Letter: Pusztai's results
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Media coverage of GM foods and the Pusztai affair has been characterised by inaccurate reports that have usually reflected a strong bias for or against GM foods. We would like to try to clarify some of the key issues.
Shortly after Dr Arpad Pusztai's interview on World in Action it was suggested that his experiments had only tested the effects of potato spiked with ConA lectin. He was then suspended from his post at the Rowett Institute and an audit was instituted according to Medical Research Council guidelines, an act that could be interpreted as implying fraud.
It is clear from the report of this audit, conducted in August 1998 but only recently and incompletely released (http://www.rri. sari.ac.uk/press), that experiments involving transgenic potatoes containing the gene for the snowdrop lectin (GNA) had already been performed at the time of Dr Pusztai's television interview. Although Dr Pusztai's suspension was subsequently lifted, he was prevented from continuing his experiments on the transgenic potatoes.
It was this aggressive treatment that led ourselves and other scientists to allow our names to be included in a memorandum defending Dr Pusztai, whom we know to be an honourable and careful scientist. If the Rowett Institute had simply released a statement that the data was preliminary and allowed the work to continue, much of the confusion would have been prevented.
It has been widely stated that all lectins are toxic. They are not. They are ubiquitous carbohydrate-binding proteins. All mammalian cells and all plant nuts, seeds and bulbs, including many foodstuffs, contain lectins. Some of these, red kidney beans for example, are toxic and need to be destroyed by heat before consumption but others such as tomato lectin are apparently harmless when eaten raw.
Many of these plant lectins serve an insecticidal or antifungal role in the plant. The snowdrop lectin (GNA) binds to a sugar called mannose which is virtually absent from the lining of the mammalian intestine but is extensively expressed in the intestine of sap-sucking insects. It is therefore plausible that expression of this lectin in food plants might render them unattractive to insects but safe for human consumption, particularly if the food (potato) is always cooked.
The experiments performed by Dr Pusztai, whatever their results, would not imply that all genetically modified foods were unsafe. The message Dr Pusztai was trying to put across was simply that such foods require particularly careful testing before release. Some will prove toxic or otherwise unsatisfactory and be discarded.
The fact that Dr Pusztai has been barred from continuing his experiments has resulted in an unsatisfactory situation in which his data, although interesting, remain preliminary and further experimentation will be needed before final conclusions can be drawn.
Professor JONATHAN RHODES
Dr RONALD FINN
Department of Medicine
University of Liverpool
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