The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

182 the world according to monsantoThe ITV interviewer asked Pusztai: “Does the lack of tests of GMOsworry you?”“Yes,” he replied without hesitation.“Would you eat transgenic potatoes?”“No. And as a scientist actively working in the field, I find it’s very unfairto use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”At first, the directors of the Rowett Institute saw nothing to criticize inthe sentence repeatedly aired in promotional spots for World in Actionon August 9, 1998. The next day, the Institute was flooded with interviewrequests, and Professor James was only too pleased to praise a study thatbrought such publicity. The night of the broadcast, August 10, the directorcould not keep himself from calling Pusztai to congratulate him for his performanceon television: “He was very enthusiastic,” Pusztai recalled. “Then,suddenly, everything changed.”On August 12, while a mob of reporters was waiting outside his house,Pusztai was summoned to a meeting where Philip James, accompanied by alawyer, told him that his contract had been suspended, he would be dismissed,and the research team would be dissolved. The computers and documentsconnected to the study were confiscated and the telephone linescut. Pusztai was put under a gag order under threat of prosecution. Thenbegan an appalling disinformation campaign designed to sully his reputationand, by the same token, the validity of his warning. In several interviews,James claimed that Pusztai had made a mistake and, contrary to what he believed,had used not snowdrop lectin but another lectin called concanavalinA (con A), derived from a South American bean and known to be toxic.In other words, the effects observed in the rats were due not to geneticmanipulation but to con A, a “naturally occurring poison,” as Dr. Colin Merritt,British spokesman for Monsanto, hastened to point out. 2 “Instead of rodentsfed with genetically altered potatoes, Dr. Pusztai had used the resultsof tests carried out on rats treated with poison,” according to the ScottishDaily Record. 3 “If you mix cyanide with vermouth in a cocktail and find thatis not good for you, I don’t draw sweeping conclusions that you should banall mixed drinks,” was the ironic comment of Sir Robert May, a governmentscience advisor. 4 In France, Le Monde picked up this “news,” which was especiallystrange because it involved the world’s greatest specialist on lectin:“Dr. Pusztai confused data from a line of transgenic potatoes, the study ofwhich had barely begun, and other data from experiments consisting of