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British Scientists Condemn Using Children in GM Food Trials as Unacceptable
Children have been used as 'lab rats' in GM rice trials that were carried out in breach of ethics rules drawn up in response to the medical crimes of Nazi Germany, it is claimed.
A group of 22 scientists are condemning a controversial trial involving feeding GM rice to children in China and the US. (photo: The Daily Mail)
Youngsters aged 6-10 were fed so-called Golden Rice, which has been modified to contain enhanced levels of beta carotene or vitamin A.
The rice is being developed to combat Vitamin A deficiency, which is linked to damage to the sight, poor brain development and immune system failure.
However high consumption can also have harmful toxic effects and cause birth defects.
Critics are furious that the GM rice was not put through animal feeding trials to ensure it was safe before being given to children.
The decision to use the children has been condemned as 'completely unacceptable' by a group of 22 scientists - all GM critics - from Britain and around the world.
They claim it is indicative of moves by the biotech lobby, led by the USA and biotech firms, to force GM food into the mouths of the world without proper assessment.
The project was financed and run through the US National Institutes of Health and involved children in China and America.
The scientists have written an open letter to the team behind the experiments, condemning the way they were conducted.
It states: 'We are writing to express our shock and unequivocal denunciation of the experiments being conducted by your colleagues which involve the feeding of genetically modified Golden Rice to human subjects.'
The letter says there has been 'woefully inadequate pre-clinical evaluation' of the rice.
The scientists argue there is a large body of evidence showing GM food production can trigger gene mutations which 'can result in health damaging effects when GM food products are fed to animals'.
The letter adds: 'Our greatest concern is that this rice, which is engineered to overproduce beta carotene, has never been tested in animals'.
It says there is evidence that certain chemicals derived from beta carotene 'are both toxic and cause birth defects'.
Critics of the GM experiments says the Nuremburg code states that children under 10 are not considered legally capable of giving consent to participation in such experiments.
They say the code also requires that human guinea pigs should not be used if scientists have an alternative experimental method.
Thirdly, experiments on humans should not be conducted until tests with animals have identified potential hazards.
Among the leading bodies behind the GM Golden rice project are the biotech company Syngenta, the Rockefeller Foundation and the charitable foundation set up by Microsoft boss Bill Gates.
The list of signatories to the protest letter includes Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at Sunderland University, who said: 'This type of experimentation is frightening - children as lab rats - it is not on.'
Another is Prof David Schubert, of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, San Diego, who said: 'It is completely immoral to feed this rice to children without proper safety testing...It's like putting a new drug on the market with no toxicology or safety trials.'
Other signatories include Prof Carlo Leifert, director of the Tesco Centre for Organic Agriculture at Newcastle University; and Dr Stanley WB Ewen.
Dr Ewen was involved in rat feeding trials in Scotland in 1999 which linked GM potatoes to harmful toxic effects.
Dr Brian John, of GM Free Cymru said: 'These irresponsible and dangerous trials must be stopped immediately, and the Golden Rice Project team must put its much-vaunted product through a full and transparent testing process before it is allowed to pass the lips of any other human being.'
Project manager at the Golden Rice Organisation, Dr Adrian Dubock, denied that the Nuremburg Code has been breached. He said the feeding trials had been approved by independent ethical review panels.
'Parents were not given financial rewards for their children's participation - to avoid undue pressure on poor families - but children were rewarded with school bags and pencils and paper as a thank you for participating,' he said.
Dr Dubock said 6,000 people around the world die every day due to illnesses related to failing immune systems where Vitamin A deficiency is a factor.
'The Golden Rice contains the food colours found everywhere in coloured natural foods and the environment...There is no possible way the trials could do any harm to the participants.'
Dr Dubock said animal experiments would not have helped. 'As humans are the designed beneficiaries of Golden Rice, animal testing could not answer the questions posed,' he said.
This appears odd as all GM foods, which are designed to be eaten by humans, are required to go through animal testing by food safety authorities in many countries.
16 Comments so far
Show AllIt is apparent that companies in this country, who are more interested in profits than humanity, have learned that if they say they can feed the world or they can cure some problem with GM food, they will be allowed to run rampant. This kind of testing was made unacceptable for a reason, and apparently those reasons have gone the way of all things in the biotech industry. I find it amazing that in public policy and administration doctoral work, I must submit my proposals to review boards, have letters that provide informed consent, and I must under all circumstances protect those who are vulnerable from unnecessary risk. Yet, apparently, those who use not questionnaires, but actually products on test subjects are permitted to do this kind of thing to our children without consequences.I would call on the President and his staff to put an end to this kind of crime, nationalize and then liquidate companies like Syngenta, Monsanto, Bayer, ADM, Cargill and the rest, using the proceeds to fund the medical care of those who have been harmed by this kind of insane food tampering. I would ask that he fire anyone in the FDA or the USDA that is working within those departments appointed by Bush or planted after serving in a Republican administration or working for any of the biotech firms for the last 40 years. Enough already with the poisoning of our children and families. It is time to demand healthy safe, non-modified or treated foods again. It is time to stop these companies who put profit before human life or common decency and sense.
The FDA and EPA have loopholes available in bypassing ethical restrictions which they have outright opposed in the desire to use pregnant women and children (especially the poor)in the diabolic practices of the food and chemical industries. This is nothing new. The 4th Reich marches on. Luckily, one consolation is that the military is not inducting small children yet. There they would be completely vulnerable to all kinds of experimentations.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2006/2006-01-25-05.asp
Jane Goodall has said the same thing-which is why she proposed a Nobel prize for medicine that doesnt use non human animal torture.
Malcolm Hooper, Prof David Schubert, Prof Carlo Leifert, Dr Stanley WB Ewen,
Dr Brian John, these people are immoral cowards.
They make their living off animal experimentation and are just trying to get research funding pushed in their direction.
GMos should be illegal- testing them on innocent non humans is not the answer.
You cant cure diseases in elephants by experimenting on giraffes. Rats are not simple versions of human beings-they are different species.
These scientists are despicable and have the moral understanding of retarded infants.
Torturing innocent non humans in research intended for humans is like helping a homeless person by kicking a family out of their house.
If they really wanted to help people they would say the research shouldnt be done period.
They just want to get funding dollars for their animal torture.
Pfizer does research on African children because they know that if youa re making medicine for humans, you need to use humans ultimately.
The use of non human species is just a quasi Darwininan myth to keep cowardly despicable scientists employed.
"To be humane is to be cruel, vicious and unrestrained, like humans.
To be inhumane is to be compassionate, restrained, moderate, like non humans."
All GM foods contain new chemical combinations in the same plant or animal. You can't just take one fish gene section and splice it into a rice cell-you have to insert the whole gene, 1/50 of the fish's entire genetic code. Even if you can switch a fish code section over to the rice plant, other chemicals are created. Million year balances are thrown out of whack. That's when things happen inside the fish/rice living thing.
Most of the combos simply die. We never hear about them. That's why, of the ones that live, most are somewhat messed up but not morbidly messed up.
The effect of producing brand new hormonal combinations is to mess up certain human beings who eat the combinations. A few people have strong medical reactions to GM foods and not to most ordinary foods.
If you take enough kids through enough experiments you're going to have a dead kid.
Another thing too, would these wonderful moralists be happy if they did rat torture and the GMO rice didnt affect them-but then it did affect humans later on?
It happened with Thalidomide and other drugs.
Would they just say: oops! If there was a problem the rat research should have shown it!
It just shows that they are worried about losing research grants not human health.
if you take out the non human component then it puts their jobs at risk.
Non human animal research fraud is based upon the quasi Darwinian idea that you can take other "lesser" species and break them down into component parts and use the data as a reliable indicator for humans.
In 1989 Nazi camp survivors tried to get the nazi research destroyed but they were told the research was valuable(of course-since it used humans).
The people claiming we need non human animal research are those who profit from it.They can make careers out of torturing rats and announcing every few years-we may have a breakthrough.
Seems like every week there is another breakthrough and yet the final results are years and years away.
There was a Hugh Grant movie where a doctor was using the homeless for medical research and the doctor(Gene Hackman) is watching a tv news show that mentions that a treatment for spinal cord injuries in rats had been found-and he quips " 5 billion rats are rejoicing at the discovery." In the movie, the patients of sick people were helping to get homeless people for the research.
It was a remarkably thoughtful movie-because there is an inherent selfishness in medical research-you have to wish ill on others to find cures for you or those you care about(like organ transplant donors).
If they really wanted to be moral, they would propose that the scientists who are making GMOs be used for research-and have it tested on their children.
That would be the more sound ethical view here. Not saying that other more innocent parties should be used in experiments.
And to think these are the type of sadists that the UK police puts laws in place to protect from groups like SHAC.
This site has the iron clad anti-vivisection arguments:
http://animalvegfaq.tripod.com
I have used them against researchers and they have never been able to refute them.
That's what's really sad about medical science. They dont have a true ethical leg to stand on, but they keep doing their torture anyway, and some of them like these misguided idiots above, may actually think they are kind.
Scientists are the last people to look to as authorities on the morality of GMos. It is science policing science.
We need wisdom and common sense instead.
These scientists are human garbage.
They torture the innocent as a profession. They are no different from war profiteers who maim and kill civilians and claim they are defending freedom.
"To be humane is to be cruel, vicious and unrestrained, like humans.
To be inhumane is to be compassionate, restrained, moderate, like non humans."
Kind of makes you wonder about all the conditions and diseases people are getting these days. My Dad just went on a gluten free diet a few months back and I was surpised to learn that 1 in 133 people have celiac disease. So much of our food does not carry the proper labeling and even then, we really don't know what's in it unless you picked it off a tree yourself. Testing on children is horrendous and makes you wonder if these people have children of their own, if so, they have no soul.
www.oldelmtree.com
Josef Mengele is at it again, eh?
This is a complete boondoggle. Kids like carrots.
Orange vegetables are full of vitamin A.
So is bear liver but it's so full that you get carotene poisoning (too much vitamin A) from it.
I didn't know General Motors was in the food industry? When did this happen?
There are alot of things that Bush allowed that are now poping up.
The world's poor do not need genetically-engineered beta carotene enhancement in rice. We have been using spices for many millennia to do that. For example 8 g (about a teaspoon) of paprika supplies the daily requirement of vitamin A. If the world's poor lack access to spices then someone is oppressing them. The US government is promoting GM commodity grains but it should be promoting local nutritional self-sufficiency. Many regions rely on traditional varieties of rice and other grains that are far more nutritious than the varieties peddled by the USA. The USA promotes milling too so that most of the nutritious part of the rice kernel is milled off. It may be that a majority of the vitamin A deficient are as a result of US pressure on their governments to replace traditional varieties grown by the people with commodity rice from the USA. This is to push them into the cities to work in the factories to serve the "global market". This is the US elites' master plan of course. And if they create a vitamin A deficiency they see that as merely another profit opportunity. We have to demand land/water rights for all, and let the people feed themselves.
"We have to demand land/water rights for all, and let the people feed themselves"
They do not want the people to feed themselves. They want to control food, water and energy and reduce consumption by reducing living standards and population.
JP Morgan always said that for anything you do you need 2 reasons, a good one and the real one. the "good" reason is we are running out of resources and damaging the planet, it is also a myth that has become a religion.
The real reason is they want eliminate inferior races and defective individuals (poor, unemployable, elderly) so as to create a master race via evolution and genetic matching. Also, in the industrial age, the number of workers (debt slaves) to keep the ruling elite well supplied is much reduced, so they have no need for most of the 6 billion in population. And fewer people means it is easier to control them. Thats also why they won't provide a single payer health care system. Those who can not afford health care are meant to be terminated earlier, since inadequate health care leads to shorter lives, and poorer people are least worthy as otherwise they would not be poor. Survival of the fittest they say.
Thats been the plan for over 100 years with the birth of the Eugenics movement which is still going strong but under various UN and US agencies which have comforting names that mask their true goals (the workers in these agencies believe they are doing good and in isolated areas, do some good, but overall they get bad overall results by the design of their leaders ).
From Jeffrey Smith in his Genetic Roulette book.
"According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so little Vitamin A, a 2 year old child would need to eat 7 lbs per day, and an adult 20 lbs per day, to get the daily recommended dose."
Testing is fine, very little has been done on GM foods, but the risks for golden rice do not outweigh the benefits. Better off tackling the root cause of vitamin deficiency. And start the testing with adults, after animal testing, and then move on to children. In the US no human testing is required, and the animal testing that is done by the Monsantos of the world are designed not to detect problems. FDA blindly accepts the results.
Sick sick sick. American CEO's have no shame, no dignity. They knowingly ship infected peanut butter to victims just to increase profits....
I'm boycotting everything that comes from them, everything in a wrapper. But only unusual non-profit crops are safe from GMO. Kava and Guava and Santos and upo just to name a few are peasant foods in the pacific, extremely nutritious, and not profitable to modify by the chemical companies turned agrigiants in 2000: Monsanto, Dow and others. The reason the Giant Chemical companies went into the agriculture sector was to move their poisons out a whole new door....
Read "The Biotech Century" by Jeramey Rifkin. You will never eat anything from a store again....
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
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Nothing personal---It's business.
Shame on those supporting these trials. As long as ilk like this one continues to see the world through eyes that see nothing but dollar signs, the world will continue to be in trouble.
Looks like a mere continuance of the status quo from some of it's key forebears. Nothing new that's for sure.
More importantly, it's another example of people protesting and accusing and nothing being done. They will continue with these kind of abuses and worse ones as long as they are unobstructed, especially now that they can see that none dare oppose them with worse than words. They will march right over all the opposition (and human rights too) just like the German scientists they learned so much from, because much like in WWII Germany, our leaders are complicit, and our citizens indifferent, excluded, apathetic.
The world's affairs are increasingly controlled by sociopaths who continue to gain confidence from victories of brazen and shameless lying and public denials of damning evidence while their media changes the channel endlessly. Clearly the time has come when world leaders (elected or not) have begun to realize that they can finally stop beating around the proverbial bush (no pun intended) and being sneaky, and just start doing whatever they want. They have seen that the world is backing down.