Beware: The Stories Are Genetically Modified, Too
(UK) New Statesman and Society, Friday, 19th March 1999
The papers seem almost unanimous on GM foods: "this stuff is bad and should be banned now". On one side, it seems, we have the government; on the other, the press. But look more closely and you will see that there is a division in the press - except that it is not, for the most part, between papers but between different journalists on the same papers. Nearly all the running on the "Frankenfood" story has been made by the environmental, political and consumer affairs correspondents. The science correspondents, by contrast, are deeply ambivalent about the whole thing.
From long experience, they are inclined to be particularly sceptical about any claims from the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Such pressure groups have come a long way from their hippy-dippy beginnings; they have matured into well-oiled publicity machines able to match the combined forces of Monsanto, Zeneca and any other multinational that comes into their sights. The instinct of science correspondents is to take claims from either camp with equal quantities of salt.
Those of us who forgot this learnt our lesson last September, at the British Association science conference in Cardiff. There, a motley group of Anglo-American eco-beardies called the Genetics Forum put out a press notice which caused much excitement: Stephen Hawking, the renowned Cambridge physicist, had released a statement attacking the gene foods. This was a great story. A top boffin had come out against the Frankenfoods, a great victory for the environmentalists against the sneering derision of such eminences as Richard Dawkins.
Sadly, this excellent story was also completely untrue. At least one hack (hands up) was caught out, missing Hawking's angry fax denying the story, which arrived in the Cardiff press room a couple of hours later.
Yet as the winter wore on, the media's mood started to harden on gene foods. News editors sensed a new BSE crisis in the making; the trouble was that no one had died, or even been harmed, by eating the stuff. (At least in the BSE case, we had lots of dead and distressed cows and a sprinkling of casualties among other species, even before people began mysteriously to contract what looked like the same disease.) The environmental angle was exploited for all it was worth, and several journalists managed to score direct hits on Monsanto, rebutting its often dubious claims that there was no conceivable environmental risk. But on the claim that the foods could injure health, the story lacked a smoking gun.
Just when it looked as though it might be safe to creep back into the kitchen, the Frankenfoods were dealt a new blow. Joan Walley, a Labour MP, stood up in the Commons and announced that dozens of Americans had died after eating GM foods. Her claims were printed in the Guardian and the Mail; in both cases, the stories came from political correspondents in the Westminster lobby.
What the lobby failed to report, however, was that Walley was talking about the tryptophan disaster, a decade-old story that had nothing to do with GM foods. Tryptophan is a food supplement and a batch of it was contaminated during the manufacturing process. It poisoned hundreds of people, killing 37. It is true that the bacteria used in manufacturing the substance were specially engineered, but even Greenpeace admitted that there was no evidence whatever that the poisoning had anything to do with DNA manipulation. The following Sunday the Observer ran a piece demolishing Walley's claims, along with a cartoon warning the reader to "beware the genetically modified story".
Then the Pusztai story broke, and the GM yarn got back on its feet. Arpad Pusztai, a Hungarian emigre scientist working at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, had gone public last summer with claims that genetically modified potatoes had damaged the immune systems and shrunk the organs of laboratory rats. If it was confirmed that the damage was real, and was caused by the genetic modification, this would prove a fatal blow to the gene lobby. In allegedly sinister circumstances, Pusztai was sacked, and prevented from speaking to the press.
On 31 January, the Mail on Sunday ran a story, written jointly by its industrial editor and consumer affairs correspondent, claiming that Pusztai was right all along. Nobody followed this up until 11 February, when the Guardian splashed with a story, written by a team of non-specialist investigative reporters, that Pusztai's research had been verified by 20 scientists from all over the world. The Guardian was clear that Pusztai had been vindicated, and that this showed that GM food was at least potentially unsafe. After a long winter of surmise and conjecture, the gene food story had been given new legs.
But these legs were quickly hobbled. In the days after the Pusztai story broke, eminent scientists queued up to rubbish his results. In a letter in the Daily Telegraph, which has always taken a broadly pro-GM stance, Britain's top 19 scientists denounced Pusztai's paper as a hopeless piece of science.
Nevertheless, the Independent (and its Sunday sister) and the Express have come out strongly against gene foods. The Mail has followed suit, I suspect reluctantly. But some journalists remain unhappy that proper, sceptical inquiry has taken a back seat to what they see as irresponsible scaremongering. For example, Roger Highfield, science editor of the Daily Telegraph, says: "I'm just amazed that Fleet Street does not apply the same scepticism to this story as they would to a statement from Monsanto or from a politician. It's brainless reporting. Why the hell do we not treat environmentalists with the same degree of scepticism as we apply elsewhere?" |
