gmo
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GMOnsanto tag lost --> roy</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mischa Popoff: Leaving the Organic Food Movement</font></div><div>August 17, 2015 H. Sterling Burnett, Mischa Popoff</div><div>
</div><div>In today's edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, H. Sterling Burnett, managing editor of Environment & Climate News speaks with Mischa Popoff. Popoff is an author as well as a Heartland policy advisor. Popoff comes on the podcast to discuss organic farming and GMO foods.</div><div>
</div><div>Popoff talks about his history as an organic farmer and his time as a government organic food inspector. He explains why he abandoned the organic movement and why organic farmers should embrace GMO foods. According to Popoff, biotech foods can be the ultimate organic food.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Puppetmasters of Academia (or What the NY Times Left out)</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>September 8, 2015 Biotechnology, Commentaries, Science Media 41 Comments</div><div>
</div><div><b>by Jonathan Latham, PhD</b></div><div>
</div><div>“Reading the emails make(s) me want to throw up” tweeted the Food Babe after reading a lengthy series of them posted online by the NY Times on Sept 5th. The emails in question result from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and are posted in the side bars of a front-page article by Times reporter Eric Lipton (“Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show”). The article is highly disturbing, but, as the Food Babe implied, the Times buried the real story. The real scoop was not the perfidy and deceit of a handful of individual professors. Buried in the emails is proof positive of active collusion between the agribusiness and chemical industries, numerous and often prominent academics, PR companies, and key administrators of land grant universities for the purpose of promoting GMOs and pesticides. In particular, nowhere does the Times note that one of the chief colluders was none other than the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).</div><div>
</div><div>All this is omitted entirely, or buried in hard-to-notice side bars, which are anyway unavailable to print readers. So, here is the article Eric Lipton should have written.</div><div>
</div><div>First, The Lipton Story</div><div>The Lipton article seems, at first sight, to be impressive reporting. Lipton describes how Kevin Folta, Chair of the Dept. of Horticulture at the University of Florida secretly took expenses and $25,000 of unrestricted money from Monsanto to promote GMO crops. On behalf of the biotech industry, or via the PR firm Ketchum, Folta wrote on websites and attended public events, trainings, lobbying efforts and special missions.</div><div>
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</div><div>FOOD INDUSTRY ENLISTED ACADEMICS</div><div>
</div><div>Parts of this were already known, but Lipton digs up further damning evidence and quotes from Folta. They include an email to Monsanto that solidly contradicts Folta’s previous denials of a relationship with Monsanto and the biotech industry:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> “I am grateful for this opportunity and promise a solid return on the investment,</span>” Folta wrote after receiving the $25,000 check, thereby showing both a clear understanding of his role and the purpose of the money. The article goes on to similarly expose Bruce <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Chassy (Prof Emeritus, University of Illinois) and David Shaw (Mississippi State University)</span>. It also discussses, presumably for <b>“balance”, agronomist and GMO critic Charles Benbrook, then at Washington State University, who unlike the others openly acknowledged his funding.</b></div><div>
</div><div>What Lipton Missed</div><div>But readers of the emails can find facts that are much more damaging to perceptions of academic independence than that contained in the main article.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> For one thing, the money Folta received is insignificant besides the tens of millions his university was taking from Syngenta (>$10million), Monsanto(>$1million), Pioneer (>$10million), and BASF (>$1million)</span>. Money that it’s hard to believe did not have a role in protecting Kevin Folta as he roamed zealously (and often offensively) over the internet, via his twitter account, blog, podcast, and OpEds, squelching dissent and ridiculing GMO critics wherever he went.</div><div>
</div><div>Also missing from the main Times article is a sense of the extensive and intricate networking of a small army of academics furthering the interests of Monsanto and other parts of the chemical, agribusiness and biotech industries. Folta rarely acted alone. His networks are filled with economists, molecular biologists, plant pathologists, development specialists, and agronomists, many of them much more celebrated than Kevin Folta, but all of them in a knowing loop with industry and the PR firms. Their job was acknowledged openly in emails <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(“We are all bad-ass shills for the truth. It’s a pleasure shilling with you.” Or, as Folta himself put it: “I’m glad to sign on to whatever you like, or write whatever you like.”</span>).<b> More generally, the group’s role was to initiate academic publications and other articles and to firefight legislative, media and scientific threats to the GMO and pesticide industries, all the while keeping their industry links hidden.</b></div><div>
</div><div>The academics identified by these emails as cooperating with industry and PR firms include:</div><div>
</div><div>Profs. Bruce Chassy (University of Illinois) and Alan McHughen (University of California, Riverside) who worked together to destroy the credibility of Russian scientist and GMO critic Irina Ermakova. They persuaded the journal Nature Biotechnology to interview Ermakova about her research and describe it. This interview was followed by a detailed critique of her research (about which none of the authors were expert). Ermakova was neither told of the critique nor given a chance to answer it. This whole elaborate <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">subterfuge required her to be sent a dummy proof of the article she thought she was publishing in the journal.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Prof. Calestuous Juma (Harvard University) longtime advocate of GMOs for Africa.</div><div>
</div><div>Prof. Wayne<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Parrott (University of Georgia)</span> a serial intervener in academic GMO debates.</div><div>
</div><div>Prof. Roger Beachy (Danforth Center, formerly USAID). Beachy is the principal living exponent of a classic biotech strategy: to respond rapidly to a report or publication critical of some aspect of the technology with a multi-author “rebuttal” [Disclaimer: the inaugural report of the Bioscience Resource Project (on the genome damage caused by genetic engineering) was met, even before formal publication, with both barrels from 23 professors, including Roger Beachy (Altpeter et al 2005)].(2)</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prof. Ron Herring (Cornell) who has helped to promote GMOs in India and fought to defuse the farmer suicide debate in India.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prof. CS Prakash (Tuskegee University) </span>is the convener of the influential listserv AgBioWorld. AgBioWorld was the all-important conduit for a petition signed by three thousand scientists calling for the retraction of a 2001 scientific paper showing <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">GMO contamination of Mexican corn (</span>Quist and Chapela 2001). As detailed in an article called <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Fake Persuaders, the scientists who initiated the petition, and made inaccurate and inflammatory statements about the authors, were not real people. However, their emails could be traced back to servers belonging to Monsanto or Bivings, a PR company that was working with Monsanto at the time.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prof. Nina Fedoroff (Penn State) is the most prominent of all of the scientists looped into all of the Times emails. Nina Fedoroff was the 2011-2012 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.</span> The AAAS is the foremost scientific body in the US. During her Presidency, Fedoroff, who is also a contributor to the NY Times, used her position to coordinate and sign a letter on behalf of 60 prominent scientists. This letter was sent to EPA as part of an effort to defeat a pesticide regulatory effort. The real coordinator was Monsanto but Fedoroff participated in phone conferences and email exchanges with them (including with the prominent lobbyist <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stanley Abramson) </span>and gets credit in the emails for “moving the ball far down the field”. Yet Nina Fedoroff is not once named in the main article and nowhere at all is her position noted.</div><div>
</div><div>So the story that academia’s most vocal GMO defenders, and some of its most prominent scientists, are copied into these emails is missing. The focus on individuals like Folta occludes a demonstration, for the first time ever, of long-suspected and intricate coordination and cooperation among them.</div><div>
</div><div>Also looped in to various of the emails are supposedly independent individuals and organisations who speak in favour of biotechnology, self-reportedly out of personal passion. These include Dr Steve Savage, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Karl Haro von Mogel of Biofortified, Mischa Popoff (of the <b>Heartland Institute) and Jon Entine</b> </span>(then affiliated with George Mason University and now head of the Genetic Literacy Project and a Forbes Magazine columnist). All are revealed, by the emails but not the article, as biotech insiders.</div><div>
</div><div>Cooperation among academics is not a crime. But these emails show, as in the EPA letter example, that a company (usually Monsanto, but also Dow and Syngenta and a PR firm, often several of them, plus sometimes the biotech lobbyists BIO or CropLife America) were invariably looped in to these emails, and further, that initiatives usually began with one of these non-academic entities, and were shepherded by them. Only rarely is there even a suggestion from the emails that the various academics were out in front, though that was always the intended impression of the result.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But perhaps the biggest of all revelations within these emails is the connivance of senior university administrators, especially at Cornell University.</span> The NY Times article focuses on the misdeeds of Mississippi State University Vice President David Shaw. But, looped into one email string, along with the PR firm Ketchum and Jon Entine are various Cornell email addresses and names. These are ignored by Lipton, but the email addresses belong to very senior members of the Cornell administration. They include Ronnie Coffman (Director of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Science) and Sarah Evanega Davidson (now director of the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Gates-funded Cornell <b>Alliance for Science).</b></span></div><div>
</div><div>The Alliance for Science is a PR project and international training center for academics and others who want to work with the biotech industry to promote GMOs. It is funded ($5.6 million) by the Gates Foundation. Its upcoming program of speakers at <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Cornell for September include Tamar Haspel (Washington Post reporter), Amy Harmon (New York Times reporter) and Prof. Dan Kahan (Yale Law School). These speakers are the exact ones mentioned in a proposal worked out between Kevin Folta and Monsanto in a series of email exchanges intended to enhance biotech outreach. These email exchanges also propose setting up “Ask Me Anything” events to be held at universities around the country with Kevin Folta as of the panelists.</span></div><div>
</div><div>On Sept 10th the Cornell Alliance for Science is hosting an event in downtown Ithaca (home town of Cornell). It is called “Ask Me Anything About GMOs” and Kevin Folta is a panelist. Somehow or other Davidson’s Cornell Alliance for Science read Monsanto’s lips, perfectly.</div><div>
</div><div>Your right to know</div><div>Let me speculate at what is really going on behind the scenes of Lipton’s article.</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier this year, a newly-formed US group called US Right to Know (USRTK) set in motion Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests directed at 14 <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(now 43)</span> prominent public university scientists it suspected of working with (and being paid by) the biotech industry and/or its PR intermediaries. Now, if these 43 academics had nothing to hide, this request would not have attracted much attention and hardly any emails would have been forthcoming. However, the USRTK FOIA requests triggered a huge outcry in various quarters about the “harassment” of public scientists. The outcry has led to OpEds in the LA Times and the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">controversial removal of scientific blog posts defending USRTK, </span>and much else besides, as reputedly tens of thousands of emails (from these FOIA requests) have landed on the desks of USRTK.</div><div>
</div><div>What would a good PR company recommend to its clients in such a situation? In order to preempt the likely upcoming firestorm, it might recommend that various media outlets run ahead of USRTK to publish a version of events in which academic small-fry like Kevin Folta, Bruce Chassy and David Shaw (of Mississippi State) are the villains. Making them the fall guys lets others off the hook: high-profile scientists like Nina Fedoroff and Roger Beachy; the pro-biotech academic community in general; and prestigious Ivy League institutions like Cornell University.</div><div>
</div><div>These much bigger fish are who the NY Times should have harpooned. Since they did not, or perhaps would not, let us hope that USRTK will make better use of those emails, ideally by posting all of them online.</div><div>
</div><div>Footnotes</div><div>(1) Others Professors cc’d into emails include : Peter Davies (Cornell), Carl Pray (Rutgers), Tony Shelton (Cornell), Peter Phillips (University of Saskatchewan), Prabhu Pingali (Cornell), Elizabeth Earle (Cornell), Peter Hobbs (Cornell), Janice Thies (Cornell) and Ann Grodzins Gold (Syracuse), Martina Newell-McGloughlin (UC Davis).</div><div>(2) Later published as A. K. Wilson, J. R. Latham and R. A. Steinbrecher (2006) Transformation-induced Mutations in Transgenic Plants: Analysis and Biosafety Implications. Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews 23: 209-237</div><div>
</div><div>References</div><div>Altpeter F. et al (2005) Particle bombardment and the genetic enhancement of crops: myths and realities. Molecular Breeding 15: 305–327.</div><div>David Quist and Ignacio H. Chapela (2001) Transgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nature 414: 541-543</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/monsantos-gmo-crops-banned-two-more-european-nations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div class="headline" style="line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title" style="line-height: 52px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; color: rgb(26, 47, 90); clear: both;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monsanto's GMO Crops Banned by Two More European Nations</font></h1></div><div class="teaser" style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 15px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greece and Latvia join Germany and Scotland in rejecting the biotech giant's genetically-modified crops.</font></div></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>The Goodman Affair: Monsanto Targets the Heart of Science</div><div>
</div><div>May 20, 2013 Biotechnology, Commentaries, Science Media 103 Comments</div><div>
</div><div>by Claire Robinson and Jonathan Latham, PhD</div><div>
</div><div>Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has jested that instead of scientific peer review, its rival The Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. On another occasion, Smith was challenged to publish an issue of the BMJ exclusively comprising papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. He replied, “How do you know I haven’t already done it?”</div><div>
</div><div>As Smith’s stories show, journal editors have a lot of power in science – power that provides opportunities for abuse. The life science industry knows this, and has increasingly moved to influence and control science publishing.</div><div>
</div><div>Richard E Goodman, University of Nebraska</div><div>
</div><div>RICHARD E GOODMAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA</div><div>
</div><div>The strategy, often with the willing cooperation of publishers, is effective and sometimes blatant. In 2009, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier was found to have invented an entire medical journal, complete with editorial board, in order to publish papers promoting the products of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck. Merck provided the papers, Elsevier published them, and doctors read them, unaware that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was simply a stuffed dummy.</div><div>
</div><div>Fast forward to September 2012, when the scientific journal<b> Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT</b>) published a study that caused an international storm (Séralini, et al. 2012). The study, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, France, suggested a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize, and the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, pose serious health risks. The two-year feeding study found that rats fed both suffered severe organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death. Both the herbicide (Roundup) and the GM maize are Monsanto products. Corinne Lepage, France’s former environment minister, called the study “a bomb”.</div><div>
</div><div>Subsequently, an orchestrated campaign was launched to discredit the study in the media and persuade the journal to retract it. Many of those who wrote letters to FCT (which is published by Elsevier) had conflicts of interest with the GM industry and its lobby groups, though these were not publicly disclosed.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The journal did not retract the study (editor’s note: later they did). But just a few months later, in early 2013 the FCT editorial board acquired a new “Associate Editor for biotechnology”, Richard E. Goodman. This was a new position, seemingly established especially for Goodman in the wake of the “Séralini affair”.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Richard E. Goodman is professor at the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, University of Nebraska<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. But he is also a former Monsanto employee, who worked for the company between 1997 and 2004. While at Monsanto he assessed the allergenicity of the company’s GM crops and published papers on its behalf on allergenicity and safety issues relating to GM food (Goodman and Leach 2004).</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Goodman had no documented connection to the journal until February 2013. His fast-tracked appointment,</span> directly onto the upper editorial board raises urgent questions. Does Monsanto now effectively decide which papers on biotechnology are published in FCT? And is this part of an attempt by Monsanto and the life science industry to seize control of science?</div><div>
</div><div>To equate one journal with “science” may seem like an exaggeration. But peer-reviewed publication, in the minds of most scientists, is science. Once a paper is published in an academic journal it enters the canon and stands with the discovery of plate tectonics or the structure of DNA. All other research, no matter how groundbreaking or true, is irrelevant. As a scientist once scathingly said of the “commercially confidential” industry safety data that underpin approvals of chemicals and GM foods, “If it isn’t published, it doesn’t exist.”</div><div>
</div><div>Goodman’s <b>ILSI </b>links</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The industry affiliations of FCT’s new gatekeeper for biotechnology are not restricted to having worked directly for Monsanto. Goodman has an active and ongoing involvement with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is funded by the multinational GM and agrochemical companies, including Monsanto. It develops industry-friendly risk assessment methods for GM foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations.</span></div><div>
</div><div>ILSI describes itself as a public interest non-profit but its infiltration of regulatory agencies and influence on risk assessment policy has become highly controversial in North America and Europe.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In 2005 US-based non-profits and trade unions wrote to the World Health Organization (WHO) protesting against ILSI’s influence on international health standards protecting food and water supplies. As a result, the WHO barred ILSI from taking part in WHO activities setting safety standards, because of its funding sources. And in Europe in 2012, Diana Banati, then head of the management board at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), had to resign over her undisclosed long-standing involvement with ILSI (Robinson et al. 2013).</span></div><div>
</div><div>Goodman’s appointment to FCT is surprising also for the fact that the journal already has expertise in GM food safety. Of the four senior editors, José L. Domingo is a professor of toxicology and environmental health and author of two comprehensive reviews of GM food safety studies (Domingo 2007; Domingo and Bordonaba 2011). Both reviews expressed skepticism of the thesis that GMOs are safe. Consequently, it is far from clear why FCT needs an “associate editor for biotechnology”, but it is clear why Monsanto would have an interest in ensuring that the “Séralini affair” is never repeated.</div><div>
</div><div>Editing the scientific record: The case of<b> Paul Christou</b></div><div>FCT is not the only academic journal that appears to have been captured by commercial interests. After the initial campaign failed to get FCT to retract the Séralini study, the journal Transgenic Research published a heavy-handed critique of the study and of the researchers themselves (Arjo et al., 2013). The lead author of that critique was Paul Christou.</div><div>
</div><div>Christou and co-authors castigated the editor of FCT for publishing the study, calling it “a clear and egregious breach of the standards of scientific publishing”. They insisted that the journal editor retract the study “based on its clearly flawed data, its breaches of ethical standards, and the strong evidence for scientific misconduct and abuse of the peer-review process”. “Even a full retraction of the Séralini article” wrote Christou, “will not cleanse the Internet of the inflammatory images of tumorous rats.”</div><div>
</div><div>The same writers further implied that the Séralini study was “fraudulent”, that the researchers failed to analyse the data objectively, and that the treatment of the experimental animals was inhumane.</div><div>
</div><div>This is not the first time Christou has attacked scientific findings that have raised doubts about GM crops.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In 2001 Ignacio Chapela and David Quist of the University of California, Berkeley, reported in the journal Nature that indigenous Mexican maize varieties had become contaminated with GM genes (Quist and Chapela, 2001). This issue was, and remains, highly controversial since Mexico is the genetic centre of origin for maize. In an exact parallel with the Séralini study, an internet campaign was waged against Chapela and Quist demanding that the journal retract the study. </span>Then Christou, just as he was later to do with the Séralini study, attacked Chapela and Quist’s paper in an article in Transgenic Research. The title said it all: “No credible scientific evidence is presented to support claims that transgenic DNA was introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico” (Christou, 2002).</div><div>
</div><div>Responding to the campaign, Nature editor Philip Campbell asked Chapela and Quist for more data, which they provided, and arranged another round of peer review. Only one reviewer in the final group of three supported retraction, and no one had presented any data or analysis that contradicted Chapela and Quist’s main finding. Nevertheless, Nature asserted, “The evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Some subsequent investigations, testing different samples, reported finding GM genes in native landraces of Mexican corn (Pineyro-Nelson et al. 2009), while others did not (Ortiz-Garcia et al. 2005).</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Paul Christou, in contrast, probably did not have much trouble getting either of his critiques published in Transgenic Research. He is the journal’s editor-in-chief. And, like Goodman, Christou is connected to Monsanto. Monsanto bought the GM seed company Agracetus (Christou’s former employer) and Monsanto now holds patents for the production of GM crops on which Christou is named as the inventor.</span> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> It is normal practice to declare inventor status on patents as a competing interest in scientific articles, but<b> Christou did not disclose either conflict of interest </b>– his editorship of the journal or his patent inventor status – in his critique of the Séralini study.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The Ermakova affair: Preemptive editing of the scientific record</div><div>
</div><div>Not only can journal editors prevent the publication of research showing problems with GM crops in their own journals – they can effectively prevent publication elsewhere. In 2007, the leading academic journal Nature Biotechnology featured an extraordinary attack on the work of Russian scientist, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Irina Ermakova (Marshall, 2007). Her laboratory research had found decreased weight gain, increased mortality, and decreased fertility in rats fed GM Roundup-tolerant soy over several generations</span> (Ermakova, 2006; Ermakova, 2009).</div><div>
</div><div>The editor of Nature Biotechnology, Andrew Marshall, contacted Ermakova, inviting her to answer questions about her findings, which she had only presented at conferences. He told her it was “an opportunity to present your own findings and conclusions in your own words, rather than a critique from one side”. Ermakova agreed.</div><div>
</div><div>The process that followed was as deceptive as it was irregular. The editor sent Ermakova a set of questions about her research, which she answered. In due course she was sent a proof of what she thought was to be ‘her’ article, with her byline as author.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">However, the article that was finally published was very different. Ermakova’s byline had been removed and Marshall’s substituted. Each of Ermakova’s answers to the questions was followed by a lengthy critique by four pro-GM scientists (Marshall, 2007). The proof sent to Ermakova, now revealed as a ‘dummy proof’, had not included these critical comments. Consequently, she was denied the chance to address them in the same issue of the journal. And in the final article the editor had preserved the critics’ references but removed many of Ermakova’s, with the effect that her statements appeared unsubstantiated.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Nature Biotechnology’s treatment of Ermakova attracted condemnation from many scientists. It was also strongly criticized in some media outlets. Harvey Marcovitch, former editor of a scientific journal and now director of the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which sets ethical standards for academic journals, commented, “This is a type of publication which I have never encountered.”</span> He said that while reading it he was struck by “some surprising things”. He was unwilling to speculate as to what exactly happened: “Either the editor was trying out a new form of experimentation, in which not everything went according to plan, or there was indeed a conspiracy or whatever one wants to call it.”</div><div>
</div><div>Dr Brian John of the Wales-based campaign group GM-Free Cymru was more blunt, calling the process<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> “tabloid academic publishing involving deception, lies, duplicity and editorial malpractice”.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Amid the uproar, editor Marshall released his email correspondence with Ermakova on the internet. It showed that far from his having “solicited” the comments from the critics, as he had originally claimed, the four pro-GM scientists had themselves approached the journal proposing their “critique”,</span> and even though none of them are toxicologists, Marshall had agreed. The self-selected critics judged Ermakova’s research – which they had never even seen in its complete form – “demonstrably flawed”.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Nature Biotechnology also failed to fully disclose the conflicts of interest of Ermakova’s critics.<b> Bruce Chassy</b> was lead author on two influential ILSI publications, which defined weak risk assessment methodologies for GM crops that were later inserted into the guidelines of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). <b> Vivian Moses</b> was chairman of CropGen, a GM industry lobby group with Monsanto among its funders.<b> L. Val Giddings,</b> an industry consultant, was described in the article as formerly of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Nature Biotechnology omitted to say that Giddings occupied a senior position at BIO – vice president for food and agriculture – and that BIO’s funders include the GM crop companies, Monsanto, Dow and DuPont. The last of the four critics, <b>Alan McHughen,</b> developed a GM flax called Triffid that in 2009 was found to have contaminated flax supplies coming into Europe from Canada. If these interests had been disclosed, readers might have judged the criticism of Ermakova differently.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Open source scientific publishing?</div><div>These examples show that the threat to scientific publishing from industry influence is real. The avenues for researchers to publish critical views in science are already few. This is especially true for the high-impact journals that the media notices and that therefore influence public discourse. Equally problematic is that few scientific institutions will support researchers whose findings contradict industry viewpoints, as<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Chapela found out when <b>UC Berkeley tried to deny him tenure</b> following the controversial maize study. </span>Even fewer funding sources will give to such researchers. Consequently almost all funding of biosafety research finds its way into the hands of researchers with industry ties.</div><div>
</div><div>This directly affects the quality of the science produced. A recent literature review found that most studies concluding that GM foods are as safe as non-GM counterparts were performed by the developer companies or their associates (Domingo and Bordonaba, 2011). It is no coincidence that Norway, a country without an agricultural industry lobby, hosts the only publicly funded institute in the world with a mission to conduct research on the environmental, health and social consequences of genetic engineering.</div><div>
</div><div>There are in principle ways within the existing system to mitigate or neutralize the influence of industry on the ability of scientists to publish independent and critical research. The first is transparency in publishing. Journal editors should adopt the COPE guidelines and publish all conflicts of interest among staff and editors.</div><div>
</div><div>Also in line with COPE’s stipulation, peer reviewers should be selected to avoid conflicts of interest. If this proves impossible due to the spread of patents and industry research funding, then care must be taken to select a balanced panel representing a plurality of views. FCT is a member of COPE, but does not publish information on editors’ conflicts of interest, and its appointment of Goodman over Domingo shows that it does not seek to avoid them.</div><div>
</div><div>There may in fact be a need to critically examine the entire concept of peer review. The limitations of all types of expert opinion – whether that of an individual expert or of an expert panel – are recognized in the field of evidence-based medicine. To address this problem, bodies such as the non-profit Cochrane Collaboration have developed systematic and transparent methodologies to review and evaluate data on the effectiveness of different medical interventions. The aim is to enable healthcare practitioners to make well-informed clinical decisions. The reviewing criteria are transparently set out in advance, so there is less scope for bias in evaluations of studies. When disagreements do occur, it is easy to pinpoint the reason and resolve the problem. Cochrane also implements rules to prevent conflicts of interest among its reviewers and editorial board.</div><div>
</div><div>The Cochrane approach is widely respected and the lessons learned in evidence-based medicine about conflicts of interest and resisting industry pressure are being applied to other fields, such as hazardous environmental exposures (Woodruff et al., 2011). There is no reason why scientific journals, including those publishing GMO research, cannot use similar methods to evaluate papers, so that less discretion is given to experts with conflicts of interest.</div><div>
</div><div>Implementing such policies presumes strong support among the scientific community for independent science. But this support may not exist outside of medical research.</div><div>
</div><div>FCT took on Goodman, a former Monsanto employee and well-known supporter of industry viewpoints, immediately following the publication of a controversial paper that was critical of Monsanto’s principal products. In doing so, FCT senior management bypassed the normal scientific editorial culture of gradual promotion from within.</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, two other prominent academic journals have served as platforms for their editors to generate unsubstantiated and unscientific abuse without any repercussions for their editorial positions. Marshall remains editor of Nature Biotechnology. The fact that journal editors get away with such behavior suggests that support for independent research among scientists is generally lacking and that accountability within the scientific publishing world barely exists.</div><div>
</div><div>It seems unlikely that scientific journals will address unaided the defects in scientific publishing at FCT and elsewhere. To do so would require confronting the fundamental problem that academic science now largely makes its money from exploiting conflicts of interest. This has become the underlying business model of science. Universities offer ‘independent’ advice to governments while taking corporate money for ‘research’. Corporations offer that money to universities, not for the knowledge it generates, but primarily for the influence it buys.</div><div>
</div><div>These same incentives are reinforced at the personal level as well. Individual scientists occupy taxpayer-funded academic positions while benefitting from patents, stocks and industry consultancies. If journals and government agencies took action to eliminate conflicts of interest, the corporate money for science would dry up, because industry-funded scientists would lose influence.</div><div>
</div><div>But if scientific journals do not find a way to level the playing field for critical studies, the few scientists who are still able to carry out independent public interest research may need to find an alternative publishing model: public peer review, or ‘open-source science’. Such online collaborative approaches could even revitalize scientific publishing.</div><div>
</div><div>Unless radical reform is achieved, peer-reviewed publication, which many hold to be the defining characteristic of science, will have undergone a remarkable inversion. From its origin as a safeguard of quality and independence, it will have become a tool through which one vision, that of corporate science, came to assert ultimate control. Richard Goodman, FCT’s new Associate Editor for biotechnology, now has the opportunity to throw down the stairs only those papers marked “industry approved”.</div><div>
</div><div>Note: Click here to see a response from scientists to the attacks on Séralini</div><div>
</div><div>Postcript: FCT has now retracted (Nov 28 2013) the Séralini study. The editors’ letter is at the bottom of this link.</div><div>
</div><div>Post-postscript (Feb 25 2015):<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Food and Chemical Toxicology has expelled Richard Goodman and demoted Wallace Hayes, apparently because of numerous complaints.</span></div><div>
</div><div>References</div><div>
</div><div>Arjo G, et al. (2013). Plurality of opinion, scientific discourse and pseudoscience: an in depth analysis of the Séralini et al. study claiming that Roundup Ready corn or the herbicide Roundup cause cancer in rats. Transgenic Research 22: 2 255-267</div><div>
</div><div>Christou P (2002). No credible scientific evidence is presented to support claims that transgenic DNA was introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Transgenic Research 11: iii–v</div><div>
</div><div>Domingo JL (2007). Toxicity studies of genetically modified plants: a review of the published literature. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr 47(8): 721-733</div><div>
</div><div>Domingo JL and JG Bordonaba (2011). A literature review on the safety assessment of genetically modified plants. Environ Int 37: 734–742.</div><div>
</div><div>Ermakova I (2006). Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies. Ecosinform. 2006;1:4–9.</div><div>
</div><div>Ermakova I (2009). [Influence of soy with gene EPSPS CP4 on the physiological state and reproductive function of rats in the first two generations] [Russian text]. Contemporary Problems in Science and Education 5:15–20.</div><div>
</div><div>Marshall A (2007). GM soybeans and health safety – a controversy reexamined. Nat Biotechnol 25: 981–987.</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz-Garcia S, et al. (2005). Absence of detectable transgenes in local landraces of maize in Oaxaca, Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102: 18242.</div><div>
</div><div>Pineyro-Nelson A, et al. (2009). Transgenes in Mexican maize: molecular evidence and methodological considerations for GMO detection in landrace populations. Mol Ecol 18(4): 750-761.</div><div>
</div><div>Quist D and IH Chapela (2001). Transgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nature 414(6863): 541-543.</div><div>
</div><div>Robinson, C, et al. (2013). Conflicts of interest at the European Food Safety Authority erode public confidence. J Epidemiol Community Health.doi:10.1136/jech-2012-202185.</div><div>
</div><div>Séralini GE, et al. (2012). Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize. Food and Chemical Toxicology 50(11): 4221-4231.</div><div>
</div><div>Woodruff TJ, et al. (2011). An evidence-based medicine methodology to bridge the gap between clinical and environmental health sciences. Health Aff (Millwood) 30(5): 931-937.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/print/food/i-used-work-scientist-gmos-now-im-having-serious-second-thoughts-about-risks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>