No-one is saying that products should be withdrawn from the market. There are out and out opponents of the processes whose position is well known and well understood. They ve produced no scientific evidence, no force of argument, no intellectual case for what they are saying. The scientific community is clearly divided on the health and environmental safety of the genetic engineering of food crops. It is not true that all lectins are toxic Dr. Pusztai, a leading authority on lectins, who has published some 270 scientific papers, had been working with the snowdrop lectin for seven years and was using it precisely because it was not thought to be toxic to mammals.
Lectins are a family of molecules that recognise and bind to sugars.
The human body, for example, contains many different lectins. The reason that Dr. Pusztai s research was so significant is because a control group of potatoes which had the snowdrop lectin added to them did not affect the rats in the same way as the potatoes genetically engineered with the snowdrop lectin even though the lectin was present in both. This points to the process of genetic engineering itself the same process used for the genetically engineered foods currently approved for human consumption in the UK, none of which has been tested to see if it has the same effects on the immune system or internal organs. They have been asked for it now for some considerable time. As soon as they do make their findings available to us of course we shall examine them quickly and comprehensively.