Who's leading the call for transparency over the GM feeding trial?

An ipetition has been set up on behalf of "the scientific community" demanding that Professor Seralini release all the raw data from his recent GM corn study, with some signatories making comments about Prof. Seralini's study such as, "This is another example of pseudo-science that must be exposed to the world."

In fact, according to Corinne Lepage MEP, France's former Environment Minister and the President of CRIIGEN, the institute, that undertook the research, "Professor Seralini is committed to making public his raw data so that there is a real scientific debate, but only when producers of GMOs and public authorities respect the law and abandon the secrecy behind which they hide their own knowledge by making their raw data public too."
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/51-2012/14233

Monsanto has not only refused to release the raw data behind its safety studies but has even fought through the courts to try and prevent it from reaching the public domain. And this raises an interesting point. How come the sponsors of this petition haven't previously sought to make Monsanto release all its raw data "so that the scientific community can independently evaluate the results"?

And why aren't they calling for that now in tandem with their call to Seralini? After all, the Monsanto data underlies studies that the company has used to gain safety approval for GM crops that have then become part of much of the world's food supply, so its importance could hardly be more crucial.

And that raises another question about the sponsors of this demand for total scientific transparency. Who exactly are they?

The petition's signatories read like a who's who of hardline GM supporters, and many of them have been involved in the attacks on Seralini's research, but who actually set up this online petition?

Interestingly, the sponsors of the petition appear to have withheld their identity. Under "Sponsor", the petition simply says, "(No Sponsor Information)"
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dr-seralini-please-release-data

And this lack of transparency shouldn't necessarily be taken as accidental. Another petition was set up a few days ago which showed the sponsor's name: "Channa Prakash", and there  is even a photo of Prakash to go with it. And if you look at the signatures on the ipetition, you can see that the very first person to sign it was: "Name: CS Prakash".
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dr-seralini-please-release-data/signatures

So it seems probable that Prakash is the sponsor for both these petitions demanding full public transparency. 

Yet it couldn't be more ironic to have this professor of plant genetics, biotechnology and genomics at Tuskegee University leading the charge on the issue of complete transparency. 

A few years ago we awarded CS Prakash a Pants on Fire Award. The reason? His total lack of transparency. 

Here's what we had to say when we made the award:

Take Prof Prakash's AgBioWorld Foundation. Prakash presents this as a mainstream science campaign, in support of "agbiotech", that has "emerged from academic roots and values" and which eschews corporate support. The centre piece of AgBioWorld's campaign is Prakash's petition supporting the "judicious" use of genetically engineered crops in the developing world. This declaration has always been presented by Prakash as a Third World scientist's rallying point for fellow academics. But according to the annual report of the Competitive Enterpise Institute (2000), the petition formed a key part of the CEI's much wider campaign against "death by regulation"!

Recently, Prakash has been more open about the fact that Greg Conko of the CEI was a "co-founder" of his campaign. The midwifery of an organisation described by PR Watch as "a well funded corporate front", and which opposes restrictions on smoking just as vociferously as it does those on GM foods, sits a little oddly with Prakash's claims of AgBioWorld's "academic roots and values"!

Prakash also runs the AgBioView e-mailing list which has accused critics of genetic engineering, variously, of fascism, communism, imperialism, nihilism, murder, corruption, terrorism, and even genocide; not to mention being worse than Hitler and on a par with the mass murderers who destroyed the World Trade Centre.

In 2002 AgBioView worked flat out to label the biotech industry's critics as "killers of the hungry" over their criticism of USAID and its tied GM aid for Africa. Unmentioned by Prakash was the fact that he is an advisor to USAID or that his university enjoys multi-million dollar contracts with the agency. In autumn 2002 Prakash and Conko issued an AgBioWorld press release falsely implying the activities of anti-GM activists on the food aid issue had been responsible for the deaths of 10,000 people in the Indian state of Orissa. In reality, all the deaths were due to a super-cyclone.

The fakery and sleight of hand doesn't even stop there. In April 2002 the journal Nature, in an unprecedented move, disowned the research of UC Berkeley scientists, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, which had demonstrated the contamination of traditional maize landraces in a remote part of Mexico. Prakash has been quite happy to admit that AgBioWorld "played a fairly important role in putting public pressure on Nature" and has even claimed, in a fund-raising e-mail, that AgBioWorld's campaign led directly to the disavowal of the research.

Certainly the AgBioView list took the lead in promoting and coordinating the attacks on the Berkeley researchers. The inflammatory series of e-mail attacks that kicked off AgBioView's campaign came from a "Mary Murphy" and an "Andura Smetacek". These e-mails claimed Chapela was politically motivated and that his research could only be understood in the light of his collusion with "fear-mongering activists" with whom, it was insinuated, he had designed the research. And Smetacek even asked how much money Chapela was getting in "expenses" from the anti-biotech "industry".

Both "Murphy" and "Chapela" were fronts. "Mary Murphy" was run by Monsanto's PR company, Bivings, while the postings of "Andura Smetacek" have been traced back directly to Monsanto in St Louis. In all Prakash posted around 70 of their poison pen attacks on his list. And their attacks on Chapela were all placed at the top of his AgBioView bulletins.

Yet according to CS Prakash, he and AgBioWorld have absolutely no connections with any PR companies or biotech corporations. In reality, however, his connections with both are more direct than even the Murphy/Smetacek mails might suggest. An error message received while we were searching the messages in Prakash's original AgBioView archive – now closed – showed that this AgBioView database was hosted on Bivings' main apollo server. A technical audit of AgBioWorld's website showed it had all the hallmarks of having been designed by Bivings. Monsanto's front persona for circulating attacks on the internet, "Andura Smetacek", even created an online petition calling for the jailing of Jose Bove that stated it had been created by Smetacek *on behalf of Prakash's AgBioWorld* – Prakash was amongst that petition's early signatories.

A Monsanto PR "phantom" can speak on behalf of AgBioWorld because Prakash's AgBioWorld is, in reality, just one of a series of virtual shopwindows created by Monsanto and Bivings in order to influence the GM debate... He is the mannequin in Monsanto's virtual shopwindow and one who seems prepared to go anywhere and say or do almost anything to promote the interests of the US biotech industry.
http://ngin.tripod.com/pantsoftheyearaward.htm

Find out more about the man behind the call for scientific transparency: http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Channapatna_S._Prakash