John Hodgson
 

According to Greenpeace, its candidate in the US presidential election, the mutant tiger, FrankenTony, received the support of 1,275 voters. Greenpeace does not say how many of these were Floridians.

Research published in Nature Neuroscience this month (Nat. Neurosci. 3, 1301, 2000) has exposed the duality of thinking within certain organic farming organizations. The research suggests little more than that animals treated with the pesticide, rotenone, might be reasonable models of Parkinson's disease in human. However, the UK's organic farming enforcer, the Soil Association, has been galvanized into putting out a press release on the subject. Rotenone, you see, is a plant extract, and one of the seven chemical treatments permitted in organic farming. The Soil Association says that the real worry is not the use of rotenone (even though that was actually the subject of the reported research) but the synthetic pesticides that work in a similar way but which do not break down in the environment. It calls for urgent research into the effects of those synthetic chemicals. Presumably, by the same token, the Soil Association will be allowing the use of another substance readily broken down in the environment, Monsanto's herbicide, RoundUp. And surely they will be supporting crops that encourage the substitution of RoundUp for other herbicides.

Ah, the perils of medical publishing. The five defendants charged with criminal damage for removing an Aventis GM oilseed rape crop from a field in the North of England used Arpad Pusztai's research, "peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet" as part of their defense in their trial in mid-November. They argued that if they had not destroyed the crop it was likely that personal injury or death would have almost certainly resulted. Pusztai's paper was used as "proof of the dangers caused by GM contaminated foods." They also argued that the advent of GM technology will bring about new allergens and toxins that will not be detected by current food safety tests, wheeling out in support of this thesis the old saw (now discredited) of the 1989 outbreak of eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome associated with the use of amino acid supplements by body-builders.