Secret Report Raises Fears Over Genetically Mutated Crops

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/1339215
Secret Report Raises Fears Over GM Crops
The Independent of London is reporting that a new scientific study carried out by Monsantao raises new fears over the safety of genetically modified corn. The study -- which the company has tried to keep secret -- found that rats fed genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to the composition of their blood.


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640402

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?
22 May 2005


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.