Árpád Pusztai

Árpád Pusztai   (scientist)
Born	8 September 1930 Budapest, Hungary
Died	17 December 2021 (Age 91)
Alma mater	Eötvös Loránd University, Lister Institute
Interests	GM Food/Health effects
Scientist who was fired - likely after a intervention from Prime Minister Tony Blair - after publishing research unfavorable to genetically modified food.

Árpád János Pusztai was a Hungarian-born British biochemist and nutritionist who spent 36 years at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a world expert on plant lectins, authoring 270 papers and three books on the subject.

In 1998, Árpád Pusztai publicly announced that the results of his research showed feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats had negative effects on their stomach lining and immune system. This led to scientific criticism.

Pusztai was suspended and his annual contract was not renewed. The resulting controversy became known as the Pusztai affair.

Pusztai affair

Full article: Document:GM Food Scandal

In 1995, the Scottish Office Agriculture Environment and Fisheries Department commissioned a three-year multi-centre research programme under the coordinatorship of Dr Pusztai into the safety of GM food. At the time there was not a single publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the safety of GM food. By late 1997, preliminary results from rat experiments were showing totally unexpected and worrying changes in the size and weight of the animals's body organs. Liver and heart sizes were getting smaller, and so was the brain. There were also indications that the rats' immune systems were weakening.

Finally in August 1998, Pusztai expressed his growing concerns on World in Action in a 150 second interview, stating" "'We're assured that this is absolutely safe...We can eat it all the time. We must eat it all the time. There is no conceivable harm, which can come to us'. But as a scientist looking at it, actively working in the field, I find that it's very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs. We have to find guinea-pigs in the laboratory.' Pusztai had been told not to talk about his experiments in detail, but he did say, in a sentence that would become the centre of the controversy, that 'the effect was slight growth retardation and an effect on the immune system. One of the genetically modified potatoes, after 110 days, made the rats less responsive to immune effects'.

On the day after the interview,two phone calls, Pusztai says he was told, were put through to head of the Rowett from Prime Minister Tony Blair's office. One was 'around noon, the other was slightly earlier'. He learnt this information from two different employees at the Rowett, who could be sacked if their identities were known. The Pusztais were also later told by someone at the Rowett, currently in a senior management position at the Institute, that Bill Clinton had phoned Blair and told him to sort out the problem. In all, five people have said that they were told that Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the sacking of Dr. Pusztai.

Two days after the interview, Pusztai and his wife Susan were told to hand over their data. All GM work was stopped immediately and Pusztai's team was dispersed. His three PhD students were moved to other areas. He was threatened with legal action if he spoke to anyone. His phone calls and emails were diverted.

Aftermath

Pusztai's annual contract at Rowett was not renewed following the incident and he moved back to Hungary.

In February 1999 20 international scientists from 13 countries published a memo supporting Pusztai.

Extraordinary, since then no one has repeated the experiments. In 2009 Pusztai pointed out:

It would need a very..how shall I put it...brave person. I don't think that anybody will have the, I can say, the audacity to try to repeat our experiments - because they know perfectly well that they will get something very similar, if not identical results.

He gave further lectures on his GE potato work and on claimed dangers in general of genetic engineering of crop plants. In 2005, he received the Whistleblower Award of the Federation of German Scientists and the German section of the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA). In 2009, Pusztai and his wife, Prof. Susan Bardócz, received the Stuttgart Peace Prize.

Further reading

Medialens

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:GM Food Scandal	article	1 December 2011	Jeffrey M. Smith

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