Royal Society Science and Agriculture Study Criticised

There are significant concerns about the long term security and sufficiency of global food-crop production due to the potential impact of many factors including climate change, population growth, changing consumption patterns and competing demands for land. The Royal Society is to study the extent to which the biological and related sciences can contribute to enhancing global food-crop production over the next 30 years within the context of changing global and regional demand during this period.
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Farm Bill Amendment calls for NAS to Study Safety and Impacts of Cloned Meat and Animals

Press Release of the Center for Food Safety
FDA APPROVAL OF CLONES STALLED BY PASSAGE OF MIKULSKI-SPECTER AMENDMENT IN FARM BILL

Bill Passes by an Overwhelming Majority of 79 to 14; Coalition of Consumer,
Farmer, and Animal Welfare Groups Praise the Senate’s Action
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Corn Fakes

The article below is reprinted from the British magazine Private Eye, No. 1194, 28 September-11 October 2007. The ‘heavy-handed’ libel threats referred to below temporarily closed the GM Watch website this summer.

Heavy-handed libel threats on the part of a biotech researcher have done little to silence criticism of a scientific paper claiming that shoppers prefer GM produce.
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Study Questions Application of Animal Experiments to Humans

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

Much of science, including healthcare research and important fields of risk assessment, depend, in part or in whole, on the presumption that animal models can usefully predict human responses to treatments. However, relatively little research has been done to test this assumption. A new study has compared the results of animal experiments and human clinical trials. The study selected six treatments in which the human clinical trials had shown a clear result (either benefit or harm). They compared these to the results of animal tests. In three cases the results were in concordance while in the other three they were not.
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Conflicts of Interest: In Agriculture too?

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

Failure to declare a conflict of interest, as Lester Crawford has been reminded (see news item), is a federal offence for United States Government employees, punishable by a prison term. To many scientists however, conflicts of interest are a fact of life. Members of hundreds of government advisory panels hold shares in, consult for, or are employed by, the companies about whose products they are supposed to provide ‘independent’ guidance (Krimsky, 2003). Similarly, many public interest organisations, notably patient groups and charities, are in the similar position of receiving money from corporations affected by their policies, conduct and advice. The prevailing attitude in science is that these conflicts either are unavoidable, because most successful scientists have them, or that they do not matter because scientists are sufficiently objective to discount them. In the words of numerous editorials and official guidelines, these conflicts are ‘apparent’ rather than real. None of these arguments should carry much weight.
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