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According to a report in the British broadsheet The Guardian yesterday (October 2), the UK's extensive field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops show that "two out of three…oil seed rape and sugar beet, appear more harmful to the environment than conventional crops and should not be grown in the UK."
But the trial results are not yet published--they will appear in eight papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 16 October—and the Royal Society is furious. It immediately issued a statement attacking The Guardian "for putting its own commercial interests ahead of the public good by publishing a speculative article."
Stephen Cox, executive secretary of the Royal Society, said in the statement: "This attempt by The Guardian to summarize in a soundbite the entire contents of the eight scientific papers has not been checked for accuracy by either the authors of the papers, who carried out the farm scale evaluations, or the journal."
In a sideswipe at The Guardian's sources, Cox adds, "In fact, it does little more than repeat much of the content of a similarly speculative article that appeared in The Independent newspaper on 2 August."
He went on to say that the Guardian piece was wrong about the publication date of the scientific papers and misrepresented the journal's reasons for rejecting a ninth paper about the farm scale evaluations. "You can draw your own conclusions about how accurate the rest of the article is likely to be."
The Guardian describes the ninth rejected paper as a set of recommendations. But Brian Johnson of English Nature, who serves on a sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), told The Scientist it was neither a policy paper or a scientific paper, but "a summary paper which tried to put the results in the context of biodiversity on farmland."
ACRE is the body that will judge the significance of the trial results for government policy. That ninth paper was turned down, said Johnson, simply because it didn't include any new data.
Penny Hirsch at the Institute of Arable Crops Research and also a member of an ACRE subgroup, told The Scientist "how discrete all of those involved [in the research] are being. We don't know what our colleagues are doing!"
ACRE, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, English Nature, and several other bodies and pressure groups deeply concerned with the GM crop trials told The Scientist that they had not seen the forthcoming papers and expressed themselves mystified as to how The Guardian might have gained access.
Cox said: "We appeal to editors in the print and broadcast media to ensure that reports about the eight scientific papers are based accurately on their full published contents and not on speculation that cannot be checked for reliability."
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