subject:
Blair accused in new GM scandal allegations
Date:
Mon, 7 Jul 2003 22:47:58 +0100
From:
"NLP Wessex"
To:





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

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
 nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
Tearing Down Biotech's 'Berlin Wall'
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/genomicsparadigm.htm
The Acceptable Face Of Ag-biotech
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/monsantoMASpossibilities.htm
=========================================================================

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 Tony 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 Tony 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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