I confess that I picked up this book with a certain jadedness: after working with breaking GM news for several years, I didn't think there was much more that a book could tell me that my non-scientist's brain could also make sense of. How wrong I was.
Jeffrey Smith, who used to work for a GM testing company, has written the story of the GM foods scam in an account that is as compelling as it is lucid. Once I'd started it, I couldn't put it down. Smith has an extraordinary gift for writing about this complex and highly technical subject in prose that romps along as effortlessly as a railway station novelette -- but without compromising one iota of journalistic integrity or scientific rigour.
Among the glowing commendations of the book is one by Arpad Pusztai that pays tribute to Smith's presentation of the science: "A particular strength of the book -- and this will be hated by the pro-GM lobby -- is that it uses a very colourful but easily understandable language to describe what is usually described as 'high' science. My greatest compliment is that even though I am a scientist I got some special insights into the workings of the recombinant DNA technology from Jeffrey Smith's enjoyable presentation."
I found the book most enlightening in its revelation of the full stories behind the headlines of all the great GM frauds and disasters. If, like me before reading this book, you only know what happened in the Starlink episode from news reports, you don't know the half of it. I knew that consumers alleged that they had suffered allergic reactions to corn products that were found to contain GM Starlink corn, which was not approved for human consumption but which had got into the food chain. I knew that US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did some tests and then announced that Starlink was NOT the cause of the allergies. I knew that Val Giddings of the industry group BIO had been widely quoted in the media as saying the results meant that the case was "slam-dunk closed". Recently, in the wake of reports that three years after Starlink was pulled from the market it is still turning up in corn, Giddings has once more been wheeled out to mouth the industry line. "[Starlink has] been a non-trivial black eye, a self-inflicted wound we didn't need," said Giddings. But "not only don't we have dead bodies, we don't have headaches or a single sniffle."
On the basis of their record of truth-telling I didn't believe Giddings or the FDA tests, but I couldn't have argued my case because I lacked the details. Smith gives us those details: the bits that didn't appear in the news reports. And as ever, the truth makes sense in a way that the mixture of half-truths and spin that reach the media does not. Baroness Greenfield complains that the public is confused about GM, but she fails to address the fact that much information about GM comes from industry, that industry lies, and that lies are always confusing. They are designed to be.
Smith tells us that five weeks after FDA's declaration of safety, scientific advisors to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- including leading food allergists -- released a thorough critique of the FDA's allergy tests and other aspects of the investigation. EPA concluded that "The test, as conducted, does not eliminate StarLink Cry9C [the new protein in the GM plant] as a potential cause of allergic symptoms". One of the major flaws EPA identified in the allergy test was that FDA asked Aventis, the makers of Starlink, to provide the Cry9C. No independent verification of the protein was obtained. In fact, Aventis did give FDA a sample of Cry9C protein, but it wasn't taken from Starlink but from E. coli bacteria. Proteins express differently in different species. Smith points out, "they can have different added molecules (hitch-hikers), for example, or be folded differently". Even FDA admits that this substitution could invalidate the test's results. More importantly, Cry9C created from Starlink has an added sugar chain, a hitch-hiker, which as EPA said, "is well known to enhance allergenicity of a protein".
Back in 1997, EPA had asked Aventis to determine the composition of the sugar chain in order to assess its allergenicity. Aventis never reported any results to the agency. What Aventis did provide was woefully inadequate. Mistakes in the document obscured the results, conclusions were at odds with the study's own data, and Aventis failed to update an out-of-date unreliable test. One frustrated member of the EPA panel commented, "if this were presented for publication in the journals that I review for... it would be rejected." Japanese scientist Masaharu Kawata commented on the StarLink test that "We have found many examples of this kind of data comparison that are incomparable and may look scientific, and is the same disguised tactics used in the application for approval of Roundup Ready soybeans by Monsanto in Japan."
Finally, EPA upheld their original assessment that there is a medium likelihood that StarLink is an allergen -- a conclusion conveniently ignored by the likes of Giddings.
Smith looks at all the major GM stories and uncovers astonishing stories of fraud and persecution of whistle-blowers. There are chapters on:
*the Pusztai affair, including the role of the Rowett head, Prof Phillip James, who banned Pusztai from talking about his GM potato research and then wrongly told the public and media that Pusztai's potatoes had been modified to include a toxin -- a mistake that has since proved more than convenient for the GM lobby;
*the l-tryptophan incident, including interviews with people who were sickened and disabled by the supplement, which was made with GM bacteria. Smith shows how FDA covered up evidence that GM was to blame, while the company that made the supplement behaved with relative openness. FDA distorted the incident to put the blame on unregulated natural health treatments and used it as an excuse to ban a supplement that had never hurt anyone in its non-GM-produced form;
*reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson's investigation into Monsanto's GM bovine growth hormone rbGH, including a breakdown of how Monsanto tried to force Akre and Wilson to change their report to make rbGH sound less dangerous. One tactic was to 'demote' GM-sceptical scientist Dr William von Meyer by stripping him of his numerous credentials gained from years of testing the effects of chemicals on humans. The Monsanto version of the script referred to him simply as a 'scientist in Wisconsin' -- for all we know, a wild-eyed eccentric with a few test tubes bubbling away in a rural garage.
Now we know: it's no accident that supposedly balanced TV and radio programmes about GM name all the scientific credentials of the pro-GM spokespersons and show them looking important and serious in their labs, whereas the anti-GM voices are worried housewives and angry bearded greenies shown chopping veg in their kitchens or ripping up crops in a field. References by anti-GM spokespeople to scientific research are edited out; all that's left is the 'emotive' element that the pro-GM lobby uses as a stick to beat us with.
The biotech industry wants us to see and swallow such messages, products of a spin machine they hope remains in the shadows. Smith gives us a clear vision of what they don't want us to see: a master plan by corporations to take over the control of the world's food supply. At a 1999 industry conference, a consultant from Arthur Anderson Consulting Group explained how he helped Monsanto create that plan. He asked Monsanto to describe what their ideal future looked like in 15-20 years. Monsanto executives described a world in which 100% of all commercial seeds were genetically modified and patented. Anderson worked backwards from that goal and developed the tactics to achieve it. Those tactics are laid bare in this book. Smith interviews courageous scientists and officials who were expected to fall in with the plan but wouldn't - and there are more of them than you might think -- often paying with their reputations and careers.
Sprinkled between the big GM stories are fascinating anecdotes that Smith has evidently picked up from his privileged position on the fringes of the industry. We read of a biochemist's shocked response at an industry conference to a company's vaunting of a GM tomato that looks fresh 150 days after it's picked: "I have a problem. If this doesn't rot or decay in 150 days, then what have you done with the nutrient value?" The industry honcho refuses to answer in front of the other delegates, but leads the biochemist outside the room and says: "We're not interested in the nutritive value. What we're interested in is if it's picked now, will a housewife buy it in 180 days?"
If such stories strike a chill into your heart, you can warm it up again by reading the inspirational chapter on how former prisoners and disruptive schoolchildren in Wisconsin turned their lives around JUST by changing their diet. Out go the junk foods, in come the fresh unprocessed foods. One judge even 'sentences' new probationers to the healthy diet, warning them that if they don't stick to it they'll be back in trouble, and then it'll be jail. One previously violent school has seen no incidents of weapons, drugs, suicides, dropouts or expulsions in the five years since it put its students on the program. The story shows that the sort of people we become and the sort of societies we inhabit depend heavily on the quality of the food we eat. All the more reason for genetic engineers and their friends in government to take responsibility and end their insane acts of terror against our food.
Whether you know nothing, a little, or a lot about GM, Seeds of Deception is one book you cannot afford to pass over. You can lend it to your parents, your friends, the local farmer, your MP and even your doctor in confidence that they will emerge informed and immunised against all the lies they will hear about the 'safety' of GM foods.