THE argument over the safety of genetically modified food was stoked up this
week as an OECD conference on the topic in Edinburgh heard conflicting evidence
on whether it harms rats. A big unpublished study from China says it does not,
while newly unearthed American findings from 1993 raise some fresh doubts.
Controversy arose in 1998 after claims by Arpad Pusztai, then at the Rowett
Research Institute in Aberdeen, that rats fed potatoes engineered to produce a
snowdrop protein suffered damage to their immune systems and changes in the size
of internal organs. Other scientists said his results were flawed…
