URGENT APPEAL FROM GM WATCH
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Dr Arpad Pusztai was asked by GM Watch editor, Jonathan Matthews, if he would comment on a recent piece published on AgBioView by Dr Christopher Preston of the University of Adelaide, looking at the lack of peer-reviewed publications on the safety of GM foods.

Preston's piece also made reference to the New Zealand Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons, who he implied was in the business of circulating propaganda rather than having due regard to the science. However, Dr Pusztai finds that on examination Preston's own comments hardly bear examination.

Dr Pusztai also takes particular issue with how Preston presents the findings of the research on rats fed the controversial MON 863 (genetically engineered) corn. He comments, "I am sure Dr Preston must have read a different submission on MON 863 to the one that I (officially) read", and he quotes from the submission to show it says the exact opposite to what Dr Preston claims.
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Dear Jonathan,

No, I have not seen this piece by Dr. Christopher Preston of the University of Adelaide before. Perhaps, it is just as well, because it depressed me quite a bit.

You may call me naive but I always thought that scientists were a breed apart and that they did not get carried away with ideologies but that what they saw was what was actually there rather than what they would like to see. I can only hope that as a Senior Lecturer in Weed Management, Dr Preston is more objective when he teaches his students.

I'll explain why I found Chris Preston's piece so depressing by interposing into his comments the reasons I have a problem with his attitude to science.

PRESTON: I am sure others will have their 2 cents worth on this as well. The discussion of the lack of peer-reviewed publications on the safety of GM foods is an interesting one. It originated with a letter to Science in 2000 by Jose Domingo (Science 288: 1748-1749), where on searching Medline he could only find 8 experimental studies on safety of GM foods. Since then others, have published their own analyses. Ian Pryme and Rolf Lembcke published one in 2003 in Nutrition and Health (Nutrition and Health 17, 1-8) that reported 10 peer reviewed studies.

I had a bit of trouble sourcing a copy of this review as Nutrition and Health is not indexed by Current Contents, but I found the abstract on Medline and the full paper from the Soil Association. This latter study has been widely reported by Greenpeace who have taken the added precaution of excluding any studies that have been performed by industry scientists or supported in any way by industry. This is a sure-fire way to keep the number of reported studies small.

COMMENT: I have to point out that in the Pryme and Lembcke paper the list of GM papers they have reviewed was restricted only to those which actually dealt with nutritional feeding studies. They included all such studies regardless of whether they had been performed by industry scientists or by researchers supported in some other way by industry. What Greenpeace may have done or may not have done has nothing to do with Pryme and Lembcke. It is disingenuous, therefore, to imply that these authors may have had an anti-industry bias just "to keep the number of reported studies small". They showed no such bias. The reality is that the number of such peer reviewed published studies is genuinely very small.

PRESTON: However, this analysis does not take into account any recognition of how science works. It also conveniently ignores the large number of studies submitted for regulatory approval under the polite fiction that these are not "peer reviewed". They are reviewed by scientists employed by or contracted to the regulatory agencies. On the other hand, Jeannette (and others like her) will be quite happy to cite a large number of "studies" that are published on the internet by anti-GM activists with no peer review, such as the Terje Traavik study on allergies to Bt in the Philippines.

COMMENT: This paragraph is obviously written for non-scientists because, hopefully, practising scientists do not need to be told "how science works". But, in reality, this is not a description of how science works but a bit of PR on behalf of the biotech people.

I am sure, Chris Preston knows all too well that the submissions made by the biotech industry are mostly confidential and therefore cannot be regarded as scientific publications regardless of whether he regards them as "peer-reviewed" or not. He is senior enough that I should not need to lecture him on what is the purpose of publishing scientific papers. Indeed, he has himself amassed some 60 such papers during his career. He cannot, therefore, fail to be aware that confidential and non-retrievable works are absolutely useless for the general scientific community.

It is also disingenuous to refer to what kind of papers Jeanette (or others like her) may cite. Jeanette, to the best of my knowledge, is not a scientist and as such she has the perfect right to quote anything published on the Internet or elsewhere and, of course, we as scientists also have a perfect right to ignore it. This intermingling of references to politicians, etc. with references to the evidence presented by scientists such as Domingo or Pryme and Lembcke, just reinforces my gut feeling that what Chris Preston is engaged in is a PR operation on behalf of the biotech industry, which is funny in view of the first sentence of his next paragraph.

PRESTON: As a practicing (sic!) scientist, I deal with all ends of the peer review exercise. In my career I have published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers. I typically review about a dozen manuscripts a year and act as an associate editor for a journal. I can tell you that it is difficult to get negative results published. I have published only one paper that reported negative results and that was a close run thing. The only reason it was published was because it addressed failings in an hypothesis being widely expressed at the time. One reviewer of the manuscript did recommend against publication on the basis that my studies showed no differences between treatments. I have lots of other negative results, but they all live in the bottom of my filing cabinet. As a reviewer, I am often asked by Journals about the novelty of the work and I am afraid negative results just don't cut the mustard as novel.

COMMENT: I am sad to hear that lots of negative results live in the bottom of Dr Preston's filing cabinet and yet there is something curiously familiar about this argument about the difficulties of publishing negative results. It is an argument I seem to have heard advanced before in defence of the lack of published evidence of safety in the GM field and I am not sure we should buy into it.

Dr Preston himself puts his finger on one problem with this argument when he refers to the fact that his only paper with negative findings that met with success was published precisely "because it addressed failings in an (sic) hypothesis being widely expressed at the time". So here could be the recipe for more success. I suggest if he does experimental work on the safety of GM he may well find quite a few problems. If he addresses these, he may find very definite failings in the hypothesis that there is nothing wrong with the safety of GM crops/foods. As there are still only about a dozen and a half published papers on the effects of GM foods in the peer-reviewed literature (including the papers published by industry scientists), there is a great opportunity opening to him and others to explore what these possible failings may be and to knock down this sacred cow of a hypothesis that GM foods are safe. Meanwhile, and just to whet his appetite, he may read our review on GM safety based on all the published papers in this field (up till end of 2002; the next instalment is coming in 2005) in a book: "Food Safety: Contaminants and Toxins, ed. By JPF D’Mello published in 2003 by CAB International Publishing (Wallingford, Oxon, UK; ISBN 0-85199-60
7-8 pp. 347-372.

There are two other important points to consider in connection with this statement about negative results. The first is the implied suggestion that GM risk assessment studies almost by definition will lead to negative results, i.e. that the GM and non-GM lines will be found to be indistinguishable, i.e. substantially equivalent. And of course, according to the basic tenets of biotechnology, this is an indisputable fact. I do not want to point out again how basically unscientific it is in research to prejudge an issue, particularly if it is so important an issue as the GM debate.

The other point is that the science behind most of the biotech submissions (and I have seen most in my time) is that the research behind them frequently is quite static and based on rather crude analytical or nutritional comparisons. May I suggest that the results of more dynamic studies into the genomic changes and the physiological, immunological, hormonal, etc., consequences resulting from genetic modification, will be quite a surprise to all those who feel discouraged that they will only obtain negative results which will then be unpublishable.

PRESTON: A secondary issue is corporate funding of such research. I am afraid this is a reality of the World. At my University in Australia, if I don't get outside support for work, it just doesn't get done. So it would be impossible for me to set up a study to examine the safety of GM crops unless somebody was going to fund it. The reality of granting agencies is they would largely see such a study as being outside their terms of reference, unless there was a perceived market failure - that is it was a question not being addressed by industry. However, given the recent furore over GM crops, such attitudes may have softened. Any grant application would also suffer from the perception that the results would be unsurprising (i.e. negative).

COMMENT: I think I have already dealt with Dr Preston's prejudiced assertion of the predictability of negative results, but it is worth commenting on his remark about the difficulties of obtaining grants without a major industrial involvement. This situation is, of course, not very surprising because since Mrs Thatcher "reformed" science and its funding in the UK (and most countries' politicians happily followed her example) most of the granting agencies are led and staffed by industry scientists. Perhaps, we the public and other scientists ought to have put more pressure on our politicians to restore the situation that used to be the norm in research: i.e. to re-establish the principle that the main purpose of science is to find out more about the world and ourselves and not just one of doing applied science to serve the interests of the corporations. However, even in the present day with a little bit of persistence and a lot of great ideas it is possible to get modest funding for fundamental studies even if their results cannot be rendered profitable immediately.

PRESTON: As to the two specific points you raised, there has been a lot of discussion among the anti-GM brigade about the safety of Corn MON 863. I
don't know who started it, but it is based on an interpretation of a difference in white blood cell, lymphocyte and basophil counts in male, but not female, rats fed the MON 863 corn. The changes were not considered biologically significant because they fell within the range of the standard deviation of the control group. The European Food Safety Authority recently released a press release on MON 863: (http://www.efsa.eu.int/press_room/press_release/669pr_gmo03_statement_mon863_en1.pdf).

COMMENT: This is again remarkable. I am sure Dr Preston must have read a different submission on MON 863 to the one that I (officially) read. Here are the facts taken from the submission (with no additions or subtractions other than for the purpose of emphasis):

MALES:

There are significant differences in WBC, lymphocyte counts, basophil counts and APPT between rats on 33% GM maize diet vs. control

There are also SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in RBC, haemoglobin, haematocrit (not fully), MCHC, WBC, reticulocytes, lymphocytes, basophils BETWEEN RATS on GM MAIZE DIET vs. REF controls (!!!)

FEMALES:

RBC, haemoglobin, reticulocytes (at both weeks 5 and 14), basophil counts were significantly different in GM maize-fed rats vs control.

MCHC, reticulocytes, basophil counts, prothrombin time and APPT in GM maize-fed rats were ALL SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT FROM THOSE in REF CONTROLS (!!!)

How the EFSA and Dr Preston managed to misread the content of the Tables in the submission is beyond me. Surely it couldn't be that what these people often accuse the "greens" of also applies to them, i.e. that they are driven by ideology and not the facts of the case?

With my best wishes

Arpad

PS I have nothing against your circulating this.