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Tue, 8 Jul 2003 10:32 -0500

Fw: Blair accused in new GM scandal allegations

 

 

 

07 July 2003 22:56

Blair accused in new GM scandal allegations

 

" Breaking his long silence over the affair, [Dr Pusztai] now

claims that he was fired as a direct consequence of Blair's intervention. The day after his World In Action

broadcast, he believes that two phone calls were put through

to his boss, Philip James, from the Prime Minister's office

in Downing Street. The following day he was fired. He says

he was informed of the calls by two different employees at

the Rowett. Dr Putsztai and his wife were also told by a

senior manager at the institute that Blair's intervention

followed a phone call to Downing Street from President Bill

Clinton, whose administration was spending billions backing

the GM food industry.... the story is supported by two other

eminent researchers..... The second source to confirm the

story is Professor Robert Orskov OBE, who worked at the

Rowett for 33 years and is one of Britain's leading

nutrition experts. He was told that phone calls went from

Monsanto, the American firm which produces 90% of the

world's GM food, to Clinton and then to Blair.'Clinton rang

Blair and Blair rang James,' says Professor Orskov. " The

Daily Mail, July 7 2003

 

-

 

GM WATCH daily: http://www.gmwatch.org/archive.asp

---

THE SINISTER SACKING OF THE WORLD'S LEADING GM EXPERT - AND THE

TRAIL THAT LEADS TO TONY BLAIR AND THE WHITE HOUSE

by Andrew Rowell

The Daily Mail, July 7 2003

 

EARLY one fine summer morning, a taxi pulled up outside a

neat suburban terrace house in Aberdeen and took a

68-year-old scientist to a TV studio.

 

Shortly afterwards Dr Arpad Pustzai found himself propelled

from a life of grateful obscurity into the centre of an

astonishing political maelstrom that would cost him his

job, his reputation and his health.

 

His crime was to question the safety of genetically modified

food. His interview on ITV's World In Action lasted just 150

seconds, but that was long enough to reveal his

ground-breaking research suggesting rats fed genetically

modified potatoes suffered stunted growth and damage to

their immune systems.

 

It triggered a controversy that put him on a collision

course with the Government, the biotech industry and the

scientific establishment. The diminutive Hungarian-born

scientist, who had escaped the terrors of Stalinism to enjoy

a brilliant 35-year academic career, became a reviled

figure: ostracised by colleagues, villified, and gagged.

 

Now, five years on, there are disturbing claims that this

distinguished scientist was the victim of behind-the-scenes

manoeuvring at the highest political level.

 

Some of the allegations are truly explosive. They raise

profound questions about the extraordinary network of

relationships between senior Labour figures and the biotech

companies. They also throw new light on why the

multi-billion-pound GM industry continues to press ahead in

the face of huge public opposition.

 

The World In Action documentary was broadcast on Monday,

August 10, 1998. It was a little over a year since Blair had swept into Downing Street. His government was in

thrall to the biotech industry, convinced it could become a

driving force of the British economy. What Dr Pusztai was

saying threatened to derail those ambitions.

 

He was based at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, which

conducts research into animal nutrition. He had published

more than 270 scientific studies and three books on lectins,

plant proteins that are central to the GM controversy. He

was the world's leading expert on the subject.

 

In the TV interview, he said he believed GM food could be

made safe, but added: 'If I had the choice I would certainly

not eat it.

 

He demanded tighter rules over GM foods, and warned: 'I find

it's very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.

We have to find guinea pigs in the laboratory.'

 

On the evening the programme went out, the Rowett

Institute's director Professor Philip James congratulated Dr

Pusztai on his appearance, commenting how well he had

handled the questions.

 

The following morning a press release from the Institute

gave him further support, stressing that a 'range of

carefully controlled studies underlie the basis of Dr

Pusztai's concerns'.

 

Yet within 48 hours, everything had changed. Dr Pusztai had

been suspended by the Institute and ordered to hand over all

his data.

 

His research team was dispersed and he was threatened with

legal action if he spoke to anyone. His phone calls and

e-mails were diverted; his personal assistant was banned

from speaking to him. He read in a press release issued by

the Institute that his contract would not be renewed.

 

What triggered such an extraordinary about-face? How did a

respected scientist become a pariah overnight?

 

The results he claimed to have found were certainly

worrying. Dr Pusztai maintained that when rats were fed a

certain kind of GM potato - adapted to produce natural

insecticide - their livers, hearts and other organs got

smaller.

 

He also found that the size of their brains was affected,

but did not dare publicise this fact because he was thought

to be alarmist.

 

Clearly, such findings were deeply threatening for the GM

industry. In Orwellian fashion, the Rowett Institute gave a

number of conflicting reasons for suddenly disowning them.

 

First, it claimed Dr Pusztai had simply got confused,

muddling up the results for two different batches of

potatoes. According to this explanation, the worrying

results came from a 'control' sample of potatoes containing

a substance known to be poisonous.

 

This was an utterly astonishing claim - a basic error worthy

of a bumbling schoolboy. Newspapers rightly described it as

one of the most embarrassing blunders ever admitted by a

major scientific institution.

 

The trouble was, it wasn't true. Whatever the merits of his

results, Dr Pusztai hadn't mixed them up, as a subsequent

audit of his work confirmed. One of his colleagues, leading

pathologist Stanley Ewen said: 'Arpad has always had a clear

vision. He is certainly never muddled. He was on top of the

whole business.'

 

When it became clear the claim was baseless, the Institute

shifted its ground. First, it said that Dr Pusztai had not

carried out the long-term tests needed to prove his

findings. Then it said he had carried out the tests but the

results weren't ready.

 

Again, this simply wasn't so.

 

Later, when his reputation was in tatters and his research

thoroughly discredited, the Institute accepted that Dr

Pusztai had acted in good faith and described him as 'an

intense investigative scientist with an international

reputation'.

 

But by then he was a ruined man who had suffered two heart

attacks. His wife, who was sacked with him, was on permanent

medication for high blood pressure. Dr Pusztai has come to

believe there is only one plausible explanation for his

downfall - political pressure from a government in fear of

his findings.

 

Breaking his long silence over the affair, he now claims

that he was fired as a direct consequence of Tony Blair's

intervention. The day after his World In Action broadcast,

he believes that two phone calls were put through to his

boss, Philip James, from the Prime Minister's office in

Downing Street.

 

The following day he was fired. He says he was informed of

the calls by two different employees at the Rowett. Dr

Putsztai and his wife were also told by a senior manager at

the institute that Blair's intervention followed a phone

call to Downing Street from President Bill Clinton, whose

administration was spending billions backing the GM food

industry. To sceptical ears, this sounds scarcely credible.

Would the Prime Minister really have had any influence over

the position of a respected scientist?

 

And yet the story is supported by two other eminent

researchers. Stanley Ewen, says another senior figure at the

institute told him the same story at a dinner on September

24, 1999.

 

'That conversation is sealed in my mind,' Ewen says. 'My jaw

dropped to the floor. I suddenly saw it all - it was the

missing link.

 

'Until then, I couldn't understand how on Monday Arpad had

made the most wonderful breakthrough, and on Tuesday it was

the most dreadful piece of work and immediately rejected out

of hand.'

 

The second source to confirm the story is Professor Robert

Orskov OBE, who worked at the Rowett for 33 years and is one

of Britain's leading nutrition experts. He was told that

phone calls went from Monsanto, the American firm which

produces 90% of the world's GM food, to Clinton and then to

Blair.

 

'Clinton rang Blair and Blair rang James,' says Professor

Orskov.

 

'There is no doubt he was pushed by Blair to do something.

It was damaging the relationship between the USA and the UK,

because it was going to be a huge blow for Monsanto.'

 

It is no secret that Blair was first persuaded to support GM

by Clinton, and that the President exerted great pressure on

his European allies to promote the new technology.

 

But would Professor James, who had run the Rowett Institute

since 1982 and was one of the world's most respected

nutritionists, have sacrificed his own man?

 

At the time, he undoubtedly enjoyed good relations with Blair. While Labour was in opposition, he had been chosen to

set up the blueprint for a new Food Standards Agency.

 

The storm over Dr Pusztai's findings was to cost him a job

as the agency's first head. 'You destroyed me,' he later

told Dr Pusztai.

 

Professor James vehemently denies acting on orders from the

Premier, saying: 'There's no way I talked to anybody in any

circumstances. It's a pack of lies. I have never talked to

Blair since the opening of Parliament in 1997.'

 

Downing Street is equally dismissive of the claims. " This is

total rubbish, " said a spoesman. Dr Pusztai, however,

remains convinced he was punished for following his

conscience. 'I obviously spoke out at a very sensitive time.

Things were coming to a head with the GM debate and I just

lit the fuse.

 

'I grew up under the Nazis and the Communists and I

understand that people are frightened and not willing to

jeopardise their future, but they just sold me down the

river.'

 

Among the most instructive aspects of the affair is the way

ministers leapt on criticism of his work and sought to

undermine his reputation.

 

In May 1999, by what seems an impossibly neat coincidence,

reports attacking him were published on the very same day by

the Royal Society - the voice of the scientific

establishment - and the science and technology select

committee of the House of Commons.

 

Jack Cunningham, the Government's so-called Cabinet

Enforcer, then poured scorn on Dr Pusztai's 'wholly

misleading results' and to promise that all GM food on sale

in Britain was safe to eat.

 

It smacked of a co-ordinated counter-attack, and that is

precisely what it was. A Government memo reveals that

Cunningham and other senior ministers had set up a

'Biotechnology Presentation Group'

 

Then, as now, relationships between senior Labour figures

and the GM food companies bordered on the incestuous. In

Labour's first two years in office, GM companies met

government officials and ministers 81 times.

 

The Blair government sees the biotech industry as a new

scientific frontier, an industry worth GBP75 billion in

Europe alone by 2005. Science minister Lord Sainsbury is a

dedicated GM supporter, though he does not officially deal

with GM food matters. On being appointed to his post, Lord

Sainsbury held large share holdings in two biotech

companies, Diatech and Innotech; subsequently they were put

in a blind trust. He is also New Labour's largest single

donor, having given the party more than GBP8 million since

it first came into power.

 

The irony of Sainsbury being in charge of a pro-GM science

policy was highlighted when it emerged he had made a GBP20m

paper profit in just four years through his investment in

Innotech.

 

There are links too between Labour and the biotech

industry's spin-doctors. Monsanto's PR company in the UK is

Good Relations, whose director David Hill ran Labour's media

operations for the 1997 and 2001 general elections.

 

In such an environment, it is scarcely surprising if

dissidents like Dr Pusztai find themselves pushed to the

fringes and turned into scapegoats.

 

The oddest twist of all came in May 1999, when Dr Pusztai

and his wife went abroad for a few days to escape the

controversy surrounding them.

 

On their return they discovered there had been a break-in at

their house in Aberdeen. The only things taken were some

bottles of malt whisky, a bit of foreign currency - and the

bags containing all their research data.

 

This was followed by another break-in at the Rowett

Institute at the end of the year. Only Dr Pusztai's old lab

that was broken into.

 

He remains baffled about who was behind the raids, and why

he was targeted.

 

But he continues to defend his controversial findings.

 

'They picked the wrong guy,' he says simply. 'I will kick

the bucket before I give up.'

 

*Don't Worry (It's Safe to Eat) by Andrew Rowell is

published by Earthscan on July 10 (£16.99).

 

 

 

 

 

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