From: Arpad Pusztai
To: DAWN ONE
Subject: Re: article
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:14:02 +0000
Dear Linda Dawn Hammond,
Thanks for your e-mail and the attached web pages. I think you made a very good job of your GMO article. Hopefully, many people will read it and learn from it. I have two comments to make.
The first one is trivial. The two internal reports concerning our work have now been taken off the Rowett's website. Your comments imply that they are still there. Incidentally, the Rowett put these confidential internal reports on their homepage against my expressed wishes.
The second refers to your text concerning your remark that may be some of the findings of differences can be explained by differences in the diet, i.e. that control diets were somewhat compositionally different from the GM-diets. This would have been a mortal sin to commit for a nutritionist. All our test diets in all four experiments were iso-proteinic and iso-energetic with all control diets. See for example our paper in The Lancet and my previous thirty odd papers published in top nutritional journals. What you refer to is a difference in the protein content between one of our GM-potato lines (line 74) and its appropriate parent line because line 74 contained 20% less protein. However, in the two experiments (D237 and D242) in which this GM-line was used the protein deficit was compensated for by including the same (in fact more) amount of a nutritionally high-quality protein. In the other two experiments, D227 and D249, because the protein content of GM-line 71 and its appropriate parent line was the same, there was no need for such a compensation. I am afraid, whatever has been said about our experiments we did our job properly and according to the fundamentals of nutrition science. Thus, our conclusions that the differences which we found in composition, rat growth, organ development and nutritional responses were clearly and unequivocally due to the genetic modification including expression of the GNA gene, the gene transfer process methodology (construct, vector, virus promoter, etc) and/or disturbances in the potato genome. The industry clearly have drawn the same conclusion that in fact explains the vehemence of their personal attacks on me.
I have a home page that you may want to consult:
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai
I shall also attach two articles for your delectation: one was in the December issue of "The World & I", a Washington Times Corp. magazine and the other is in the February issue of Laboratory News.
Keep up your interest. We need more people to feel concerned about this GMO
business
Best regards
Arpad Pusztai
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