GMO Scientists Under Attack

“It made me very angry because I saw that the indus­try is intro­duc­ing into the soci­ety a tech­nol­ogy which is not demo­c­ra­t­i­cally dis­cussed. They just enter it and we have to react or have to live with it—but we were not asked. That was the moti­va­tion for my begin­ning to make films on GMOs.”

Over the next 10 years, Verhaag and his part­ners pro­duced nine films on GMOs, the most recent of which is enti­tled Scientists under Attack—Genetic Engineering in the Magnetic Field of Money.

The germ for this film was planted at the very end of Verhaag’s pre­vi­ous GMO doc­u­men­tary, Life Running out of Control. “The rea­son for Scientists under Attack was because in the last inter­view in Life Running out of Control, a Norwegian sci­en­tist said he believes that only 5 per­cent of the sci­en­tists who are work­ing in this area are really inde­pen­dent. The oth­ers are depen­dent on the industry—paid by industry—and indus­try is decid­ing what is to be pub­lished and when to pub­lish it. That state­ment urged me into mak­ing this film, and I set out to show sci­en­tists who were pun­ished because of their per­sonal conscience.”

The doc­u­men­tary details the sagas of two dif­fer­ent sci­en­tists, Dr. Árpád Pusztai and Dr. Ignacio Chapela, who each made impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies about the poten­tial dan­gers of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops. Both of them were then per­se­cuted by their peers and in the press, and the sig­nif­i­cant dis­cov­er­ies they had made were buried. While the film fol­lows the sto­ries of what hap­pened to them, it also high­lights their cru­cial work, which has since been dis­sem­i­nated by oth­ers, includ­ing lead­ing GMO author Jeffrey Smith.

The work and story of bio­chemist Árpád Pusztai in the United Kingdom is par­tic­u­larly poignant. For 35 years, he was one of the world’s lead­ing experts on feed­ing stud­ies (in which food is fed to lab­o­ra­tory ani­mals in order to exam­ine their reac­tions). In the late 1990s he con­ducted a study of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied pota­toes, in which a group of mice was fed a GMO vari­ety and com­pared to a con­trol group fed non-GMO pota­toes. Mice raised on the GMO vari­ety exhib­ited an alarm­ing series of symp­toms, among them organs that devel­oped dif­fer­ently. There were in fact 36 dif­fer­ences between mice fed GMO pota­toes and mice fed non-GMO potatoes.

The dis­cov­er­ies were of suf­fi­cient con­cern that Pusztai sought per­mis­sion from his direc­tor at the Rowett Research Institute to go pub­lic with his find­ings, and per­mis­sion was granted. He was inter­viewed by tele­vi­sion news, and 150 sec­onds of his inter­view were aired—but it was enough to draw national atten­tion to the prob­lem. Initially, Pusztai’s direc­tor praised him greatly, and even issued his own press release prais­ing Pusztai’s work as “world-class research.”

Two days later, how­ever, two phone calls were made from the prime minister’s office to Pusztai’s direc­tor. The fol­low­ing morn­ing he was sum­mar­ily fired, after 35 years of out­stand­ing sci­en­tific research, and threat­ened with a law­suit if he didn’t remain silent. Suddenly sto­ries appeared in news­pa­pers through­out the coun­try crit­i­ciz­ing his work and call­ing it into ques­tion. His career as a research sci­en­tist was over.

“Árpád Pusztai knew that a lot of GMO food was offered in the super­mar­kets,” Verhaag related. “He dis­cov­ered in his research that it was really doubt­ful if this food was good to eat, and he said in his inter­view that he would refuse to eat it. He said that his fel­low cit­i­zens were being used as guinea pigs for the food industry.”

It was def­i­nitely not all for naught. Pusztai’s pub­lic state­ment, albeit short, began a move­ment that even­tu­ally caused GMO foods to be boy­cotted in Britain. “What hap­pened imme­di­ately is that the super­mar­kets took all GMO foods off their shelves,” Verhaag con­tin­ued. “Then a big dis­cus­sion was started in the pub­lic, in the news­pa­pers and in the par­lia­ment. Some years later an envi­ron­men­tal min­is­ter named Michael Meacher ini­ti­ated stud­ies and research that found there was a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on birds around GMO fields. Because of this, there was a big resis­tance against GMOs, so the indus­try with­drew from England. Today, about 80 per­cent of the pub­lic refuse to eat GM food and so it is not offered.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

The film also fol­lows the career of Associate Professor Ignacio Chapela, a micro­bi­ol­o­gist with UC Berkeley, whose work was sim­i­larly stopped. Additionally, Andrew Kimbrell, attor­ney and pres­i­dent of the Center for Food Safety, gives an account of the sup­pres­sion of the ini­tial research on GMOs by gov­ern­ment agen­cies, for which he and another attor­ney filed suit against the FDA in 1998.

But the doc­u­men­tary is not just a dark story—it also shows what is now being done to counter the spread of GMOs, which of course includes this film itself. And through vehi­cles such as this, the pub­lic is being edu­cated with more com­plete infor­ma­tion about GMOs.

Verhaag him­self has become heart­ened in the last few years at the pub­lic reac­tion and out­cry against GMOs. “I think maybe two or three years ago nobody really knew about what they were eat­ing,” Verhaag said. “But from my point of view much has hap­pened in the United States and Canada in the last two years. There has been a lot of talk about GMOs, and also protests. After I fin­ished Scientists under Attack, I did an inter­view with Natural Life and after­ward we got numer­ous requests for DVDs from America, and deal­ers were demand­ing lots of 2,500. Then more and more pub­li­ca­tions like yours con­tacted me; they wanted to write about it because it was so impor­tant. Many oth­ers wanted to dis­trib­ute the DVD.

“So I really have the impres­sion that there are a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple who are con­scious of the prob­lem and want to do some­thing about it.”

Find out more about Scientists under Attack, includ­ing order­ing infor­ma­tion, at www.scientistsunderattack.com.