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the audit committee decided that the data did not support Dr. Pusztai’s conclusions. Dr. Pusztai again reviewed his own data and said that they did. Furthermore, he conducted his own peer review; he sent copies of his research reports and the television transcript to scientists who requested these documents, and asked them to evaluate the materials. In February 1999, more than 20 scientists from at least 13 countries called a press conference to announce that the findings were just as Dr. Pusztai had claimed.45 Public calls for a moratorium on food biotechnology research followed immediately. Most scientists (other than the 20 supporters) strongly doubted that genetically modified lectins could have harmed the rats, although they thought the potatoes might have been induced to express higher levels of other toxic substances. When the British government rejected demands for a moratorium, critics charged that government officials were “in the pocket of the biotech industry” and had offered huge sums to biotechnology companies to induce them to work in Britain. They also noted that Monsanto had bought off the Rowett Institute in advance with a £140,000 grant.46

In May, the British Royal Society weighed in with an anonymous review that judged Dr. Pusztai’s studies flawed and inconclusive. Dr. Pusztai called this clandestine peer review “deprecable because many influential committees are redolent with advisors linked to biotechnology companies.”47 The Lancet, a leading medical journal, agreed, calling the Royal Society’s review “a gesture of breathtaking impertinence.”43 The Prince of Wales expressed sympathy for Dr. Pusztai’s plight. Industry commentators, however, said Dr. Pusztai was “largely responsible for the British public’s mistrust of genetically modified food” as well as for subsequent governmental actions to regulate, label, or ban genetically modified foods.48

In October 1999, in an act that itself generated a huge outcry, the Lancet published Dr. Pusztai’s data as a short research letter. The journal fueled the controversy by including another report in the same issue suggesting that snowdrop lectins interact with human white blood cells in some peculiar way that demands further investigation. An editorial in the same issue, however, stated that such experiments were incomplete, insignificant, inadequately controlled, and uninterpretable.49 Justifying the journal’s decision to publish evidently flawed research, the Lancet’s editor chided critics for their “failure to understand the new, and apparently unwelcome, dialogue of accountability that needs to be forged between scientists and the public.” He quite sensibly pointed out, “Risks are not simply questions of abstract probabilities or theoretical reassurances. What matters is what people believe about these risks and why they hold those beliefs. [The] data are preliminary and non-generalisable, but at least they are now out in the open for debate.”50

By one report, a member of the Royal Society with ties to biotechnology companies accused the editor of acting immorally by publishing research known to be “untrue” and implied that doing so would “have implications for his personal position.” With or without such threats, the editor’s argument did not convince scientists skeptical of the quality of the research, and they heavily criticized the journal for publishing it.51 Whatever the scientific merits of Dr. Pusztai’s work, his treatment reinforced public suspicions that no group with a vested interest in food biotechnology would act in the public interest. If a problem with transgenic foods did emerge, the government and much of the scientific establishment would support the industry above all other considerations.

Killing Monarch Butterflies

We now turn to the most widely publicized—and most fiercely debated—example of unintended consequences—the effects of Bt crops on friendly insects, in this case, monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants that grow throughout fields of corn. Of course the Bt toxin kills monarch larvae that