The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

monsanto weaves its web, 1995–1999 179garian capital in 1956, he fled to Austria, where he was granted politicalrefugee status. After obtaining a degree in chemistry, he won a fellowshipfrom the Ford Foundation, allowing him to study in the country of hischoice. He chose Great Britain, which represented for him the “country offreedom and tolerance.” After earning a doctorate in biochemistry from theUniversity of London, he was hired by the prestigious Rowett Institute, consideredthe best European nutrition laboratory. He specialized in lectins,proteins naturally found in certain plants that act as insecticides and protectthe plants against aphid infestation. While some lectins are toxic, others areharmless for humans and mammals, such as the lectin from snowdropplants, to which Pusztai devoted six years of his life. His expertise was sorenowned that in 1995, the Rowett Institute offered to renew his contracteven though he had reached retirement age, so that he could take charge ofa research program financed by the Scottish Agriculture, Environment, andFisheries Ministry.This large contract, with funding of £1.6 million and employing thirty researchers,had the purpose of assessing the impact of GMOs on humanhealth. “We were all very enthusiastic,” Arpad Pusztai told me, “because atthe time, when the first transgenic soybean crop had just been planted in theUnited States, no scientific studies had been published on the subject. Theministry thought our research would provide support for GMOs as theywere about to arrive on the British and European markets. Because, ofcourse, no one thought—least of all me, a strong supporter of biotechnology—that we were going to find problems.” He was so enthusiastic that whenMonsanto’s toxicological study on Roundup Ready soybeans was publishedin the Journal of Nutrition in 1996, he thought that it was “very bad science”and that he and his team could do better. “I thought if we could show, witha scientific study worthy of the name, that GMOs were really harmless, thenwe would be heroes.”With the ministry’s agreement, the Rowett Institute decided to work ontransgenic potatoes that its researchers had already successfully developed,inserting into them the gene encoding snowdrop lectin (known as GNA).“Preliminary studies had shown that potatoes effectively resisted aphid infestation,”Pusztai told me. “We also knew that in its natural state GNA wasnot harmful to rats, even when they absorbed a dose eight hundred timesthat produced by GMOs. What remained to be done was to assess the possibleeffects of transgenic potatoes on rats.”