-Caveat Lector- RadTimes # 82 October, 2000 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QUOTE: "The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate." --Jeremy Brecher, historian and author ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --------------- --IMF crimes against humanity --An ethics firestorm in the Amazon --What Happens When Genocide Poses as Science --Commerical Rebellion --The Thalidomide Of Genetic Engineering ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Begin stories: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMF crimes against humanity Observer (London) October 8, 2000 by Greg Palast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> An internal IMF study reveals the price 'rescued' nations pay: dearer essentials, worse poverty and shorter lives So call me a liar. I was standing in front of the New York Hilton Hotel when the limousine carrying International Monetary Fund director Horst Kohler zoomed by, hitting a bump. Out flew a confidential report, Ecuador Interim Country Assistance Strategy. You suspect that's not how I got it, but you can trust me that it contains the answer to a puzzling question. Inside the Hilton, Professor Anthony Giddens told an earnest crowd of London School of Economics alumni that 'globalisation is a fact, and it is driven by the communications revolution'. Wow. That was an eye-opener. The screeching green-haired freaks outside the hotel demonstrating against the IMF had it all wrong. Globalisation, Giddens seems to say, is about giving every villager in the Andes a Nokia internet-enabled mobile phone. What puzzled me is why anyone would protest against this happy future. So I thumbed through my purloined IMF Strategy for Ecuador seeking a chapter on connecting the country's schools to the world wide web. Instead, I found a secret schedule. By 1 November this year, it says, its government is ordered to raise the price of cooking gas by 80 per cent. It must eliminate 26,000 jobs and halve real wages for the remaining workers by 50 per cent in four steps in months specified by the IMF. It must begin to transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign operators by July and grant BP's Arco subsidiary the right to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes. That's for starters. In all, the IMF's 167 loan conditions look less like an assistance plan and more like a blueprint for a financial coup d'etat. The IMF would say it has no choice. Ecuador is broke, thanks to the implosion of its commercial banks. But how did Ecuador, an Opec member with resources to spare, end up in such a pickle? For that, we have to turn back to 1983, when the IMF forced its government to take over the soured private debts owed by Ecuador's elite to foreign banks. For this bail-out of US and local financiers, Ecuador borrowed $1.5 billion. To repay this loan, the IMF dictated price hikes for electricity and other necessities. And when that didn't drain off enough cash, yet another assistance plan required the state to eliminate 120,000 jobs. Furthermore, while trying to meet the mountain of IMF obligations, Ecuador foolishly 'liberalised' its tiny financial market, cutting local banks loose from government controls and letting private debt and interest rates explode. Who pushed Ecuador into this nutty romp with free-market banking? Hint: the initials are IMF. It made bank liberalisation a condition of another berserk assistance plan. The facts of this nasty little history come from the IMF report marked: 'Please do not cite.' Pretend I didn't. The IMF and the World Bank have lent a sticky helping hand to scores of nations. Take Tanzania. Today, 1.4 million people there are getting ready to die. They are the 8 per cent of the nation's population who have the Aids virus. The financial 'rescuers' found a brilliant neo-liberal solution: require Tanzania to charge for hospital visits, previously free. This cut the number of patients treated in the three big public hospitals in the capital, Dar es Salaam, by 53 per cent. The financial cures must be working. The bodies told Tanzania to charge school fees. Now the bank expresses surprise that school enrollment is down from 80 per cent to 66 per cent. Altogether the Bank and IMF have 157 other helpful suggestions for Tanzania, and the Tanzanian government secretly agreed last April to adopt them all. It was sign or starve. No developing nation can borrow hard currency without IMF blessing (except China, whose output grows at 5 per cent a year thanks to it studiously following the reverse of IMF policies). The IMF and World Bank have effectively controlled Tanzania's economy since 1985. Admittedly, when they took charge they found a socialist nation mired in poverty, disease and debt. Their experts wasted no time in cutting trade barriers, limiting government subsidies and selling off state industries. This worked wonders. According to bank-watcher Nancy Alexander of the Washington-based Globalisation Challenge Initiative,in just 15 years Tanzania's GDP has dropped from $309 to $210 per capita, the literacy rate is falling and the rate of abject poverty has jumped to 51 per cent of the population. Yet somehow the bank has failed to win over the hearts and minds of Tanzanians to its free-market gameplan. Last June, the bank reported in frustration: 'One legacy of socialism is that most people continue to believe the state has a fundamental role in promoting development and providing social services.' The World Bank and the IMF were born in 1944 with simple, laudable mandates: between them to fund post-war reconstruction and development projects and lend hard currency to nations left skint by temporary balance of payments deficits. But in 1980 they seemed to take on an alien form. In the early Eighties, Third World nations, haemorrhaging after the fivefold increases in oil prices and a similar jump in dollar interest payments, brought their begging bowls to the two bodies. But instead of debt relief, they received structural assistance plans listing an average of 114 'conditionalities' in return for capital. The particulars varied from nation to nation, but in every case, they had to remove trade barriers, sell national assets to foreign investors, slash social spending and make labour 'flexible' (that is, crush unions). Some say the vicious policy change resulted from the election that year of Ronald Reagan as US President, the quickening of Margaret Thatcher's powers and the beginning of the neo-liberal ascendency. (My own information is that the IMF and World Bank were taken over by a space alien named Larry. It's obvious that 'Larry' Summers, once World Bank chief economist and now US Treasury Secretary, is really a platoon of extra- terrestrials sent to turn much of the human race into a source of cheap protein. But I digress.) So what have The Aliens accomplished with their free-market prescriptions? An article by Samuel Brittan in last week's Financial Times declared that the new world capital markets and free trade have 'brought about an unprecedented increase in world living standards'. Brittan cites the huge growth in GDP per capita, life expectancy and literacy in the less developed world from 1950 to 1995. Now hold on a minute. Until 1980, virtually every nation in his survey was either socialist or welfare statist. They were developing on the 'Import Substitution Model', by which locally-owned industry was built through government investment and high tariffs, anathema to the neoliberals. In those dark ages of increasing national government control and ownership (1960-1980), per capita income grew by 73 per cent in Latin America and by 34 per cent in Africa. By comparison, since 1980, Latin American growth has come to a virtual halt, growing by less than 6 per cent over 20 years - and African incomes have declined by 23 per cent. Now let's count the corpses. From 1950 to 1980, socialist and statist welfare policies added more than a decade of life expectancy to virtually every nation on the planet. From 1980 to today, life under structural assistance has become brutish and shorter. Since 1985, the total number of illiterate people has risen and life expectancy is falling in 15 African nations. Brittan attributes this to 'bad luck, [not] the international economic system'. In the former Soviet states, where IMF and World Bank shock plans hold sway, life expectancy has plunged, adding 1.4 million a year to the death rate in Russia alone. Admittedly, the World Bank and IMF are reforming. The dreaded structural assistance plans have been renamed 'poverty reduction strategies'. Doesn't that make you feel better? Recently, the IMF admitted that 'in the recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world population have regressed' - arguably 'one of the greatest economic failures of the twentieth century.' And that, Professor Giddens, is a fact. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An ethics firestorm in the Amazon <http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/001002/anthro.htm> 10/2/00 By Karen Olsson This much is certain: In 1968, in a remote region of southern Venezuela, a research team led by American geneticist James Neel administered thousands of doses of Edmonston B, a measles vaccine, to Yanomami Indians. Beyond that fact, everything is disputed. Neel, who died in February, may have been one of the most rigorous and compassionate investigators of his time, as some colleagues remember him. Or, as reportedly claimed in the forthcoming book Darkness in El Dorado by investigative journalist Patrick Tierney, the University of Michigan scientist may have wrongly administered a vaccine that devastated the isolated tribe. "The book does clearly establish that the way the vaccine was given was producing, in some instances, symptoms of measles," says Brian Ferguson, a Rutgers anthropologist. The book, he says, suggests that Neel should never have used the Edmonston B vaccine. (The publisher, W. W. Norton, is no longer distributing early copies of the book, nor is the author talking. The American Anthropological Association acknowledges that the book makes serious charges about both genetic and anthropological researchers.) Some scholars defend Neel's use of the vaccine. According to Allen Lichter, dean of the University of Michigan Medical School: "This vaccine has been given to millions of people. It does not cause death. It confers immunity against measles. If you were a compassionate physician and had access to this vaccine, it is something that you would want to do." Although Darkness in El Dorado has yet to arrive in stores, it has already caused a firestorm, incited by a description of the book that has gone rocketing around cyberspace over the past few weeks. After reading advance copies, professors Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii-Manoa and Terence Turner of Cornell University wrote an E-mail message to officers of the AAA, characterizing the book's revelations as a scandal that "in its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption . . . is unparalleled in the history of anthropology." Sponsel maintains that Tierney's narrative imperils the reputation of the anthropological profession as a whole. Swashbuckler. In addition to the questions it raises about the propriety of using the measles vaccine, Tierney's book reportedly challenges the methods and results of anthropologists, in particular Napoleon Chagnon, professor emeritus at the University of Califor-nia-Santa Barbara. Chagnon has had his share of detractors for years, Sponsel and Turner among them. He's been portrayed as an obstinate swashbuckler and has been accused of manipulating his data. His 1968 book, Yanomamo: The Fierce People, has sold nearly a million copies, in large part because the book was widely assigned to undergraduate anthropology students. In that account of his 1964 fieldwork with the Yanomami, he vividly describes the "burly, naked, filthy, hideous men" who greeted him with "immense wads of green tobacco" behind their lips and "strands of dark-green slime" dripping from their noses. As his title suggests, Chagnon characterized Yanomami culture as one of endemic warfare. Many anthropologists have rejected Chagnon's characterization of the Yanomami. Indeed, at an AAA meeting in 1994, Turner condemned Chagnon as a "sociopath" whose "lies damage the Yanomami." In recent years, the anti-Chagnon camp has included Venezuelan government officials, who have denied him a permit to continue research among the Yanomami. Chagnon contends that these officials have been unfairly swayed by his detractors. According to University of Nebraska anthropologist Raymond Hames, who has worked with Chagnon in the past, critics simply don't care for his portrayal of the Yanomami as warlike and take issue with his contention that this trait is rooted in genetics. The one issue on which almost everybody seems to agree is the need for public airing and independent assessment of Tierney's claims. The AAA plans to hold an open forum to discuss the book at its annual meeting in November. Beyond that, says AAA President Louise Lamphere, "It's going to take a really long time for people to sort this out." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What Happens When Genocide Poses as Science <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20001008/t000096003.html> October 8, 2000 By ALEXANDER COCKBURN "We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American anthropological profession. In its scale, ramifications and sheer criminality and corruption, it is unparalleled in the history of anthropology." Thus begins a recent e-mail from two noted anthropologists, Terry Turner of Cornell and Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii, to Louise Lamphere, president of the American Anthropological Assn. The man primarily accused of these crimes, University of Michigan geneticist James Neel, died this past February. The charges are made by investigative journalist John Tierney in his book, "Darkness in El Dorado," scheduled for publication next month by W.W. Norton. Neel worked for a covert program of the Atomic Energy Commission to study the effects of radiation on human subjects and to see how human groups behaved under conditions of extreme stress. Neel had ubermensch notions about the genetics of "leadership" and differential rates of reproduction among dominant and subdominant males in a genetically "isolated" human population. The AEC was happy to pick up the tab, eager to find out how any survivor group of carefully selected Americans secluded in caves during a nuclear Armageddon would survive and breed in the aftermath. Tierney presents convincing evidence, write Turner and Sponsel, that on his 1968 trip to the Yanomami, a tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon, Neel greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of Yanomami. It seems, according to the Tierney book, that the epidemic was "caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles (exactly the Yanomami situation)." Thus, according to Tierney, who spent 10 years researching this history, Neel secretly supervised a program of potentially lethal injections. Then he instructed the members of his research team to refuse to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, reportedly saying that as men of science, they should not intervene. He apparently believed that before the rise of mass societies, first in agricultural communities and then in cities, small genetically isolated groups would produce leaders with dominant genes who would then appropriate a big share of the available women with whom they would breed, thus constantly upgrading the genetic stock of the tribe. But his theory faced a big problem, namely the vulnerability of such small groups to diseases and consequent epidemics imported from the outside world, which the large groups in modern mass society could more easily absorb. Hence Neel's terrible experiments on the Yanomami, in a kind of grim downgrade of the Malthusian ethics of "Survivor." In their e-mail, Turner and Sponsel write carefully that "Tierney's well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic was in all probability deliberately caused as an experiment designed to produce scientific support for Neel's eugenic theory." On Tierney's account of it, there's nothing here that separates Neel and his team from the Nazi doctors, and ghastly though the whole story is, there's little that should excessively surprise anyone who has looked at the practical functions of anthropology as a servant of empire. Anthropologists often served as spies for the colonial authorities, as many native peoples correctly surmised. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose study of the African Nuer tribe published in 1940 is regarded as a classic of social anthropology, interrupted a lyrical account of Nuer life to note without comment or reproof the punitive raids of British colonial authorities "including bombing and machine-gunning of camps." Nor did he regard this rending of Nuer society by the British as a topic worthy of inclusion in his description of stresses in the society. Again, this should not surprise us. Alfred Kroeber, who founded academic anthropology in California at the turn of the century and who wrote "Handbook of the Indians of California," spent many hours interviewing the Yurok tribe whose territory is on the coast of Northern California, just south of the Oregon line, about 100 miles north of where I live. Kroeber eventually distilled these conversations into a volume called "Yurok Narratives," in which he meditated on the supposed "character" of this Indian group. The Yurok, he wrote, were "an inwardly fearful people; the men often seemed to me withdrawn." He mused that "for some reason, the culture had gone hypochondriac." Kroeber never got around to mentioning that between 1848, the start of the Gold Rush, and 1910, when he was studying California's Indians, the Yurok population in the region was reduced from about 2,500 to 610. Disease, starvation and murder had wiped out about 75% of the group. It is as though an anthropologist studying the inward fears of Polish Jews after 1945 never mentioned Auschwitz. Will Tierney's book provoke the uproar that Turner and Sponsel predict? Will anthropology be placed in the dock? I doubt it. For years, native groups across the world have been telling their stories about the depredations of anthropologists to anyone interested. Few have listened. The can of worms is way too big. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Commerical Rebellion <http://www.metropolismag.com/new/oct_content/ent.htm> Advertising's voracious appetite for underground culture swallows another victim:culture jamming. by Warren Berger Advertising is expected to be upbeat in tone and slick in style. But in the past few years, some of the messages emanating from Madison Avenue have turned ornery. And they've been looking a bit ragged. A few seem like they might possibly be subversive. Consider an ad campaign that was created for Amstel Lite beer: The copy, printed in blocky, uneven lines of type, consisted of an angry rant seemingly written by an enemy of the brand, who urged the public to "Avoid Amstel Lite at all costs!" Then there was a recent series of print ads for California Pizza Kitchen, which, like the Amstel ads, adopted a low-budget, homemade look and an angry tone. Complaining (with tongue in cheek of course) about the unusual choices of pizza toppings offered by the chain, the headline blared, "Stop the madness!" When not playing the role of screaming anarchist, other advertisers have become graffiti artists, targeting their own ads. Brands like Captain Morgan Rum and Reactor Jeans have created ads in which headlines are crossed out and fake mustaches are scribbled on the faces of fashion models. One clothing designer, Moschino, recently started cluttering its own elegantly photographed ads with stickers bearing cryptic messages like "No one is all black. No one is all white. Therefore no one is all gray." So what's going on here? Have the top ad agencies been stormed by insurrectionists? On the contrary, ad agency creative executives themselves are wreaking this faux-havoc as part of the industry's latest attempt to co-opt underground culture and cloak itself in the style of the street. It seems that the great blob of advertising, having previously absorbed rock-and-roll, Beat poets, hip-hop gangstas, and indie filmmakers, has just swallowed its latest counter-cultural morsel: the phenomenon known as culture jamming. The underground movement first bubbled up in the 1980s and gained steam in the early 1990s. Small renegade groups like San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) and New Jersey's Cicada Corps of Artists drew attention by subverting ad's messages (usually on billboards), changing the words in headlines or playfully altering imagery. The jammer groups sometimes had a political agenda (tobacco ads were a favorite target), but in many cases, jamming was a form of creative expression, an opportunity to make ads funnier and more candid than the original versions. When the BLF, for example, took an Apple "Think Different" ad featuring mogul Ted Turner and slyly altered the headline to read "Think Dividends," it began to seem, for just a moment, as if advertising had started telling the truth. Initially, advertisers viewed culture jammers as their enemies. In a few instances, outdoor-ad companies tried to discourage the practice by prosecuting the billboard guerrillas, but it didn't do much good. Gradually, however, some advertisers stopped fighting the rebels and started imitating them. "Culture jammers have had a big influence on the look and tone of advertising in recent years," says Annie Finnegan, an executive with the Arnold Communications ad agency in Boston. Finnegan, who has studied and lectured on the phenomenon of "guerrilla advertising" (the industry practice of disguising ads or putting them in unexpected places), notes that a number of advertisers have become highly adept at imitating not just the look of anti-advertising but the whole rogue spirit and attitude of it. "A lot of advertisers now have become almost like pranksters," Finnegan says. Indeed, the agencies are trying all kinds of tricks that one would expect from underground troublemakers, not ad executives. For example, when the New York agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners needed to promote a new cocktail, the agency hired attractive actors, planted them in bars, and had them engage in conversations that included frequent mentions of this particular drink. Down in Miami, the ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky (CP & B) hired teenagers to play pranks and place crank phone calls targeting tobacco executives; some of the stunts ended up being used for the anti-smoking TV commercials that CP & B produces. Finnegan reports that a Swedish ad agency placed an ad for travel insurance in a wallet that was later glued to the sidewalk of a busy street to capture the attention of passersby. The Los Angeles office of the agency Deutsch recently fooled many people in that city with a series of fake billboards for "topless traffic school" and other nonexistent businesses; when curious or outraged people called the number in the ad, they were connected to the advertiser that sponsored the campaign. If that sounds like a recipe for confusing and possibly alienating potential customers, it just might be. Finnegan says that guerrilla advertising can backfire because "sometimes people become angry when they discover they've been tricked by an advertiser." But advertisers seem willing to take that risk, to deface their own ads, to engage in pranks, to do whatever's necessary, because there's a sense that anti-advertising is the only way to connect with today's cynical audience. Kirshenbaum Bond co-founder Richard Kirshenbaum argues that consumers have developed a foolproof radar that can spot an ad immediately and tune it out just as quickly; to get "under that radar," Kirshenbaum contends, advertisers must disguise their ads. One way is to make an ad look like a piece of underground communication. The audience figures out pretty quickly that the ranting poster or the street prank is really an ad, but by then, the thinking goes, the advertiser has scored points for having an ironic sense of humor. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, says that anti-advertising's primary purpose "is to appeal to the irreverence of the adolescent mind. These ads nudge us in the ribs and share a smirk with us." Of course, not everybody appreciates the humor, particularly the billboard guerrillas and media pranksters, who now find it difficult to mock advertisers that are already mocking themselves. The rebels jammed the culture, and now the culture has jammed them right back. Pedro Carvajal of the Cicada group finds that some ads from Madison Avenue look so authentically underground that, he says, "When I see some of them I have to admit, it looks like something done by a culture jammer." Jack Napier, one of the cofounders of the BLF, adds: "When I see ads that cross out their own headlines and write in something self-mocking, my first reaction is, they should be paying residuals to the BLF." But Napier has his own way of dealing with this problem: mounting counter-strikes against the co-opters. For example, he once encountered a Plymouth Neon billboard on which the oh-so-clever advertiser had made it appear as if a spray-can vandal had drawn a Mohawk haircut on the car's roof and changed the original headline from "Hi" to "Hip." "First, I was taken aback, and then I was pissed off," says Napier. "And then I thought, 'Shit, I'm not going to let them get away with that.'" Before long, he was up on the board in the wee hours, changing "Hip" to "Hype" and planting the image of a skull on the car's grill. In effect, the jammers and the agency co-opters are now battling to see who will control the communication of the streets. But it's interesting to note that the two sides in this war really aren't that different from one another. The young agency creative executives that tend to produce anti-advertising ads share the same irreverent attitude and off-the-wall sense of humor as the jammers. And many of them insist their pseudo-attacks on their own ads represent an attempt to modernize advertising by making it more candid and self-aware. Steve Grasse, who runs the Philadelphia agency Gyro, echoes many of the ad business's young turks when he insists, "I hate almost all advertising." (Except his own, naturally.) Grasse tends to produce rough-around-the-edges, highly sarcastic ads that ridicule the phony feel-good imagery of conventional cigarette and beer ads. Asked whether that approach constitutes something of a rip-off of culture jammers, Grasse barks: "Who the hell are the culture jammers, I haven't taken anything from the underground culture. All the stuff I create is original." Finnegan observes that both the underground rebels like Napier and the young ad-agency hipsters like Grasse "are products of the same advertising-drenched culture and have the same sensibilities. They just went in opposite directions." There's one crucial difference between them: The ad guys have the money, and the upper hand. These days, they usually manage to think of pranks before the pranksters do. For example, the BLF had every reason to expect that Madison Avenue would be shocked when the guerrilla group recently jammed a Levi's billboard campaign by inserting a sticker with the visage of Charles Manson on the ads. Imagine, Manson as ad spokesman! But the fact is, Steve Grasse and Gyro had already crossed that Rubicon a couple of years earlier when the agency featured Manson in advertising for one of its clothing clients, scoring a hit with consumers. "I feel kind of sorry for the culture jammers," concludes Finnegan. "It seems like now, whatever they try to do, advertising has already gotten there." ---- Warren Berger is author of Advertising Today (Phaidon), scheduled for publication next year. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Thalidomide Of Genetic Engineering revised June 2000 from the GE issue of 'Soil & Health (NZ)' Aug '99 by L.R.B. Mann, D. Straton & W.E. Crist [Dr. Mann, a biochemist, served for its first dozen years on the Toxic Substances Board advising successive New Zealand ministers of health on poisons. Dr. Straton is a psychiatrist who has taken a special interest in therapeutic uses of tryptophan. Mr. Crist is a publicist who has interviewed researchers, victims, and lawyers involved with EMS.] By the end of the 1980s some millions of people, mostly in North America, were supplementing their diet with L-tryptophan, an essential amino-acid present in proteins of any normal diet. Amino-acids such as tryptophan are routinely produced in micro-breweries using suitable microbial cultures. One producer, Showa Denko K.K., artificially inserted genes into a bacterial species to increase its production of tryptophan. Then in late 1989, some 5,000 - 10,000 in North America fell ill with a highly unusual if not completely novel illness, EMS (eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome) caused by Showa Denko tryptophan. Within months, dozens had been killed and thousands maimed. Today thousands continue to suffer permanent nasty effects, and a trickle of them continue to die early (at least 80 total by now). The epidemic ceased when non-prescription tryptophan was severely restricted. We emphasize that if thalidomide had happened to cause a type of birth defect that was already common, e.g. cleft palate or severe mental retardation, we would still not know about the harm, and pregnant women would have kept on taking it for its undoubted benefits. The fractional addition to figures which were already relatively large would not have been statistically significant. But as it turned out, the damage noticed was of a kind that most doctors never see in a whole career - drastic malformations of the arms & legs - so although the numbers were not huge these cases were picked up. Similarly, impurities in the GE tryptophan happened to cause an illness (EMS) which was novel. The surge of numbers therefore stood out and got noticed. If Showa Denko's poison had caused the same numbers but of a common illness instead, say asthma, we would still not know about it. Or if it had caused delayed harm, such as cancer 20 - 30 years later, or senile dementia in some whose mothers had taken it early in pregnancy, there would have been no way to attribute the harm to the cause. This reminds us of the need for extreme caution with GE foods. They must be assumed guilty until lengthy tests have suggested they are, if not innocent, at worst guilty of only minor dangers. Such is nowhere near the case today as large companies rush to market their GE foods. It is very disappointing to find a leading physician, Prof Sir John Scott, writing about this disaster thus: "Rare cases of EMS were known before the introduction of the genetically engineered bacterium, which further supports the hypothesis that EMS is not due to the genetic engineering event." An exact analogue of that argument would run: "Rare cases of seal-limb were known before the introduction of thalidomide, which further supports the hypothesis that seal-limb is not due to thalidomide." But even more important is the fact that the trickle of about 100 early cases, years before the epidemic of late 1989, were due to (early versions of) Showa Denko GE microbial cultures. No other manufacturer's tryptophan caused EMS. The contrast is startling with the elaborate procedure before registration of a new drug. It has taken a decade to get legal approval for supplementing humans with (a modified version of) the human hormone amylin, for treating diabetics. Yet GE foods are urged for legal distribution in great haste and with only extremely scanty testing, and the main discussion so far has been whether they should be labelled. Labelling would not in itself be wrong, but can of course not substitute for the careful lengthy testing that would be needed before any GE food should be approved for human consumption. Labelling of GE food would imply acceptance by authorities, as does the ingredient list of any labelled food. The Showa Denko disaster is crucial to understanding GE food. If a purified single chemical - the natural amino-acid L-tryptophan, better than 99% pure and definitely meeting the notorious 'substantial equivalence' test - can turn out when GEd to kill dozens and cripple thousands, what will it take to check properly a potato containing a synthetic 'exact' copy of a gene for a toxin from the African clawed toad? And most urgently, the attempt to count as 'substantially equivalent' purified sugars, oils etc. is shown by the Showa Denko disaster to be a gamble. The assumption that soy oil from GE soybeans is exactly equivalent to ordinary soy oil requires the most careful scientific measurements to check it. Merely assuming 'substantial equivalence' will not do. Those who search the internet on this topic will soon discover the claim by apologists for GE that the problem was only decreased purification of tryptophan. We disagree for several reasons - mainly, the first 3 GE strains had been causing EMS for years before this slackening of procedure in Jan 1989 when also the superproducer strain went into production and caused the epidemic. But this question cannot be settled with finality unless Showa Denko release the GE microbes for detailed examination. Whether you believe the impurities were due to incompetent purification & monitoring, or to deviant metabolism in the GE-bugs, or both, you had better believe that the fabled 'substantially equivalent' assumption flopped in that epidemic of crippling & lethal illness. The most menacing forms of biotechnology are genetically engineered foods and other uncontained GE organisms, but some other forms of biotechnology entail serious threats to public health which are under even less control than chemical poisons - and that's saying something. If faulty filtering was indeed the problem, it follows that the production of amino-acids and other 'Health Food supplements' may be much more inherently hazardous than has been believed. Perhaps the Health Food Industry should be subject to controls on purity and safety comparable to those applied to the pharmaceutical industry. Either way, biotechnology - which includes GE but also includes other processes such as purifying the mixture "lyprinol" from green-lipped ussels - requires much-enhanced scrutiny. ----- Good sources: 1. L-Tryptophan Puzzle Takes New Twist, Science 249 988, 31 August 1990 2. Does Medical Mystery Threaten Biotech? Science 250 619, 2 November 1990 3. EMS and Tryptophan Production: A Cautionary Tale, Trends in Biotech 12 346-352, September 1994. 4. Eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. Results of national surveillance. J Am Med Assoc 264 1698-703 1990 ====================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. 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