The cornerstone of science is full and truthful reporting but the British Food Journal's "Award for Excellence for Most Outstanding Paper" in 2004 went to research where critically important information was deliberately excluded and where the journal's reviewers and editors failed in their duty of critical scrutiny.
In a special report, GM Watch reveals that what the reviewers mistook for an impressive piece of scientific enquiry was actually a carefully crafted propaganda exercise that could only have one outcome. Both the award and the paper now need to be retracted.
For links to GM Watch's full report and a photo of one of the signs the researchers used to bias consumer responses, and whose emotive wording they failed to mention, go to:
http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=72&page=1
Here's a summary:
In late 1999 a Greenpeace news conference outside a Loblaws grocery store in downtown Toronto was disrupted by a group of GM supporters.
"The food is safe," shouted Jeff Wilson, who farms northwest of Toronto.
He'd come to the store with the head of a lobby group that supports GM foods, and Doug Powell, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph.
And they'd come prepared. Holding aloft a bug-ravaged cabbage, Wilson demanded, "Would you buy that?" Wilson claimed the cabbage could have been saved by genetic engineering. Doug Powell ended up in a shouting match with a shopper.
A year later and Powell and Wilson's street theatrics had given way to a much more carefully choreographed exercise in persuading people that GM foods were what they wanted
The scene this time was not Loblaws but Jeff Wilson's farm store. Here Powell and Wilson were running an experiment that had been conceived following the Loblaws encounter.
During summer 2000 Wilson grew both GM and conventional sweet corn on his farm. And following the first harvest, both types of corn were put on sale amidst much publicity. The aim was to see which type would appeal most to Wilson's customers.
According to an award winning paper published in the British Food Journal, a sizeable majority opted for the GM corn. In the paper, authored by Wilson and Powell, and Powell's two research assistants - Katija Blaine and Shane Morris, the choice appears simple - the bins were "fully labeled" - either "genetically engineered Bt sweet corn" or "Regular sweet-corn". The only other written information mentioned in the paper that might have influenced the preference of customers was lists of the chemicals used on each type of corn, and pamphlets "with background information on the project."
What Powell and his co-authors failed to report was that they had used a variation on the bug-eaten cabbage stunt. The sign above the non-GM corn bin in Wilson'd store asked, "Would You Eat Wormy Sweet Corn?" Above the the Bt-corn bin, the sign referred to "Quality Sweet Corn"!
Toronto Star reporter Stuart Laidlaw, who visited Wilson's farm several times during the research, says, "It is the only time I have seen a store label its own corn 'wormy'." In his book Secret Ingredients, Laidlaw includes a photograph of the "wormy" corn sign, and notes that with those labels "it was hardly surprising which sold more."
Laidlaw also notes that any mention of the corn being labelled as "wormy" or "quality" was omitted in presentations and writings about the experiment.
This is certainly the case with the paper in the British Food Journal. Yet the paper describes in significant detail the care that the researchers took to avoid biasing consumer choice!
Laidlaw also details other instances of flagrant bias that were never mentioned in the published paper.
Whether reviewers and editors will continue to collude with the researchers'
deceit remains to be seen. Either way, important questions need to be posed about a culture of science and academia that allows scientists who raise questions about GM, and other corporate interests, to suffer a barrage of criticism and abuse, and even terminal damage to their careers; while those whose opinions and findings support GM are validated and affirmed, regardless of whether their claims stand up to critical scrutiny.
This is the context in which corporate propaganda came to be rewarded as exemplary science.
FOR THE FULL EXTRAORDINARY STORY AND A POINT-BY-POINT REBUTTAL OF THE ORWELLIAN EFFORT TO COVER UP WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, GO TO:
http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=72&page=1