There are regulations to protect food for humans but are they effective? StarLink corn was approved only for cattle because it contained an allergenic protein. It escaped from animal feed contaminating half the US maize supply and causing allergies from Canada to Japan.
In 2000, researchers from Berkeley found GM contamination in native Mexican corn as well as indications that this transgenic DNA was not stable. The significance was demonstrated by the ferocity of the biotech industry's attacks, not on the research, which had been reproduced and confirmed by the Mexican authorities, but on the researchers. Publication endangered a $50 million grant from Novartis to their university, so the researchers earned the hostility of fellow scientists.
In Britain, the first research into the health effects of GM was so badly handled that it shattered public confidence in the probity of government and its scientific advisers. The unease increased as details emerged. According to four witnesses at the Rowett Institute in Scotland, telephone calls, first from Monsanto to President Clinton, then from Clinton to Tony Blair, then from Blair to the Institute, stopped this key project. Conspiracy theory? But what else might explain subsequent events?
Dr Arpad Pusztai, one of the world's leading experts on plant lectins with 35 years of lab experience, in a project won in competition with 28 other teams, had found that the small intestine, pancreas and brain of rats fed on a GM diet developed differently from the control group. "I believe that this technology can be made to work for us," he said in a short interview on television in 1998 but "it is unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs, we have to find guinea pigs in the laboratory."
