Does Bt Corn Kill Monarchs?
In the spring of 1999, as the monarchs embarked on their return flight north, a young Cornell University entomologist name John Losey reported in the journal Nature that the monarch's future appeared to be endangered, not from urban sprawl or toxic waste but from eating the pollen of genetically modified corn. - Food, Inc., p. 122
Losey came under major attack, both from his own colleague, Anthony Shelton, and by the biotech PR apparatus, which claimed that more butterflies were killed by colliding with car windshields than by eating GM corn pollen. In his analysis, Pringle (who is actually pro-biotech) says that the biotech industry was bluffing because in reality, there was no scientific evidence to back them up.
Losey had always admitted that his work was only preliminary, not conclusive, but of course that did not quell any of the attacks. After his initial publication in Nature he followed up with more research. The next study provided "the first evidence that transgenic Bt corn naturally deposited on milkweed in a cornfield causes significant mortality." (Food, Inc. p. 130)
Whatever anyone thought of Losey's or the Iowa study, the researchers had clearly identified a hazard for the monarch butterfly. The biotech companies moved swiftly to control the damage, calling for more research and putting up funds to convene an inclusionary process and have third parties develop the data. Several academics, including Losey and Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch, were invited to carry out studies funded 60 percent by industry with the rest of the funding coming from government grants and other sources. Losey said he wanted to research whether monarchs would avoid pollen-dusted leaves, but the industry was not interested in his inquiry, so he bowed out. The industry said Losey wanted to "take the research in his lab in a different direction" from the one they had chosen. - p. 130-131
Arpad Pusztai
The same year that Losey first published his findings about monarchs, another scientist also incurred the biotech industry's wrath. He was Arpad Pusztai, a researcher at the Rowett Institute in Scotland, who studied the safety of GE potatoes that produced a chemical called lectin.
In his study, he fed rats either potatoes, GE potatoes with a gene to produce lectin, or regular potatoes that he had laced with lectin.
At the beginning of his third year of research - 1998 - Pusztai became concerned by preliminary data showing that rats fed the transgenic potatoes showed a slight retardation of growth, plus a degrading of the immune system. - p. 110
He was asked to talk about his experiments on TV and he did so with the approval of the Rowett Institute. While on TV, he was asked "So, if genetically altered foods can affect rats in this way, could they possibly have long-term effects on humans too?" He answered that he did not eat GMOs until there was more evidence of their safety... and that it was very unfair to use the British people as guinea pigs. As a result of the outcry that followed, Pusztai was forced to retire.
A special peer review was called by members of the Royal Society, an exclusive club of 1,200 British and Commonwealth fellows. A pillar of the British scientific establishment, the society included many of the scientists who had pioneered biotechnology. They quickly declared that Pusztai's experiments were "flawed in many respects of design, execution, and analysis." - p. 112
However, when Pusztai's research was published in The Lancet, it showed that there really was an issue to merit more research. (The Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote that the published paper "provides a report that deserves further attention.") Prior to publication, some British scientists had tried to stop The Lancet from publishing Pusztai's work at all. Horton sent Pusztai's work to six reviewers - "twice the normal number" - and a majority agreed it should be published. As you can see here, it's not just biotech companies that fiercely fight against anyone who comes out with even preliminary findings that show problems with biotech.
GMOs in Mexican Corn
Then there's the story of Chapela and Quist and their findings in the corn of Oaxaca, Mexico.
In their report in the scientific journal Nature, the Berkeley researchers, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, had described two separate events. The first was the cross-pollination of an unidentified transgenic corn with a local criollo (a variety cultivated by local farmers without interbreeding with modern varieties, known genetically as a landrace). The second event was more complicated and raised the possibility of far greater consequences. The researchers reported that the genes from the genetically modified pollen were now unstable in the genome of the criollo, implying that these wandering genes might produce all manner of unexpected and destructive results. - p. 160
The biotech lobby group BIO immediately tried to discredit the article, saying Chapela and Quist were antibiotech and that their ideology trumped their ability to do unbiased research. Other scientists spoke out against Chapela and Quist too.
On the day their paper was published, Internet probiotech forums carried immediate demands for the paper to be retracted. One of these forums, AgBioView, with an e-mail list of thirty-seven hundred scientists, led the attack... An early criticism came from a "Mary Murphy" who attacked Chapela for being on the board of directors at Pesticide Action Network, a group trying to reduce the use of pesticides, and so, claimed Murphy, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer."
Murphy's posting was followed by a message from "Andura Smetacek." Smetacek had appeared on AgBioView before in a rant about Losey's experiments with monarch butterflies and how green groups were using a PR firm to create scare campaigns about transgenic crops... A British antibiotech activist traced Murphy and Smetacek's electronic personas to the Bivings Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations company that had Monsanto as a client, but Bivings denied any knowledge of either name. - p. 168-169
When the backlash came, Nature "disavowed the legitimacy of the research... It was the first time in the 133-year history of Nature that the London-based journal had withdrawn support for an article in defiance of its authors and their referees."
I think we should take the backlash against Huber with a grain of salt, knowing that is the norm that there is ALWAYS backlash when anything comes out against biotech, whether the antibiotech findings are true or not. And, sadly, it seems that the backlash sometimes serves to stifle the debate and research, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to do once troubling preliminary findings are reported. |
