The Royal
Society

Royal Society Rejects Latest Claims On GM Potatoes

Publication of the paper makes Pusztai and Ewen's data and interpretations accessible to a wider audience for further evaluation. The Society first called for the data from this contentious work to be submitted for publication in August 1998.

Close reading of the paper makes it clear that it is based on the work reviewed by the Society in May this year and that it, too, is flawed. Too few animals were used to give statistically significant results for the complex phenomena being examined; the diets used were incompletely controlled; there was no mention of the gut responses in any control group of rats fed a normal, or reduced protein, diet (the latter is important because GM potatoes contain less protein than normal potatoes); and there was, again, a lack of rigour in the experimental design and statistical interpretation.

On the basis of this paper, it is wrong to conclude that there are human health concerns with the process of genetic modification itself, or even with the particular genes inserted into these GM potatoes.