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| A memo leaked in Canada in 1999 and written by Dr George Paterson described a private deal which resulted in rapid approval for two new kinds of GM NewLeaf potatoes made by Monsanto (4). Until the deal was negotiated, the potatoes had been held up in the regulatory system because Monsanto refused to provide key scientific information to regulators assessing the products' health and environmental effects. Michele Brill-Edwards, a former Health Canada drug regulator said of the Paterson memo: "What you're seeing is a high- level example of a very dirty game that practically nobody knows about. These kinds of meetings go on all the time........... people are careful not to let this kind of thing be known."
And let's not forget that Monsanto was responsible for another scientific scandal involving the GM growth hormone rBST, which was approved in the United States but not in Canada (5). In the latter country, the tactics used by Monsanto (and supported by George Paterson) appalled both the regulators and the media, and some of the malpractice related to the scientific data submitted -- reluctantly and belatedly -- in support of its application for approval. This was revealed by a later "gap analysis" of the research data which showed that significant areas of required research had just not been covered. Some of the whistleblowers were later fired. Later still, after a very careful "meta-analysis" of all the supporting data submitted by Monsanto, Dohoo and others (6) revealed that a good deal of uncomfortable information relating to health damage, in a multitude of documents, was simply masked out or disregarded in the pursuit of approval. The authors were too polite to refer to scientific fraud, but that is what they were dealing with.
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monsanto
