelligence of the great unwashed masses. In the Financial Post of Canada, business columnist Terence Corcoran attacked critics of Monsanto and biotech foods as “radically slanted,” “alarmist,” “scaremongering” industry bashers. “They want to save the world from killer tomatoes,” he complained. “Frankenstein Food is now part of the language in Britain. Genetic research has been compared with Nazi experiments in genetics. Intimidated by media hysterics and an alarmed public, supermarkets no longer carry genetically modified food.”⁵⁷ Gene Grabowski, a spokesperson for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, complained about the “shrill statements and outrageous tactics by people who are attacking biotech foods.”⁵⁸ Europe’s rejection of biotech foods prompted Richard Morningstar, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, to complain bitterly that “politics and demagoguery have completely taken over the regulatory process” and that “the outlook for the resolution of this issue is bleak.” Europe’s impertinence led the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal to write, “In Europe, across the whole food technology front, confusion and hysteria have displaced reason and economics,” characterizing biotech critics as “zealots” and complaining that “on matters of trade and technology, the mob has been running the show for a while.”⁵⁹

New Scientist, one of England’s leading science journals, offered similar reasoning in its coverage of the Arpad Pusztai affair. In retrospect, it concluded, the Rowett Research Institute’s decision to fire Pusztai was a “blunder” because it had created a “martyr,” thus giving “ammunition on a plate” to “conspiracy theorists” and environmental fanatics. “Nothing sets a nation’s pulse racing like a food scare,” it added. New Scientist’s coverage also provides a telling indicator of the consistency with which pro-biotech forces hold to their conclusions about the safety of biotech foods, regardless of new facts as they arise. When the Pusztai story first broke in August 1998, New Scientist joined the rest of the media chorus in repeating the “Con A” fallacy promulgated by the Rowett Institute: “Pusztai and his colleagues gave potatoes a gene from the South American jack bean,” it stated. “But the product of the jack bean gene, concanavalin A, has long been known to be harmful. It is one of many toxic proteins called lectins with which plants defend themselves against insects. Other lectins include ricin, the poison used on an umbrella tip to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. Iain Cubitt, chief executive of Axis Genetics in Cambridge, was alarmed by the publicity given to the findings. ‘Everyone has known for years that concanavalin A is toxic, so if you put this in a potato and it ends up toxic, why is that such a surprise?’ he says.”⁶⁰

By February 1999, however, everyone knew that Pusztai’s potatoes had used the snowdrop lectin and not Con A. As the facts changed, therefore, so did New Scientist’s opinion about the safety of lectins. “What is still woefully unclear is what Pusztai’s experiments really mean for the safety of GM foods,” it wrote. “The lectin gene used in his potato could certainly be hugely important—and not just to the food industry. It may yet end up warding off insect pests from rice, a staple crop for millions. Pusztai’s one indisputable result—that the lectin does not in itself harm rats—is therefore reassuring.”⁶¹

U.S. farmers have already felt the consequences of the growing international rebellion against biotech crops. Between 1997 and 1998, European purchases of U.S. corn fell from nearly 70 million bushels to less than 3 million—a 96 percent drop in a single year.⁶³ In June 1998, U.S. Undersecretary of Agriculture Gus Schumacher said American farmers were losing $200 million a year from French refusal to import genetically modified corn and soybeans. Farmers who initially responded favorably to industry’s intense pro-biotech sales pitch have begun rebelling. The American Corn Growers Association, a commodity group that represents thousands of corn growers in 28 states, is encouraging its members to plant non-GMO varieties. “American farmers planted [gene-altered crops] in good faith, with the belief that the product is safe and that they would be rewarded for their efforts,” the American Corn Growers Association complained in a September 1999 statement. “Instead they find themselves misled by multinational seed and chemical companies and other commodity associations who only encouraged them to plant increased acres of [these crops] without any warning to farmers of the dangers associated with planting a crop that didn’t have consumer acceptance.”⁶⁴ Even the pro-biotech National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), the “official” corn commodity group that represents larger growers, can’t argue with market reality. At a U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee hearing, NCGA board member Tim Hume called on biotech seed companies to make sure they offered their best hybrid varieties in conventional versions.⁶⁵

As the biotech controversy grows, the food industry appears to be realizing the consequences of ramming through market approvals without full public debate. “Consumers’ faith in the government and retailers as watchdogs over food safety could be broken, undermining one of the pillars upon which the modern supermarket was built,” observed an October 1999 issue of the trade publication Supermarket News.⁶⁶

Eyeing the wreckage in other countries, the biotech industry is now fighting against the consumer backlash emerging in the United States. Stories questioning various aspects of the technology and reporting on the international consumer revolt have been appearing in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and Consumer Reports. In June 1999, the public relations industry trade publication PR Week reported that the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA)—representing 132 firms including Heinz, Kraft, and Procter & Gamble—was launching a multimillion-dollar PR campaign to provide what it called “balanced” (i.e., favorable) information to consumers about genetically modified foods. According to GMA’s Gene Grabowski, the campaign reflected the food industry’s determination to “act before a potential crisis.”

In a July 5, 1999 story, “Field of Bad Dreams,” PR Week writer John Frank acknowledged that “genetically engineered foods are a PR pro’s potential nightmare,” noting that industry got “a wake-up call” with the May 1999 release of a Cornell University study showing that pollen from Monsanto’s Bt corn could drift onto milkweed plants and poison Monarch butterflies. The Monarch is “sort of the Bambi of the insect world,” according to Marlin Rice, a professor of entomology at Iowa State University in Ames. “It’s big and gawdy and gets a lot of good press. And you’ve got school kids all across the country raising them in jars.” The Bt-Monarch controversy came on the heels of other recent studies showing that Bt crops kill nontarget beneficial insects such as lacewings and ladybugs, kill beneficial soil microorganisms, damage soil fertility, and may harm insect-eating birds.⁶⁷ However, it was the image problems associated with killing Bambi that sent industry spokespersons scurrying to counter the damage. Discoveries like this could end consumer complacency “in an instant,” worried one source quoted in PR Week.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of PR Week’s response to the Monarch butterfly study is the narrow range of options that it considered possible for the public relations industry. “Are we only limited to a defensive role in talking about GE foods?” it asked, answering that PR pros can also make a positive case for them by arguing that biotechnology is “needed to adequately feed a growing world population.” The choice, in other words, was between playing defense or offense for the biotech team. The possibility that anyone might want to flack for the precautionary principle was not even considered. “The law of unintended consequences means studies like the butterfly study are likely to surface, focusing on something company researchers may never have considered,” PR Week admitted, but rather than take such “unintended consequences” seriously, it advised PR pros to treat them as “brush fires” to be “quickly dealt with.” This would entail setting up “early warning systems” to handle awkward scientific studies and activist groups; training seed company officials to deal with the popular press; getting seed companies to publicize their research; and roping in “third party spokespersons” to trumpet pro-biotech statements and opinions from government regulators. Farmers make especially good spokespersons, PR Week advised, because they “garner positive response from American consumers.”⁶⁸

The first line of attack against the Monarch butterfly study involved the usual nit-picking aimed at the scientific methodology used by Cornell’s researchers. Why hadn’t they measured the amount of Bt ingested by the dead butterflies? Why did they do their study in a laboratory instead of out in real farm fields?⁶⁹ (In fact, a separate study by scientists at Iowa State University had been conducted in real farm fields, with similar results.) The second line of attack involved rushing to sponsor a series of contrary studies. In November 1999—barely six months after the release of the Cornell study—the industry-funded Biotechnology Stewardship Research Group held a symposium to discuss the implications of its Monarch butterfly research, even though the research itself had barely begun. Prior to the meeting, the Biotechnology Industry Organization circulated a news release confidently predicting that “a panel of scientists is expected to conclude [that] genetically improved corn poses negligible harm to the Monarch butterfly population.”⁷⁰

The news release rather than the symposium itself served as the basis for most of the news coverage associated with the event. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and other papers published stories with headlines such as, “Scientists Discount Threat to Butterfly from Altered Corn.”⁷¹ This contrasted sharply with the observations of one of the few publications that actually sent a reporter to the meeting. “Luckily, Carol Yoon from the New York Times attended,” recalls Rebecca Goldburg, a biologist with the Environmental Defense Fund who was also present. “During the afternoon, she stood up and said that she had just talked to her editors and that they had received a press release from industry stating that the meeting would conclude that Bt corn presented little risk to Monarchs. Carol asked if participants agreed with this conclusion. The answer was a clear ‘No’ from a number of researchers.”⁷² “Far from culminating in a consensus,” Yoon reported, “the day was marked by sometimes heated exchange and ended with some scientists concluding that the bioengineered corn was safer than had been feared while others said that it was premature to draw any such conclusion. . . . Many of the researchers emphasized that their results were preliminary, with many studies still far from complete. . . . Some researchers expressed concern that so many studies, still far from completion and none peer-reviewed or published, should be given such a public airing, in particular in a forum orchestrated by the industry whose product safety has been brought into question.”⁷³

In a follow-up story a week later, some of the scientists who participated in the industry-funded event responded to these criticisms. “The scientists say part of the reason they chose to release preliminary data, some of the studies with as little as 10 percent of the work complete, was pressure from farmers seeking more information,” the Times reported.⁷⁴

This hasty approach to the airing of scientific results contrasts markedly with the treatment of “dear old Arpad Pusztai,” whose 150 seconds on television brought immediate charges that he had violated an unwritten scientific code by publicly discussing unpublished research. Pusztai’s appearance prompted Monsanto’s Colin Merritt to complain about the “unprofessional” way his findings had been made public. “You cannot go around releasing information of this kind unless it has been properly reviewed,” Merritt complained.⁷⁵ In the months following Pusztai’s suspension from the Rowett Research Institute, no fewer than four scientific panels were convened to attack his conclusions. Sir Robert May, the British government’s chief scientist, described Pusztai’s work as “garbage” and accused him of “violating every canon of scientific rectitude.” The critics were in no way appeased when Pusztai did publish his results in the Lancet.⁷⁶ Professor Ray Baker, head of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, immediately denounced the Lancet as “irresponsible” for publishing an “unworthy” paper, and the president of the British Royal Society attacked the journal for giving Pusztai’s paper an “authenticity it does not deserve.”⁷⁷ The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, even reported receiving a “very aggressive” phone call prior to publication from a senior member of the Royal Society, who called Horton “immoral” and intimated that his job would be at risk if he published the paper.⁷⁸ These attacks on Pusztai’s work were themselves broadcast through the news media rather than through the peer-reviewed journals where scientific debate is normally conducted.

The GMA is the driving force behind the Alliance for Better Foods, said GMA spokesperson Brian Sansoni.⁸¹ The alliance doesn’t include biotech companies or their trade association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), he said, but was created to get the food industry “to speak from the same page” in support of the technology. “We didn’t want the activists’ misinformation and scare campaign to be the story—like what happened in Europe,” he said.

Both critics and defenders of the technology now understand that the brewing public debate over transgenic food may involve even bigger stakes than they originally anticipated. The same vested interests that didn’t trust the public enough to inform it that they were introducing genetically engineered food into the environment and grocery stores are now asking to be trusted as reliable experts on the question of whether this innovation is safe and good. Their fear—and the hope of activists on the other side of the issue—is that the debate on biotech foods could be the issue that awakens the public to the realization that government regulators are not presently functioning to safeguard the public’s best interests.

Scientists like Arpad Pusztai, meanwhile, find themselves caught somewhere in the middle. Pusztai still believes in the potential promise of genetically modified foods, provided they are carefully tested before being marketed. “Everything in nature is a balance. Changes will bring good effects and bad effects, and you have to decide if it’s worth it,” he says. “In my opinion, in this case, it is not—certainly without testing first. We are not talking about a delicate sort of issue where two scientists are disagreeing. We are talking about our food.”

Pusztai’s own experience has left him doubtful that corporate and government powers-that-be will do the right thing. “We are told there is rigorous testing, but where is it? It is not published in any of the journals,” he said.⁸² “I have no regrets about speaking out. I did it for the simple reason that it would have taken me another two years at least to publish the data. Meanwhile, all the stuff would have been on the supermarket shelves. The politicians have been saying this bit of nonsense that GM foods are the most rigorously tested food in the history of mankind. The truth is different, however.” He points to a June 2000 letter in Science magazine by Spanish toxicologist Jose L. Domingo, who performed a computer search using the Medline and Toxline databases and could find only eight published papers based on experiments related to health risks of GM foods—and even two of those citations, Pusztai says, turned out to be irrelevant.⁸³

“You can count the number of relevant peer-reviewed papers on the fingers of your hands,” Pusztai says, “and that includes the two papers from my laboratory that were published in the Journal of Nutrition in August 1999 and in the Lancet on October 13, 1999. I have a feeling that any unbiased observer would say that this is a very poor record for an industry which is just about to save the world from famine and other calamities.”

Con A

Big Stakes for Small Potatoes

Mutatis Monsanto

No Label? No Problem!

The Empire Strikes Back

The Hell in Health Food

The Terminator

Regulatory Underkill

Crisis Containment

Full-Court Press