This refers to Dr Usha Barwale Zehr’s letter (July 31) on my Q&A (‘GM food can cause the biggest health crisis’, July 18). Zehr has challenged some of my assertions, but these are incorrect. She says that all reports on the studies on the Bt Brinjal were signed by the institutes — this can easily be verified from the official files of Bt brinjal (that were on the Ministry of Environment website in India). As stated in my report, they were not signed in the first official pages by the researchers. It is also well explained in the report that the insecticide in the Bt brinjal is not Cry 1Ac but a chimeric protein. So the assertion that the protein which is in the Bt brinjal plant is the exact protein that got tested in the toxicity studies is incorrect.
It is also impossible to destroy all genes of the food in the intestine contrary to what Zehr’s letter suggests. On the nptII gene, several European authorities have asked the company to remove these unnecessary, useless, risky genes.
Zehr speaks of how the comparisons of Bt and non-Bt have to be done, but this is exactly what I did in my reassessment — I compared Bt and non-Bt treated animals with the same line or same hybrid. The results are clearly not similar as evidenced in my summary studying crude Mahyco’s crude data. Nor is it correct to say, as Zehr does, that there are no ‘treatment related statistical differences’. While talking of diarrhoea, Mahyco focuses on stable parameters instead of focusing on the disturbed ones like any medical doctor should do.
Finally, Bt brinjal has always been compared with its non-Bt counterpart in my file, like they say, but not in their file! The proof is that they have added in their treatments a lot of unrelated, non-substantially equivalent brinjals in the diets to avoid clear results.
Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini President of the Scientific Council of CRIIGEN
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