and they were not supposed to have been touched experience sixty thousand pages of internal documents and in these internal documents it was very clear that the scientists inside the agency said we need to test these foods for toxicity allergenicity immune response lower nutrition and for environmental contamination page after page of study they said we need none of this was done today around a third of the soil from the u s is genetically altered and when it gets to the factory it's mixed together with ordinary soil and you never know which is at engineering it means one question means one career you ask one question you get the answer and you might or might not be able to publish it but that's the end of your career what's i think very unique in my case is that i survive the attack on scientists is very well structured by the vatican destry it's systematic it's worldwide it's very coordinated it's part of the way that they do business so anywhere in the world at any time if someone finds a problem they're jumped on if the problem is really severe they get jumped on even more whenever there's something that comes up that can threaten this biotechnology empire companies exist to make money they don't exist to entirely for the public good they are exist to give profit back to their shareholders pigs they could get pregnant big because of the g m corn is that right so so what i may do it another time i'm on my cell phone now but i might actually have to we talk a bit i might actually email you and tell you exactly what i've written down about what we've talked about to make sure it's accurate so that was good news he said that he was willing to talk his cell phone was dying on the battery and he said first thing he said was is my name going to be in the article you're writing so i had to put them at ease and tell him no it's not if you don't want to be in the article it would be in there that's that's the truth that's why we don't have a lot of whistleblowers if farmers farmers are not interested a lot of scientists are scared about it and that's the whole state of the art right now where almost all scientist focused on genetically engineered research are funded directly or indirectly by industry so we're going to very dangerous situation because there's no real there's no real independent science and they could lead to toxins and allergens and new diseases and antibiotic resistant diseases a nutritional problems most of the soil grown in united states is monsanto's round a pretty soybeans where they take the soybeans and they put into the a gene that allows the plant to be sprayed with monsanto's roundup herbicide and it will kill all of the weeds around the plant but the soybean plant will survive so eighty six percent of the soybeans in united states are genetically engineered to withstand monsanto's herbicide long term consumption of g m foods may affect health the professor is so concerned about the implications of his discovery he's decided to publicize his findings as a scientist looking at it actively working on the is one of the easiest to genetically engineer and the point of the whole genetic modification experiment was to protect the potato against philadelphia us physicians criticize that after more than ten years there is still no long term studies concerning the consumption of genetic modified food due to the fact that there is no initial experimental data recorded and labeling has not been permitted so even though i'm not a scientist i worked with more than thirty scientists over two years to document the known health risks of genetically engineered foods and the first part of the book is the documented health risks and there are sixty five different health risks divided into sections now the first one that i chose to highlight with an evidence of reactions is dr pou styles work and the reason why is that our part pointed out that it was basically the process itself of genetic engineering because the significant damage so only the genetically engineer potatoes caused the problem the rats th were fed the natural potatoes along with the same insecticide did not have the same problems so his brilliant design showed that it wasn't the insecticide that caused the problems it was somehow the process of creating the genetically engineered potato and he used the same process that's used to create all the other genetically engineered crops on the market the even system takes about ten days to get in here so if we do trial we wouldn't have seen the end result if i had the choice i would certainly not eat it till i see at least compatible experimental evidence which we producing for genetically modified potatoes those one hundred fifty seconds where boom boom boom and they got everybody got the message everybody got the message  they asked me would you eat it i said no certainly not that there's we worked on it if i could avoid it i would certainly avoid it the the other piece of the message was that  us that they should not use shadows citizens as human guinea pigs when he was asked to speak on television he had enormous pressure he was one of the few people on earth that realized that the g crops on the market might be causing all that damage in the garden in the brain in the organs of the entire population and so with permission from his director he was interviewed and then he was a hero for about t days at the route institute the director praised his work took over all the press work put out his own press release praising it as world class research and then the two phone calls allegedly place from the u k prime minister's office forward whole situation changed and then the director to save his own skin decided that the best way to deal with the situation and then we looked at the submissions of applications by the biotech companies produce products which were already eating and we find that that they were flimsy and they were not  extensive studies he said it was a turning point in my life he said jeffrey why realise what i was doing and what they were doing was diametrically opposed i was doing safety studies they were doing as little as possible to get their foods on the market as quickly as possible so the turning point in his wife was realizing that there were other scientists in the world who were not taking care of the health of the world we're not treating science properly you see he's on the top level of the world he expects other scientists to do so so more than being fired from his job more than than these shocking moments in his life his greatest shock was to discover that there was this whole world of scientists that would basically allow foods on the market for economic these g m o crops are very different this is early on this is the very beginning of the regulation of genetic engineering the state scientists that are scientists as these genetically engineered foods are not equivalent not substantially equivalent to conventional food and that of course that was the position that the industry wanted this nothing different here this is oh no it's very different different proteins viruses different organisms inside these foods they create unique health risks you know we see unique toxicity they get these foods could be toxic you know there's one document here that i think is especially important that really shows this history probably better than any other and this had to do with their compliance in looking at the studies and here's what the f d a scientists their own scientists said you know the thing i eighteen thousand seven hundred seventy seven you know right here and they say you know what we need to look at how these crops change how much can aggregate nichols how much pesticides you put in here we need to see how they change want to use how much water they need all long term studies that were needed down here we need to see what about the loss of nutrients in the food what about loss of nutrition none of that was done without loss of diversity in seeds long term studies recommended by the scientists never done here look at this changes in toxin or chemicals in the foods study recommended long term study never done so the scientists asked for the study so let us do them we think there's a problem here we've taken a preliminary look we there's a problem but the politicians at the f d a and in the administration of that time said no they suppress science and these questions these studies have never been done never been  the flavor savor tomato was the first genetically engineered food to reach the public cal gene the corporation that produced the tomato had done three voluntary feeding studies on rats and found lesions in some other rats stomach the question that you're asking is about the flavor saver tomato and what went into that curiously enough i was actually one of the outside consultants that was in the last meeting on the flavor saver me which wasn't terribly successful commercially but the f d a scientist went through a long present taishan about all the analyses they had done and her concluding slide was the flavor saver tomato is a tomato so they had not found any substantial differences except for the addition of the one extra gene that actually decreased the rate at which they went soft so they extended the the shelf life and indeed that was the conclusion so they had no reason to regulate it on the basis of safety no one gets up in the morning saying i want to go buy a genetically engineered food they offer no benefits no more nutrition no more flavor no nothing they only offer risks that's all they offer to the consumer and so the average person of course rational person would say why would i buy a food that offers me no only benefits the only risks so it was critical critical for the industry to get these foods out without anyone knowing because if they knew they were obviously choose not to buy them i don't know how many years of testing you would feel comfortable with but if i told you it was twenty five years would you feel comfortable if i told you it was twelve years would you feel comfortable six years at what point how many years of testing and how many different kinds of tests would make you feel comfortable i will tell you as as i've said before that because these foods are tested more than any others any other  new kinds of foods that have come on the market i am more confident about these than i am about picking up a new package of something that the ingredients of which i don't know i had a long term relationship with a group of indigenous communities and with them we developed the idea that transgenic materials would come to mexico  the problem was that when they call them nobody was there to tell them so that's when we started thinking we should really prepare a laboratory with capacity to detect the presence of  where i was helping them to set up that laboratory and the person who came to train them was my student david quist we were just training to train you would have to have a positive control and a negative control for the positive control he brought corn from the us and from the negative control we thought we should just use the local corn which of course is going to be clean and wonderful surprise came when the negative control started coming out that means we started finding transgenic materials were they were not supposed to be the reason why our findings were so astounding was because it was thought that there was no trans unicorn being planted in mexico at all and people wanted it that way the government the local communities that people who lived in the city they all wanted to have it that way that they would meet the transgenic in mexico why because mexico is the center of origin of corn and they make mexican government was worried about these collections are also a source of useful traits for breeders looking for things like insect resistance drought tolerance green faulty all kinds of other characteristics sometimes these can these almost landry says could be source of genes for those kinds of those kinds of characteristics these things are slowly disappearing from the countryside it's farmers adapt and were proved right he's also as farmers leave the countryside because now  where here in central mexico in a place where traditionally for many thousands of years corn has been planted in these lands it's a very rich well conics oils and people plant corn here for many generations over the years corn has changed and able to tell over the years over time whether there is more or less what kind of transgenic materials are here because the transgenic manipulation is invisible people around here don't even know that they are receiving the transgenic and they are growing them and they're passing them on to their children and to their neighbors and so on so what we're trying to develop is the methods so that they can know what's happening and make their own choices and the decisions about what to do about it one way to do the way most people have done it so far is to go down to the fields and sample each one of the fields you take a piece of a leaf and then take it to the lab but that's very time consuming and very difficult to do the possibility that we are developing is the possibility of sampling the air that contains pollen grains from the corn so that we are in effect looking at many fields at the same time looking at the particles that come in the air and then detecting the particles of corn and within those detecting those pollen grains that  a long road that we are following the next step for us would be to be able to have a piece of machinery that we are developing that we could move around with us but really our goal in the end is to get ourselves out of the picture to develop an instrument that we can make available to those people down there and we want to enable them so that they can go into the internet and through the internet build up a map so that they can see each other on the landscape and in relationship with each other once we were sure that we had found transgenic material seeing what haka we wanted to have a publication that would be very visible so we sent it for publication to nature nature sent this article off to experts to be reviewed five times around and then nature said yes we will publish it by that time however the news that these information was coming out made very many people within the industry very narrows and very unhappy so they themselves started a discredit taishan campaign for the paper they did not want the paper to be published and if it was going to be published they wanted people not to believe what this paper was saying now we know the industry hired a professional a public relations companies propaganda companies who at the time were experimenting for the first time with something called viral marketing which his the idea that a p r company a public relations company will go into the internet and start spreading ideas around in on behalf of the companies that hire them but without telling people i forget they made up two names and these two doctors went on to be on the internet and started spreading rumors that what we had said was false and that the paper was flawed and so on and so forth and it the way the internet works is that people really respond to each others opinions and the idea started really spreading around that our paper was false and had been submitted under false and maybe illegal conditions whatever the case is because we don't really know to this day nature decided to print two letters criticizing a paper and also get clean to a very confusing editorial where they say we don't want to take positions based on what we know now we have doubts that we should have published the paper back then  completely against the way we do science nature itself recognizes that they had never done anything like this in one hundred thirty years the whole history of the magazine so there was something seriously important happening that they do not want to talk about but i believe i'm convinced it was pressure from this industrial actors of industrial activists who wanted to change the nature of the position towards this problem the industry said you don't need to worry about this because we have it under control the control is really the question and they have been telling the world that they really had control over these crops that if they planted it planted corn corn fields was a huge problem for them because he really showed very simply and with real evidence that they really did not have control so they lost the claim to having control over these materials and from that point on the stop to talking about all exist the life i became a start of a new life you know when you meet people like for example prince charles that's a i wouldn't have met him otherwise so  i think that there are pluses strong pluses decision by the governments and by the biotechnology industry that they just simply go on the basis that if you don't have new they cannot you always will find scientists who are diametrically opposed for one reason or another but frankly you have to look at the bulk of the evidence and the bulk of the evidence is very simply this these products have been out virtually every food that you consume including you in germany has some genetically modified product in it whether soybeans are crossed there has not been a single documented analyzed case of even a headache attributable to genetic modification i haven't read the study yet it came out today i can immediately called my office and asked them to get me a hole in the study so she saw my assistant called into austria and spoke to someone and they're going to get me the study as soon as possible but the finding is consistent fertility problems with animals for genetically engineered crops we saw that with soybeans and we were in farmers reporting that with corn as well it's very difficult to do proper studies because monsanto doesn't allow people to use their products for studies and they also don't allow access to the parent light so that you can compare the exact same soybean with the only difference being now one of the criticisms was that she didn't use carefully controlled genetically engineered so i along with it's nearly identical not g m so i counterpart but monsanto didn't allow that soil to be released new york official statistics reveal but in the past ten years food related illnesses have practically doubled in the us since the introduction of g m food to the american diet first publication about rousseau in two thousand and he's where i actually wrote about rousseau's concept of democracy rousseau said origin of inequality between people is private property and there it all began it starts with california berkeley and we're standing at a boundary where that campus meets the private and military part of the research machine this is a big research machine one side of it has public the other side is private corporate and military the generation of knowledge that comes out of this place is very important for the world not only because of technology but also because of how we understand ourselves in a role in the world in a role with nature so that in closing of the knowledge that used to be public and becomes private or becomes corporate or becomes militarized secret that enclosure of knowledge is something that i consider to be very damaging for the movement of science and the movement of knowledge so it is a very strong battle that is happening here and in other places in the world to try and protect that they versity of knowledge that the versity of culture the latest development in this battle has been the arrival here on this  british petroleum who would like to be called beyond petroleum b p came here offering five hundred million dollars five hundred million dollars which is much more than anybody had ever offered the university supposedly for research  administrators for the university find it very difficult to say no to money and it doesn't matter where the money comes from they want the money so they try to pass these contract with b without people noticing but we have been able to find out a few things about it we know that b p wants new buildings in the canyon they want buildings that are built behind the fences of the national la so that nobody can access them they want access to our students they want access to our seminar so that they can find out which i d s are useful for them they want to have control over publication what gets published what gets said publicly or not but more importantly they also want access to the curriculum to what will be taught in the university and because this is a this is a public university we also the term in the curriculum of the children from kindergarten all the way to high school and b p now has access to deciding what is called science and what is not called science so now they can say whoever is on our side is a scientist and whoever is not on our side is not a scientist so the power that they gain from that is extraordinary and they closed the door shut to any public minority of people who oppose it and i have been very involved in trying to post these as well as other advances of these corporate kind of science this privatized kind of science because i believe that the main problem is that people don't realize what's happening and by the time they will wake up it will be too late the possibility of having a public university doing public research and developing public understanding of humanity is going to be gone we are very far from free speech at this university you're not allowed to ask many questions and you're not allowed to say many things and if you do you get into serious trouble and i am just one of many examples where people are punished by what they say and what they research in my case i was pushed out of the university at least three times every time i fought back and we managed to keep my job but it's been very difficult and i am grateful that there is this protection around my position right now after so many years of battle i feel that i have this freedom and i really intend to use it as much as possible we are manipulating life in a way that we really do not understand we cannot control and then we're letting it go into the environment so it's a change that is radical that is unprecedented and one of those dogmas is that humans have the power to change nature the way they want i've always said you only defend that which you love so people say what should i do how should i defend the environment go out and fall in love with just found love the same believe me when you do i think i'll defend