The way of behaviour of an ANONYMOUS committee of The Royal Society as described below, is completely unacceptable. Besides their conclusions are highly doubtful, to say the least. This ridiculous way of delaying with the matter does not give us any confidence in the safety of GE foods whatsoever. It certainly does not show Dr. Pusztai’s findings wrong. It DOES show the total unwillingness to honestly look into the challenges made
by Dr. Pusztai.

This process does further decrease our trust in the objectivity of scientific institutions. Therefore the urge for a moratorium on the introduction of GE foods and crops only becomes stronger and definitely not smaller.

Wytze de Lange

Press Release

The Royal Society (RS) has updated their report on GM-food of September 1998. They have peer-reviewed the nutritional and immunology data on GM-potato work carried out at the Rowett Research Institute (Rowett) between 1995 & 1998. The data reviewed were the Rowett Audit Report and my reply to it (Alternative Report; an internal document not meant for publication) which were put on the Internet by the Rowett, the latter without my consent jeopardising the publication of the data in a peer-reviewed journal.

None of the data in the RS enquiry has been forwarded by me. These data have already been peer-reviewed by a Rowett Audit Committee and thereafter by 20 senior scientists who found them to be of a standard acceptable for scientific publication and signed and released a Memorandum to that effect early in 1999. Accordingly, the results of this new enquiry by the RRS without new scientific input are likely to be of limited value.

I had offered the RS in a letter of 19th March my fullest co-operation. I indicated I would be happy to interact with the RS Working Group both verbally and in writing, provide them in confidence a copy of my updated final report incorporating the results of the independent statistical analysis of our data which was deposited with the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on 2nd March 1999 and discuss with them our interpretation of the data and our conclusions.

Unfortunately, the RS felt that speed was of the essence and did not accept my offer of co-operation. It was their view that my role should be limited to making comments on the reports of the six unnamed referees appointed by them. Thus, although the RS was fully aware that a more up to date report could shortly be made available, they still proceeded with a third peer-reviewing of the data in the two reports.

Having asked for my comments by noon on 13th May, the RS forwarded to me 3 reports on the 8th May, 2 on the 10th May and the final one on 11th May, with a rewritten version on 13th May allowing me 35 minutes to reply to this last one. As in my opinion the standard of most of the refereeing was not up to that expected from referees of international journals probably because of the undue haste and the referees' unfamiliarity with the type of nutritional work carried out by us, commenting on them would have taken much longer than the allowed time. I felt therefore that under the circumstances it would be inappropriate and unwise to attempt to make any valued judgements.

I feel considerable sadness that we have all missed a great opportunity to find ways to move forward on this important issue. It is my belief that most people find tampering with the genetic make up of our basic foodstuffs a cause for concern given the perceived lack of proper and exhaustive biological testing. It is essential that GM-foods are made as safe as can be, and I reiterate my concerns about the lack of stringency in their testing at present.

Arpad Pusztai 18 May 1999

The European Commission accepted that genetically modified foods could not be adequately tested for safety and should therefore be released to the public, with testing limited to subsequent monitoring of populations.
Dr Richard North, the respected independent food scientist who discovered the EC document, says that the recommendation recognised that traditional toxicological tests on GM foods would not detect problems because not
enough people would take part.
The 1997 EC report on testing of new foods is signed by the industry commissioner, Martin Bangemann. It states: "Conventional toxicological evaluation methods cannot be applied to foods because foods present particular difficulties not encountered with the testing of food additives and contaminants in vivo [in animals] and in vitro [in the test tube]. The
document continues: "To compensate for the inability of employing reasonably adequate safety factors, any subchronic animal feeding studies require supplementation by absorption and metabolism studies in animals and eventually in humans". It adds: "Appropriate information should be derived by combined nutritional and safety post-market surveillance".
Dr North said: "What this is saying is that, given the inability to carry out initial safety testing, the only way safety can be assessed is to release the product for general sale and then monitor the population to see if anyone gets ill. That means exposing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to a product before they can confirm it is safe. The system requires that the British population becomes an experimental group of guinea pigs."