THE Fox GUARDS THE HEN-HoUSE
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ran Blair's 1997 and 2001 election campaigns, Good Relations David Hill, also ran the PR for Monsanto in the UK. Shedding more doubt on the self-proclaimed scientific neutrality of the Royal Society, was the fact that despite its public pronouncements on Pusztai's "flawed" research, the Society never went on to conduct a "non-flawed" version of the important study. This suggested that their interests lay perhaps in something else than scientific rectitude. Following the publication of Pusztai's article, The Lancet was severely attacked by the Royal Society and the biotechnology industry, whose pressure eventually forced Pusztai's co-author, Prof. Stanley Ewen, to leave his position at the University of Aberdeen. 11 Science in the Corporate Interest ... The Pusztai case, as devastating as it threatened to be to the entire GMO project, was one among several cases of suppression of independent research or of direct manipulation of research data proving the potentially negative effects ofGMO foods on human or animal health. In fact, this practice proved to be the rule. In 2000, the Blair government ordered a three~year study to be carried out by a private firm, Grainseed, designed to demonstrate which GMO seeds might safely be included on the National List of Seeds, the standard list of seeds farmers may buy. Internal documents from the UK Ministry of Agriculture were later obtained by the London Observer newspaper, and revealed that some strange science was at work in the tests. At least one researcher at the Grainseed firm manipulated scientific data to "make certain seeds in the trials appear to perform better than they really did." Far from causing the Ministry of Agriculture to suspend the tests and fire the employee, the Ministry went on to propose that a variety of GMO corn be certified. 12 In another example of British state intrusion in academic freedom and scientific integrity, Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, senior academic scientist at the Open University and later Director of the Institute of Science in Society, was pressured by her university into taking early retirement. Mae-Wan Ho had been a Fellow of the National
