-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.independent.co.uk/sindy/stories/A0310901.html {{<Begin article>}} Expert on GM danger vindicated By Geoffrey Lean The scientist who suggested that genetically modified foods could damage health - and was comprehensively rubbished by Government ministers and the scientic establishment as a result - is to have his reputation dramatically vindicated.. Britain's top medical journal, The Lancet is shortly to publish Arpad Puzstai's research showing changes in the guts of rats fed with GM potatoes. This will reignite fears that eating GM foods may endanger human health. The Government has sought to discredit Dr Puzstai's work on the grounds that it has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Other scientists have made similar claims and attacked it as "flawed" and unpublishable. Publication of the article will encourage other scientists to try to repeat the experiments, kickstarting further scientific investigation into whether GM foods pose a threat to health or not. Galley proofs of the article have already been sent to Dr Puzstai, and his co- author Dr Stanley Ewen, SeniorLecturer in Pathology at Aberdeen University. Late last week David McNamee, the journal's Executive Editor, said that it will be published "soon." The research is important because few papers have so far been published on the health effects of GM foods, despite the rapidity with which they spread onto supermarket shelves. Indeed Dr Puzstai - who was travelling in eu rope last week and unable to comment on the news - began his experiments becuise he could find only one previous peer-reviewed study, led by a scientist from Monsanto, the GM food giant, which had found no ill-effects. He started three years research - funded by the Scottish Office to the tune of £1.6 million - at Aberdeen's Rowett Research Institute as a self-confessed "very enthusiastic supporter" of GM technology, who fully expected his experiments to give it "a clean bill of health." The 68 year-old scientist, who has published 270 sceintific papers and is acknowledged as the leading authority in his field, fed rats on three strains of genetically engineered potatoes and one ordinary one. In his first full interview, after being gagged by his institute, he told the Independent on Sunday last March; " I was absolutely confident I wouldn't find anything. But the longer I spent on the experiments, the more uneasy I becam e." His findings sparked public concern, and ignited a furious row about GM foods, after he briefly mentioned them, with the Institute's permission, on a television programme last year. They contradicted repaeted assurances f rom the Prime Minister down, that GM food is safe, and undermined the assumption behind the regulation of genetically altered crops that there is no substantial difference between them and their conventional equivalents. Despite his eminence, Dr Puztai - who came to Britain after the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian rising beacuse of the country's "tolerance" - underwent one of the most extraodinary treatments ever meeted out to a reputa ble scientist. He was suspended from his work on the experiments, his computers were sealed, his data confiscated and he found himself "sent to Coventry" by his colleagues. He was forced into retirement and forbidden to talk about his w ork. He came under comprehensive attack from ministers and the scientific establishment. Sir Robert May, the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, accused him of violating "every canon of scientific rectitude". The Royal Soci ety claimed that his work was "flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis" and said that "no conclusions could be drawn from it." And Professor Tom Sanders, of Kings College, London. said that none of the major scientific journals would publish the research. Ministers enthusiastically joined in. Cabinet enforcer Dr Jack Cunningham, who is in charge of the Government's GM strategy, said Dr Pusztai's work had been "comprehensively discredited" , and top Downing Street advisers consistently stressed it should be disregarded because it had not been published in a peer- reviewed journal. Dr Pusztai retorted that he was eager to publish, and pointed out that the scientific criticism was based on incomplete information that he had put on the internet at the Institute's request, while being denied full access to his data, which was only released to him this spring. {{<End article>}} >From http://www.independent.co.uk/sindy/stories/B0310902.html {{<Begin article>}} Kinnock to speak through a French mouthpiece By Stephen Castle DERIDED in the Paris press and harangued by Gallic journalists, Neil Kinnock has moved to calm fears of a British takeover in Brussels by employing a French media spokesman. The appointment, expected early this week, is the latest development in a row which blew up with spectacular venom as British officials became prime beneficiaries of sweeping reforms of the European Commission. Last week Paris lost the top administrative job in European agriculture for the first time in more than 40 years, a decision which is said to have provoked private protests from the French president, Jacques Chirac. The outraged French daily Liberation railed at the "galloping Anglophilia" of the new European Commission president, Romano Prodi, and whined that the Commission was fast becoming "an annexe of the Foreign Office". Cast in the role of stage villain is Mr Kinnock, vice president in charge of reform and architect of the plan to reshuffle the top bureaucratic jobs in Brussels which, by convention, have been determined by nationality. Worse, while the two French Commissioners have chosen Britons as deputy heads of their private offices, neither Mr Kinnock nor Chris Patten, Britain's other Commissioner, have reciprocated. As Liberation put it, Mr Kinnock, who "speaks not a word of the language of Moliere, did not decide to take a Frenchman in his team". French diplomats play down the consequences of reform for Paris, but there is no doubt a watershed has been reached. After last week's shake-up, seven of the most senior administrators in Brussels - the director generals, who can earn nearly 11,000 euros (£7,150) a month before tax - are Britons, well ahead of the UK's normal "quota" and one more than France. Not only has the French director-general of agriculture been moved sideways, but his colleague, Philippe Soubestre, is being pensioned off. The arrival of another Briton, Jonathan Faull, in the key press and communication service has also been taken as a sign of Anglophone domination. In the Commissioners' private offices, or cabinets, there are 17 Britons, as opposed to 14 Frenchmen. Britain has three chefs de cabinet and four deputies, compared with a French tally of one and two respectively. In France and some southern European capitals all this is seen as evidence of a decisive cultural and ideological shift on the part of Mr Prodi in favour of the north. Not since Roy Jenkins left Brussels in 1981 has the presidency been in non-Francophone hands, and Mr Prodi, a former Italian premier who studied at the London School of Economics, clearly feels more comfortable speaking English than French. The same can be said of his press spokesman, Ricardo Levi. Mr Prodi saw the problem coming, and checked into a language school in Perugia in August. But as a former economics lecturer his support for free markets, his record as a privatiser and his appearance at seminars on the "Third Way" with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (another is planned shortly) have struck as much of a chord in Paris as the average game of county cricket. All of which has fuelled a crisis which is part political, part cultural. The changes being ushered in by the new regime are starting to erode French privileges acquired over more than four decades and never before challenged in the history of the EU. It is, for example, no coincidence that the agriculture directorate, controlled by a Frenchman since 1958, accounts for half the EU's spending in a policy area which favours the interests of the rural French economy. Equally importantly, the reforms hurt the French in the gut. For decades the French language ruled unchallenged in Brussels; it is only within the past five years that journalists covering the EU have been allowed to ask questions in English without being shouted down. In Paris the notions of being part of the EU and running it tend to be inseparable. As one Commission source put it: "It is not simply that English is gaining ground at the expense of French, it is all those cultural connections which the English language, when spoken in Brussels, comes to represent." Wiser Anglo-Saxon heads are avoiding triumphalism, in the knowledge that France remains a central player with an unrivalled record in getting its way within the EU. That is one reason why Mr Patten, among others, is spending some of his first few weeks as a European Commissioner brushing up on those French irregular verbs. {{End article>}} A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." --Buddha + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller, German Writer (1759-1805) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." 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