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from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Dear all

Welcome to WW51 bringing you all the latest news in brief on the GM issue.

This week saw the launch of our new database, "THE BIOTECH BRIGADE: who's who in the fight to force-feed us GMOs", on our website
http://www.gmwatch.org, which has also now been made fully searchable.

Here, you can look up the people and organisations who are pushing GM. You can find profiles giving affiliations and sources of funding that help to explain why they speak and act as they do.

It's a directory of biotech lobbyists, PR operators, corporate phantoms, web attackers, corporate science, and campaigning pro-GM scientists. It contains a wealth of links to articles and source material.

A lot of this information has either not been published before or not in this detail, not least the exposure of how extreme political networks are active in promoting genetic engineering.

George Monbiot marked the launch of the directory by drawing on its research for an article in The Guardian showing the murky interconnections of a whole series of pro-genetic engineering 'science' lobby groups, including the Science Media Centre and Sense About Science.

Sense About Science were, of course, behind the recent letter to Blair, signed by 114 pro-GM scientists, plus a series of media items claiming critics of GM have engaged in campaigns of intimidation or that they fixed the UK's Public Debate on GM.

The real fixers of the GM debate are exposed in George Monbiot's article (see ARTICLE OF THE WEEK) and in the wide-ranging GM Watch directory which looks at the issue globally - www.gmwatch.org.

Included below are some excerpts from our BIOTECH BRIGADE profiles, most notably on Fiona Fox, director of the Science Media Centre.

The directory also identifies the principal attackers of independent scientists like Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Ignacio Chapela, both of whom could be seen worldwide in conversation this week during a live webcast from UC Berkeley: 'The Pulse of Scientific Freedom in the Age of the Biotech Industry'. The complete event is available in the Berkeley web archive.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/archive.html.

Do watch it. It is very thought provoking, not least on how we are to rescue biology from the current trajectory which is turning it into a mere adjunct of commerce (see also QUOTE OF THE WEEK). What we are seeing, says one of the contributors, is the death of biology.

The webcast ends with a standing ovation for the scientist contributors, not least the indomitable Ignacio Chapela who has just been denied tenure at UC Berkeley (see OTHER HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK) in the most suspect of circumstances.

Claire    [email protected]
www.ngin.org.uk

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CONTENTS
QUOTE OF THE WEEK- Lord Winston
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK - 'Invasion of the entryists'
THE BIOTECH BRIGADE - The new directory
SETBACKS TO THE GM LOBBY
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK
HEADLINES OF THE WEEK
SUBSCRIPTIONS
CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK from Debate in House of Lords 9 December 2003
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Lord Robert Winston, a signatory to the Sense About Science letter to Blair calling for more government support for GM crops, speaking in the House of Lords: "we must recognise that science is not certain. The problem is that the Government and Ministers want black and white, another reason for our being wary of being too much in the government pocket. We must also avoid exaggeration and over-confidence. Ministers want that, and we are too ready to ascribe to it, because funds may chase that exaggeration, but we should be very wary. With all due respect to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Taverne [Chairman of Sense About Science], in some ways I regret signing the letter about genetically modified foods because, as scientists, we showed a degree of arrogance and a failure to recognise that we need to indulge in much greater dialogue. Another reason to be careful of government is that, above all, we must beware of commercial concerns, which increasingly drive science."
from Science and Politics - Debate in House of Lords 9 December 2003
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=1869

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ARTICLE OF THE WEEK - Invasion of the Entryists
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In the following shortened version of George Monbiot's Guardian article, Monbiot exposes how a bizarre and cultish political network has become the public face of the scientific establishment, working at the very heart of media attacks against critics of biotechnology.

The full version of the article with over 30 references to original sources is available on George Monbiot's site:
http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=627

The timeliness of what's revealed in the article and the GM Watch directory, was shown by 3 programmes broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this week. All included members of this network - two (one as panelist, one as 'expert' witness) were busy dismissing the significance of climate change on 'The Moral Maze', another was the main attacker of the precautionary principle in a programme called 'Risky Business', while yet another appeared on the 'Today' programme in an item showcasing the view of Sense About Science that the GM public debate was fixed by anti-science greens.

All four 'experts' can be found in the directory - www.gmwatch.org - and three are mentioned by name in the following article. In none of the radio broadcasts, however, were their affiliations disclosed, let alone their agenda of total support for big business and for technologies like genetic engineering and reproductive cloning.

Clearly the attention of journalists and programme-makers needs to be drawn to the directory so they can begin to understand the undisclosed agendas and conflicts of interest of those presented to them as "independent experts".
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INVASION OF THE ENTRYISTS
How did a cultish political network become the public face of the scientific establishment?
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Tuesday December 9, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1102753,00.html

One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons" pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and taking them over - appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later

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