Science condemns GM crops

Pro-GM Science Community Public Enemy or Its Own Worst Enemy

Open Letter to Sir Paul Nurse (eminent British biologist /JC)

Dr. Brian John, GM Free Cymru

26th January 2011

Dear Sir Paul,

THE GM SCIENCE COMMUNITY IS ITS OWN WORST ENEMY

I was interested to watch the BBC Horizon programme in which you examine some of the reasons why the public at large is profoundly sceptical about science and scientists.

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3.I am intrigued by your apparent belief that scientists are always truthful and honest, and that they are all signed up to an unbreakable code of ethics. If only that were true. In the GM field, as in the field of pharmaceuticals, research is driven aboveall else by the profit motive, and corporate funding has largely taken the place of public funding both in the prioritization of research and in the conduct of experiments. In our researches over the past decade, we in GM-Free Cymru have homed in on case after case of poor science, selective or biased science, and fraudulent science. We have exposed many examples of “nutritional equivalence” feeding trials dressed up as “safety trials” and of scientific conclusions which are at variance with data sets. Further, we have shown that in the great majority of cases scientists themselves have allowed their work to be distorted and misrepresented, on the basis that the paymaster (be it Monsanto, Syngenta or any other applicant for a GM consent) calls the tune, and that whistleblowers are not tolerated. The conspiracy of connivance and silence that we have uncovered is truly appalling - and something of which the scientific community should be truly ashamed.

5.You apparently fail to realize that GM research is very different from publicly-funded climate research in that it isdriven, either directly or indirectly, by corporate funding, with Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer to the fore. The involvement of these companies, and others, is sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not in academic papers, and there have been many occasions on which so-called public laboratories and research institutes have produced work without mention of how their priorities are set and where their funds and salaries have come from. That situation is an inherently dangerous one, when it comes to scientific integrity. You may not be aware that the great bulk of research work on the matter of GM safety is conducted in conjunction with applications to the regulators (like ACNFP in the UK and EFSA in Europe) for growing or marketingconsents or approvals. The bulk of the data relating to these studies is contained within “supporting dossiers” which are NOT made available for independent peer review or scrutiny. Over and again, organizations such as ours have had to resort to Freedom of Information requests or even to the courts to obtain sight of these dossiers, which come to us with large sections blacked out. Yet these dossiers are ALWAYS accepted as honest and truthful by the regulators prior to issuing their recommendations to the EC for approvals. When data sets and dossiers are examined, we have almost always found serious shortcomings and scientific fraud. When Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini pointed this out in a series of peer-reviewed papers, he was subjected to a series of vicious attacks by spokesmen from the GM industry, as a result of which he brought (and won) a case of defamation against his opponents in the French courts.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Open_Letter_to_Sir_Paul_Nurse.php