Author Of Blair Food Standards Agency Report
Professor Philip James On GM Food Safety
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/profjames.htm
'I Don't Think We Fully Understand The Dimensions Of What We Are Getting Into'

"The perception that everything is totally straightforward and safe [with GM food] is utterly naive. I don't think we fully understand the dimensions of what we're getting into."
Professor Philip James
Director of the Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen,
and author of the 'James' Report commissioned by Tony Blair on the structure and functions of the then proposed UK Food Standards Agency
Scottish Daily Record, 3 February 1998

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Professor James Raises GM Food Safety Concerns Scottish Daily Record, 3 February 1998

Professor Philip James And The Pusztai Affair Why Wasn't The GM Potato Study Repeated?

Professor James Raises GM Food Safety Concerns
Scottish Daily Record, 3 February 1998

Professor Philip James And The Pusztai Affair
Why Wasn't The GM Potato Study Repeated?

"The scientific research that was largely responsible for sparking the intense debate in the UK over the safety of genetically-modified (GM) foods has finally been published, alongside new work showing possible effects on human health. ..... Dr Pusztai told the BBC: 'For me the important thing is that it makes the whole thing respectable again. I hope it will be a push in the right direction. We are still just talking, but [GM foods] need to be tested.' ...The UK Government's response to the publication of Dr Pusztai's work and another paper in the Lancet relating to the safety of GM foods came from the Cabinet Office: 'It acknowledges that further studies need to be carried out in this area.' "
GM controversy intensifies
BBC Online, 15 October 1999

"One blustery day six years ago - at the start of The Independent on Sunday's successful GM campaign - I travelled to Aberdeen to meet a man who had been sent to Coventry. Dr Arpad Pusztai was then the bogeyman of the British scientific establishment. No less a figure than Lord May - then the Government's chief scientific adviser, now president of the Royal Society - had accused him of violating 'every canon of scientific rectitude', and ministers and top scientists had queued up to denounce him. His crime had been to find disturbing evidence that the GM potatoes he was studying damaged the immune systems, brains, livers and kidneys of rats - and to mention it briefly in a television programme before his research was completed and published. His punishment was draconian; his research was stopped, his team disbanded and his data confiscated (see box). He was ostracised by his colleagues, forced into retirement and gagged for seven months, forbidden to put his case. I was the first journalist to interview him at length, spending six hours with him..... the Government refused to undertake the normal scientific process of repeating Dr Pusztai's experiments in order to either confirm or disprove his findings. Top officials at the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food told me that it would be 'wrong', 'immoral' and 'a waste of money' to do so - an extraordinary attitude given the potential threat to public health, should he be right..... I have found, time after time, in covering controversial environmental issues over the past 35 years, that lone scientists, stubbornly raising concerns in the teeth of entrenched opposition from industry and the scientific establishment, have often proved to be right. Professor Derek Bryce-Smith of Reading University was ridiculed and marginalised for decades after warning of the dangers of lead in petrol in the 1950s - but it is now being phased out all over the world. The now much honoured Alice Stewart came under similar attack for first warning of the hazards of radiation to the unborn child. And I well remember one of Britain's top officials solemnly informing me a quarter of a century ago that Dr Irving Selikoff, who did more than anyone to sound the alarm on asbestos - now one of the main causes of premature death in Britain - was 'evil'. I have sat in the august halls of the Royal Society and been told that acid rain caused by pollution did not exist. I have been lectured by one of Britain's top meteorologists - now travelling the world to warn about global warming - that the climate never changes, and that human activities could not possibly cause it to do so. And who can forget the constant reassurances from the political and scientific establishments that BSE could not spread to people?"
Severin Carrell - When fed to rats it affected their kidneys and blood counts. So what might it do to humans?
Independent, 22 May 2008

"It is not often that you meet a scientific pariah, so my recent interview with Dr Árpád Pusztai was a fascinating experience. Pusztai was at the centre of a huge media storm in 1998 over research in which he fed GM potatoes to rats. He purportedly found that rats fed a GM diet did not grow as well as rats on the control diet and that they had immune problems. Part of his work was eventually published in the Lancet, but the affair effectively killed off his research career. I had always been sceptical of claims that the scientific establishment allied with dark political and commercial forces conspired to destroy him, but after looking into the history of the events that surrounded his dismissal and from talking to him I have begun to change my view..... Rumours of political interference have surrounded the decision by the director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen Prof Philip James - who is now chair of the International Obesity Task Force - to suspend Pusztai after first congratulating him. One allegation is that James received two phone calls from the prime minister's office the day after the screening of a World in Action documentary in which Pusztai expressed his fears about the safety of GM food. In the most far-fetched version, those phone calls are supposed to have come at the behest of President Clinton who had been lent on by the biotech industry. James has always denied this, including during an appearance before a Science and Technology Select Committee hearing into the Pusztai saga..... When I talked to James about the Pusztai affair he told me he had been phoned by someone he described as 'the science officer in the Department of Agriculture in the Scottish Office' on either the Tuesday or Wednesday - one or two days after the documentary. '[They] told me how dissatisfied they were with the research that was being undertaken by Árpád Pusztai,' he wrote in an email to me. At the time, the Scottish Office was still part of central government because devolution had not yet happened. That department was funding Pusztai's research. Then things started to get a bit strange. I asked James why he had not told the Science and Technology Select Committee about this phone call when he appeared before them in March 1999....In direct contradiction to his previous email, James then wrote to me, 'I was not contacted - or lobbied - to my knowledge by the Scottish Office of Agriculture - who so specified? If so I was and am now unaware of it.' When I pointed out that it was him who had told me about the phone call, he changed tack again, saying the contact had occurred after his decision to suspend Pusztai had been taken so it had not had any influence on him..... Make of that what you will. At any rate, James denies any political influence over his decision-making. He agrees that he phoned Pusztai immediately after the programme was broadcast to congratulate him on his performance, but he later changed his mind and decided to suspend the scientist."
James Randerson - Did Downing Street ruin anti-GM scientist's career?
Science Blog, Guardian, 18 January 2008

"The affair finished off Pusztai's research career (although at the time he was already 69) and affected his health. His supporters were appalled by his treatment at the hands of the publicly funded Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, which he had served with distinction for most of his career. He was regarded as a world expert on plant lectins - defensive proteins that kill insects and other invaders - with over 300 scientific papers, including two in the prestigious journal Nature. 'I would have characterised [his treatment] as disgraceful. I don't see how any reputable scientist ... could be treated in this way,' said Dr Stanley Ewen, a pathologist who was then at the University of Aberdeen and who worked with Pusztai. Having said of GM food in 1998: 'If I had the choice I would certainly not eat it', and that 'I find it's very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs', it's easy to imagine Pusztai was ideologically opposed to GM. But this is far from the truth, he tells me. 'I'm strictly science-based ... It is not an ideology for me.' Still, he confesses that his opposition to the technology has hardened over the years, and he still won't eat it. 'Even now, I am not a campaigner. I have never belonged to any organisation campaigning for or against it.' He felt he had a duty to speak out, 'just to inject some caution into this business', he says. 'Make no mistake, this is an irreversible technology. It is no good 50 years later to say: 'We should have known.' Pusztai clearly wanted his concerns to be aired publicly, but he does not come across as a man who relished or courted publicity. He was very happy, for example, that the institute's director, Philip James, shielded him from interview requests. 'I was quite happy with this ... I am an academic scientist. I've never been exposed to this,' he says, 'I'm really not a very media person.' Pusztai says James, on the other hand, was anxious to exploit the media attention. 'The director kept running around like a blue-arsed fly. This was a tremendous public relations business for him.' James even put in a complimentary phone call to Pusztai that August evening. 'I telephoned Pusztai immediately after the broadcast to congratulate him on the modest way in which he had presented the evidence on the programme,' says James, although he denies relishing the publicity. He says he had grave doubts about the interview going ahead in the first place....The day after the World in Action programme, Pusztai's boss changed his mood from congratulation to condemnation. 'My change in attitude was dramatic because I discovered that Pusztai ... had never conducted the studies which he had claimed,' says James, an accusation that Pusztai strongly denies. He says he never claimed to have done the jackbean experiments. 'He just simply wanted to put a real cap on it,' says Pusztai. 'The simplest way to do it was to suspend all research activities into this business.' Pusztai's supporters claim that James came under pressure from Downing Street to put a lid on the affair. James suspended Pusztai and used misconduct procedures to seize his data. Pusztai's rolling annual contract was not renewed and he was banned from speaking publicly. Pusztai says he wanted to publish his results but was concerned that James would veto any approach to an academic journal. In 1998, if James had hoped that gagging Pusztai would make the affair go away he was wrong. Continued media speculation was doing considerable damage to public confidence in GM food and this prompted the Royal Society - the UK's premier scientific academy - to enter the fray. Although none of Pusztai's results had yet been published, it set about reviewing the information that did exist - an internal report written by Pusztai, an audit of the data produced by the Rowett, and an independent statistical analysis carried out by Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland. The data was sent to six anonymous reviewers. The subsequent report savaged Pusztai's results, but he remains defiant. The Royal Society putdown was predictable. The reviewers had placed a hotchpotch of lab reports and statistical analyses that were never intended for publication under intense scrutiny. 'There was practically nothing in it but numbers,' says Pusztai. He and Ewen point out that peer reviewers had praised the methodological details of the experiment when their application for a £1.6m research grant from the Scottish Office was given the go-ahead. Some of the disputed data did eventually see the light of day in October 1999, when Ewen and Puztai published a paper in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet. Because of its controversial nature, the data paper was seen by six reviewers - three times the usual number. Five gave it the green light. The paper - which used data held by Ewen and so was not subject to veto by James - showed that rats fed on potatoes genetically modified with the snowdrop lectin had unusual changes to their gut tissue compared with rats fed on normal potatoes."
Arpad Pusztai: Biological divide
Guardian, 15 January 2008

"As we search for answers as to whether GM foods are safe, two questions stand out. Given such a huge controversy over Pusztai's experiments, and the preliminary nature of their findings, why were the political and scientific establishments so intent on rebutting him? More importantly why have the experiments never been repeated?..... having finished his doctorate in biochemistry and post-doctorate at the Lister Institute, he [Pustai] was invited to join the prestigious Protein Chemistry Department at the Rowett Research Institute, which has become the pre-eminent nutritional centre in Europe.  Dr Pusztai was put to work on lectins, plant proteins that were going to be central in the GM controversy years later.   Over the intervening years, Pusztai became the world's leading expert on plant lectins, publishing over 270 scientific studies, and three books on the subject... In 1995, the Scottish Office Agriculture Environment and Fisheries Department commissioned a three-year multi-centre research programme under the coordinatorship of Dr Pusztai into the safety of GM food. At the time there was not a single publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the safety of GM food [note: incredibly, this was despite GM food already having started to enter the market with the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994, and soon Monsanto's GM soya in 1996]  ....  The idea was that the methodologies that they tested would be used by the regulatory authorities in later risk assessments of GM crops. For the first time, independent studies would be undertaken to examine whether feeding GM potatoes to rats caused any harmful effects on their health, bodies or metabolism....The thinking was that, if you could genetically modify a potato with the lectin gene inside it, the potato could have an inherent built-in defence mechanism that would act as a natural insecticide, preventing aphid attack. Because it looked promising, the snowdrop gene had already been incorporated into several experimental crops, including rice, cabbages and oil-seed rape. But by late 1997, the first storm clouds were brewing at the Rowett. Preliminary results from the rat-feeding experiments were showing totally unexpected and worrying changes in the size and weight of the rat's body organs. Liver and heart sizes were getting smaller, and so was the brain. There were also indications that the rats' immune systems were weakening... Finally in August 1998, Pusztai expressed his growing concerns on World in Action in a 150 second interview. So what did he say? 'We're assured that this is absolutely safe,' said Pusztai. 'We can eat it all the time. We must eat it all the time. There is no conceivable harm, which can come to us. But as a scientist looking at it, actively working in the field, I find that it's very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs. We have to find guinea-pigs in the laboratory.' He continued: 'If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat it till I see at least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for our genetically modified potatoes. I actually believe that this technology can be made to work for us. And if the genetically modified foods will be shown to be safe, then we have really done a great service to all our fellow citizens. And I very strongly believe in this, and that's one of the main reasons why I demand to tighten up the rules, tighten up the standards.' On the evening of the broadcast, the head of the Rowett Professor James 'congratulated,' Pusztai on his TV appearance, commenting on 'how well Arpad had handled the questions'. The following morning a further press release from the Rowett noticed that a 'range of carefully controlled studies underlie the basis of Dr Pusztai's concerns'..... When Pusztai spoke out in August 1998, the new Labour administration was already beginning to shape government policy for its second term. It was looking for drivers of the economy that could be trusted to deliver the growth and hence results that Labour needed. Hightech industries, such as biotechnology, were to be the central cogs of the engine that would drive the Blairite revolution, and deliver the coveted second term. What Pusztai was saying could literally derail an entire industry and with it many of the hopes and aspirations of New Labour..... Although banned from talking to the press, he was not banned from talking to other scientists outside the Rowett. In February 1999 30 international scientists from 13 countries published a memo supporting Pusztai that was published in the Guardian which sparked a media frenzy over GM. A week after the international scientists backed Pusztai, a secret committee met to counter the growing alarm over GM. Contrary to reassurances by the government that GM food was safe, the minutes show the cross departmental committee formed to deal with the crisis, called MISC6, knew the reassurances were premature. It 'requested' a paper by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) on the 'human health implications of GM foods'. What would happen, the minutes asked, if the CMO/CSA's paper 'shows up any doubts? We will be pressurised to ban them immediately. What if it says that we need evidence of long-term effects? This will look like we are not sure about their safety'....However Pusztai and Ewen had submitted a paper to the Lancet, which was finally published in October 1999..... four out of the six reviewers were for publication. 'A clear majority of The Lancet's reviewers were in favour,' says Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet. Then came the 'threats'. Three days after The Independent article, Richard Horton received a phone call from Professor Lachmann, the former Vice-President and Biological Secretary of The Royal Society and President of the Academy of Medical Sciences. According to Horton, Professor Lachmann threatened that his job would be at risk if he published Pusztai's paper....the fundamental flaw in the scientific establishment's response is that in 1999 everyone agreed that more work was needed. Three years later, that work remains to be undertaken. A scientific body, like The Royal Society, that allocates millions in research funds every year, could have funded a repeat of Pusztai's experiments. Is it that it is easier to say there is no evidence to support his claim, because no evidence exists, than it is to say that no one has looked?"
HOT POTATO
Media Lens, 15 July 2003

"The initial response [to the TV broadcast regarding the work at the Rowett Institute by Dr Pusztai on GM potatoes] was moderate praise for those concerned but plaudits were soon to be replaced by a complete 'U turn'........The results seemed to be treated as fraudulent enabling the Audit mechanism to be commenced under Biotechnology and Biology Science Research Council rules. Four eminent persons were selected without recourse to Dr Pusztai and he was left defenceless. He was immediately gagged and his great reputation nullified at a stroke.... His friends and colleagues felt a real sense of outrage that Dr Pusztai, a Hungarian refugee from KGB dominated Hungary in 1956, had been treated in this heavy handed manner."
Memorandum submitted by Dr Stanley William Barclay Ewen, Department of Pathology, University of Aberdeen
Select Committee on Science and Technology, House of Commons, 26 February 1999