The results predicted that the carcinogen formaldehyde could accumulate in the GM soybean plants, with concomitant depletion of the antioxidant glutathione, but not in the non-GM plants.

Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop Research?
Scientists must ask corporations for permission before publishing independent research on genetically modified crops. That restriction must end

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering. “It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”

Shields is the spokesperson for a group of 24 corn insect scientists that opposes these practices. Because the scientists rely on the cooperation of the companies for their research—they must, after all, gain access to the seeds for studies—most have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. The group has submitted a statement to the EPA protesting that “as a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the tech­nol­ogy.” (Emphasis added /JC)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research/

"Farmers" are end users with no rights to resale.

"Resellers" are middle men with restrictive rights that they pass on to their end-users.

In 2009, 26 scientists drafted an anonymous letter to the Enivironmental Protection Agency complaining that the legalese that came with each sack of GM grain was making it impossible for them to do their jobs. “No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions,” they wrote.

One of the anonymous 26 was Elson Shields, a corn-insect scientist at Cornell University.

“You had to have written permission from the companies for any science involving their seed, even if it was commercially available,” he said. Companies sometimes revoked this permission [PDF] in the middle of an experiment, undoing months of work. “Well, a research group decided to get boisterous about it and wrote that letter to the EPA,” Shields said.

This was not a group of starry-eyed environmentalists. “These were plant entomologists, mostly from Midwestern land-grant universities. We’re all generally pro-GMO,” Shields said. “It’s just that each event [of genetic insertion] needs to be looked at and evaluated on a scientific basis.”

“We readily admit that there were some concerns early on,” said Andy LaVigne when I called to ask him about this. LaVigne is president of the American Seed Trade Association, the organization that represents the crop biotech firms. But LaVigne says that he was caught somewhat off guard when Shields and the other scientists complained. “Well, we said, let’s get everyone around a table.”

{snip}

So I asked Shields: How’s that working out?

“If you are at a major agricultural school that’s negotiated an agreement with the companies, it’s working fine,” he said.

Any scientist working at those institutions with agreements is now free to experiment. The catch is that the companies require the universities to sign a further legal agreement, showing that they understand they can’t let researchers pirate the seeds or plant them after the experiment is over.

“Each company has to decide how many universities to make those agreements with,” Shields said. “What justification they have and why they pick one over the other, that’s above my pay grade. It may be that they know there’s a scientist whose work they don’t like, so they don’t choose that university.”

I went back to LaVigne and asked, why not just let all universities do this? He explained that it took a lot of time and lawyerly effort to draft agreements with every university, and some of the smaller companies had made the determination that they just didn’t have the lawyers on staff to contact them all.

But why bring in the lawyers in the first place? Why not just lay out the guidelines and go after anyone who violates them? That was just the decision the companies made, LaVigne said.

Want to guess where Monsanto stands in this? Monsanto has a blanket agreement allowing research at all universities in the United States. And actually, when Shields et al. made their complaint, Monsanto claimed it already had many of these agreements in place allowing independent research.