Lord May of Oxford
President,
The Royal Society,
6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG                 26th January 2003

Dear Lord May,

Royal Society involvement in GM propaganda

I habe been intrigued and not a little saddened by the manner in which the
Royal Society, which was once an august and respected institution, has
allowed itself to be used as a vehicle for propaganda pushed out by the
GM/biotechnology industry.

Somewhere in the pipeline at the moment you have the "Broom's Barn" study of
band spraying associated with the growing of GM sugar beet -- a profoundly
insignificant piece of bad science (1).  I am amazed that this inadequate
paper has apparently been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in your
Proceedings B, given that its sole purpose was to try and demonstrate that
there are some environmental benefits associated with an inherently damaging
farming system (ie intensive crop production involving multiple applications
of herbicides and insecticides) and the growing of a crop that nobody wants
(GM sugar beet, which has no market.)  How could such a piece of research --
even if it had demonstrated something significant, which it did not -- be
anything other than a piece of propagandist nonsense?  And in accepting this
paper for publication, how could the Royal Society, your journal editor, and
your reviewers lose sight so completely of the fact that the technology
being promoted in this paper is not only unpopular but also irresponsible?

More to the point, I have been amazed by the manner in which the Royal
Society has allowed its name to be used by the media circus in flagging up
the supposed "benefits" of the Brooms Barn spraying system.  The initial
press release came from the Royal Society (even though it was clearly
written by the Brooms Barn PR people), and this gave it, from the point of
view of the gullible media, a degree of credibility and respectability.  But
the contents of the press release were quite ridiculous, making claims about
the supposed benefits of the GM crop spraying regime to "endangered wild
life" and the environment, to sustainable farming systems and so forth.  The
research was very small in  scale, its results were open to several
different interpretations, and the data presented in no way justfied the
wild conclusions drawn from it.  Then the media circus continued, with
absurd articles in Farmers Weekly Interactive, in New Scientist magazine and
in other papers and journals, and even with the Lords Sense about Science
Committee  hosting presentations from the researchers.  I have even seen the
research referred to as a "Royal Society study."

The timing of the press release was also a disgrace, occurring on exactly
the same day as the publication of the Scottish Parliament's Health
Committee Report on the Health Impacts of GM crops.  How could the Royal
Society sink so low as to be a part of a cheap attempt to minimise or
counteract the impact of a highly significant report published with the
public interest at its heart?

If you allow this sort of thing to go on, with the Royal Society lending its
name to wildly exaggerated claims about an insignificant piece of research
that should not have been published in the first place, what happens to the
integrity of science and the reputation of the Royal Society?

Yours sincerely,


Dr Brian John 
      

(1)  By "bad science" I mean research conducted by good scientists who have
been seduced by corporate funding into the defence of failed technologies.