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Nuffield Council on Bioethics The Nuffield Council on Bioethics says it is an independent body which examines the ethical issues raised by developments in medicine and biology. Established in 1991, it is funded by The Nuffield Foundation, the Medical Research Council and The Wellcome Trust. In 1999 no less than four newsworthy reports on GM were published in the UK in the space of just two days. All asserted the safety of GM foods and crops, and all strongly criticised the research of Dr Arpad Pusztai which had raised considerable doubts about the safety of GM foods. Their publication also followed hard on the heels of a British Medical Association report calling for an indefinite moratorium on GM crops. One of these reports was the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' report, Genetically modified crops: the social and ethical issues , published in May 1999. The attack on Dr Pusztai was contained in an appendix to the report which Pusztai characterised as 'misleading and full of inaccuracies... unscientific and most unfair.' The Nuffield report declared that all GM foods currently on the market were 'safe' and that there was a moral imperative to make GM crops available to developing countries. Though the panel that drew up the report was presented as 'a group of independent scientists', this does not bear examination. Among those on the panel were:
In drawing up its report, the Nuffield panel consulted, among others, the biotech corporations Monsanto and Zeneca. The Scottish Herald (30 May 99) reported that an early draft of the report had warned of possible environmental problems with GM crops and suggested leaving large GM-free tracts of the UK as an 'insurance policy'. This suggestion did not survive consultation with the industry and was edited out before publication. Although the report made such strong recommendations on the use of GM crops in the developing world, curiously there was no consultation with anyone from the developing world, nor was a single well-known scientific critic of GM consulted. The environmental writer George Monbiot described the Nuffield report as 'perhaps the most asinine report on biotechnology ever written. The stain it leaves on the Nuffield Council's excellent reputation will last for years.' According to Monbiot, the panel made three fundamental mistakes.
The fact that the Nuffield panel did not consult even 1 person from a developing country, out of the 87 or so experts they met, proved particularly controversial. A group representing Indian farmers even turned up uninvited at the Nuffield offices in London to express their unhappiness with the report and frustration at their point of view not being heard. The Nuffield's director eventually agreed to speak to them, though not before calling the police. Four years on, in 2003, a group within the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' produced a follow up report to coincide with the UK's national GM Public Debate. |