Monday, August 06, 2007
GM FREE IRELAND issues a correction with an apology.

GM FREE IRELAND issues a correction with an apology.

 http://www.gmfreeireland.org/ Accessed 4 August 2007

Gmfreeireland.org would like to correct a claim previously made that Shane Morris made "fraudulent scientific claims". Gmfreeireland.org acknowledges such a claim has no legal basis and would like to point out that:

- No findings of fraud were ever made by the British Food Journal in regards to the claims in the publication in question.

- The paper in question remains published as a valid piece of scholarly research.

- The academic award for the paper remains valid.

- A letter of explanation on the matter was published in the British Food Journal 2006 Vol 108, Issue



It should be noted that GM WATCH in the UK also made changes to the claims on their website at my written request.

PS and the apology....some wording from a GM FREE Ireland email to their web hosts.....
.....However, following his solicitors request to you yesterday, I owe you an apology as it seems I failed to successfully upload the amended page at the time. This was also corrected.....


Monday, August 18, 2007
GM Watch goes off line

After written requests to GM Watch to remove defamtory material were ignored their own service providers have now disabled GM Watch's site to ensure compliance with their Acceptable Use Policy

Below is an email (service provider name withheld) indicating their actions taken.

I'm all for free speech but false allegations of fraud is not on...just ask Greenpeace what it feels like to be libeled. I wonder what the big funders (Zac Goldsmith's family) of GM Watch and Jonathan Matthews think now.


-----Original Message-----
From: Abuse Team [mailto: abuse@uk.X.net]
Sent: August 16, 2007 1:24 PM
To: Shane H. Morris
Cc: XX Abuse Team
Subject: Re: request to remove libelous statements from hosted website

Hi Shane

I contacted our customer's IT consultant earlier this afternoon,
who informed me that he would disable the site and this appears to
have now been done:

abuse@abuse:~$ GET  http://www.gmwatch.org
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not
allow contents to be listed.


Our customer's IT consultant also informed me that he will contact you
directly.

In the circumstances we consider the action taken by our customer to
have resolved the incident from an Acceptable Use Policy perspective,
and trust that you will agree.

Kind regards
XXXXXXX

posted by CelticLad @ 2:09 PM

Ok so maybe they did go over the legal proven at the moment line of using the phrase fraudulent science but what adjective would use when an experiment invited people to take wormy corn or quality gm-corn.

A photograph that it says shows a large sign suspended above the non-GM corn during the study that asked: "Would you eat wormy sweetcorn?" The GM corn, it claims, was labelled as "quality sweetcorn". The paper (vol 105, p 700) claims that the corn was marked simply as either genetically engineered or regular.

 http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/2007/jun.php#shane

 http://www.foodsafetynetwork.ca/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=9&sc=62&id=897

Below is the original article in question which has been pulled from the gmwatch archive, but of course available on archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20070522105547/http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=72&page=1

--------------------------------------------------------------

AWARD FOR A FRAUD

Bernard Weil/Toronto Star

The British Food Journal's Award for Excellence for Most Outstanding Paper in 2004 went to research that should never have been published. What the reviewers mistook for an impressive piece of scientific enquiry was a carefully crafted propaganda exercise that could only have one outcome. Both the award and the paper now need to be retracted.

Since this article was published a leading researcher into scientific ethics has called for the paper to be retracted.
New Scientist's report

It was late September 1999. The scene was a news conference outside a Loblaws grocery store in downtown Toronto. Greenpeace and the Council of Canadians were launching a public awareness campaign urging customers to ask the chain to remove all genetically modified foods from their shelves.

"The food is safe," shouted someone on the edge of the crowd. Jeff Wilson, who farms about 250 hectares northwest of Toronto, was part of a small group of hecklers. He had come to the store with Jim Fischer, the head of a lobby group called AgCare which supports GM foods. Doug Powell, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph, was also there.

And they had come prepared. Holding aloft a bug-ravaged cabbage, Wilson demanded, "Would you buy that?" Wilson claimed the cabbage could have been saved by genetic engineering.

According to a report in the Toronto Star, Doug Powell ended up in a shouting match with a shopper - 71-year old Evan John Evans, who told him, "I resent you putting stuff in my food I don't want."

A year later and Powell and Wilson's street theatrics had given way to a much more carefully choreographed exercise in persuading people that GM foods were what they wanted.

The scene this time was not Loblaws but Jeff Wilson's farm store, just outside the village of Hillsburgh. Here Powell and Wilson were running an experiment that had been conceived following the Loblaws encounter.

During summer 2000 Wilson grew both GM and conventional sweet corn on his farm. And following the first harvest in late August, both types of corn were put on sale amidst much publicity. The aim was to see which type would appeal most to Wilson's customers.

According to an award winning paper published in the British Food Journal, a sizeable majority opted to buy the GM corn. In the paper, authored by Wilson and Powell, and Powell's two research assistants - Katija Blaine and Shane Morris, the choice appears simple - the bins were "fully labeled" - either "genetically engineered Bt sweet corn" or "Regular sweet-corn". The only other written information mentioned in the paper that might have influenced the preference of customers was lists of the chemicals used on each type of corn, and pamphlets "with background information on the project."

What Powell and his co-authors failed to report was that the information on the chemicals came with a variation on the bug-eaten cabbage stunt Wilson pulled outside Loblaws. There Wilson had demanded of shoppers "Would you buy that?" In Wilson's store the sign above the non-GM corn bin asked, "Would You Eat Wormy Sweet Corn?" Above the the Bt-corn bin, by contrast, the equivalent sign was headed: "Here's What Went into Producing Quality Sweet Corn".

Toronto Star reporter Stuart Laidlaw, who visited Wilson's farm several times during the research, says, "It is the only time I have seen a store label its own corn 'wormy'". In his book Secret Ingredients, Laidlaw includes a photograph of the "wormy" corn sign, and drily notes, "when one bin was marked 'wormy corn' and another 'quality sweet corn,' it was hardly surprising which sold more."

Laidlaw also notes that any mention of the corn being labelled as "wormy" or "quality" was omitted in presentations and writings about the experiment. This is certainly the case with the paper in the British Food Journal. Yet the paper describes in some detail the care that the researchers took to avoid biasing consumer choice - by having, for example, both corn-bins kept filled to the same level throughout the day; and by selling the two different types of corn for exactly the same amount. We are even told the precise purchase price: Cnd$3.99/dozen.

The emotively worded signs are not the only instance of glaring experimenter bias that went unmentioned in the award winning paper. During his visits to the store, Laidlaw noted that an information table contained, as well as press releases and pamphlets on the experiments, a number of pro-GM fact sheets - some authored by industry lobby groups, but no balancing information from critics of genetic engineering.

And the bias didn't stop there. The lead researcher, Doug Powell, actually demonstrated to the journalist his ability to influence customer responses to questions about Bt corn and their future purchasing preferences. Laidlaw describes how when a customer who'd bought non-Bt corn was walking to his truck, "Powell talked to him about Bt corn - describing how it did not need insecticides because it produced its own and that it had been approved as safe by the federal government. Powell then told me I should talk to the man again. I did, and he said he would buy GM corn the next time he was at the store. Powell stood nearby with his arms crossed and a smile on his face."

Outside Loblaws the previous Fall, Powell had ended up in an unsuccessful slanging match. Now Powell and his associates had engineered a setting in which customer responses could be influenced far more successfully. Seeing Powell in action convinced Laidlaw that the only conclusion which could safely be drawn from these "experiments" was that, "fed a lot of pro-biotech sales pitches, shoppers could be convinced to buy GM products."

But none of the "pro-biotech sales pitches" made their way into the paper for which Powell and his associates were commended. Instead, research that was little more than pro-GM propaganda was presented as providing a meticulous scientific evaluation of consumer purchasing preferences.

Attempts to defend the research

One of the paper's co-authors, Shane Morris has made a number of attempts to defend the research and his role in it. On examination, however, these turn out to be as misleading as the research itself.

Morris says it's all "FAKE information and Lies!!!"

When we first drew attention to the evidence in Stuart Laidlaw's book, Morris replied on his blog with a piece entitled "More Spin, FAKE information and Lies!!!" in which he denied ever seeing any "misleading 'signs'".

So where does the photo on page 89 of Stuart Laidlaw's book come from?

The copyright belongs to the Toronto Star, the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada. It was one of several photographs taken at Wilson's farm store by one of the Star's top photographers, Bernard Weil. Weil is something of a hero in journalistic circles. Less than two years later, he was injured in Afghanistan when a grenade was thrown into his car. Last Fall, he was one of the first photographers into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

It would clearly be more than surprising if either Weil or the Toronto Star were complicit in "FAKE information and Lies!!!"

Morris says no "misleading signs during the data collection period"

Bernard Weil's photo of the "wormy" corn sign was one of several shot at Wilson's store during a media day held by Doug Powell and Jeff Wilson to publicise their study. The corn in the bins below the signs had just been harvested and was on sale as part of the study.

This is something that their press release for the event confirms.

"The first sweet corn and table potatoes of the season, including genetically engineered varieties, were available for consumers at Birkbank Farms today. The crops are part of an experiment comparing different pest management technologies coupled with consumer buying preference in a complete farm-to-fork approach." (HARVEST OF GENETICALLY ENGINEERED SWEET CORN AND POTATOES BEGINS AT BIRKBANK FARMS, 30.Aug.00)

That is what was said on August 30, 2000. The British Food Journal paper also confirms that August 30 was when the two types of corn were put on sale to customers at the store.

"Sales of both types of corn were recorded from August 30, when the corn was first harvested, to October 6..."

There's even a table in the paper where you can see how many dozen cobs of corn were sold on August 30.

So when Morris claims, "No data from any such "signs" were included in publication data", it is simply untrue. The "wormy" sign was photographed above the non-GM corn bin during the data collection period.

What Morris denies, Powell confirms

Curiously, although Morris claims the misleading signs were never there while the research was going on, the lead researcher, Doug Powell, has never made any attempt to disassociate himself from the signs. Powell's young daughter was photographed by Weil at the media day in front of the signs and in his book Laidlaw reports asking Powell explicitly about the "wormy" corn wording, and Powell's reply is included on page 118.

Powell told Laidlaw that the "wormy" question was simply rhetorical. He did not suggest that the wording or the sign were not part of the research. And it would be strange if he had. It was Powell, after all, who invited the media out to see his study on the day Bernard Weil took his photographs. In other words, this was the impression Powell wanted - at that time, at least - to present to the world.

On Powell's Food Safety Network website you can also read a letter of complaint that Powell wrote to the Toronto Star about an article about the research by Stuart Laidlaw - Altered food tested at the market, October 8, 2000. In his letter Powell says, "We simply asked consumers to decide for themselves, as the picture accompanying the story illustrated."

The picture accompanying the story was one of Bernard Weil's, showing Powell's young daughter in front of the corn bins with the signs above, ie Powell confirms that the signs photographed by Weil were a critical part of the choice presented to consumers.

Morris says he has photographic evidence of no misleading signs

Morris has also sought to dismiss the photographic evidence by producing his own. His photographs, he says, confirm there were no such "misleading signs during the data collection period".

But in the photograph of the signs that Morris has put on his blog, the resolution is so low that the wording on the relevant sign above the non-GM sweet corn bin simply cannot be read. However, from what can be seen - in terms of the number and position of words and the style of lettering - the sign would seem remarkably similar to the "wormy" corn sign in Bernard Weil's photograph!

The only differences in Morris's photograph appears to be the addition of the big sign in the middle of the picture (apparently, added shortly after August 30), and when Weil took his photographs the hand-written signs, including the "wormy" corn sign, were lower, resting on the back of the sweet corn bins.

Morris says Greenpeace Canada had no problem with his work

The other image Morris has put on his blog, and repeatedly drawn attention to, is styled, "Greenpeace Canada review of work." This text links to a photograph of Greenpeace Canada's former National Biotechnology Campaigner, Michael Khoo, looking at a sign in Wilson's store. Morris implies that if the Greenpeace campaigner wasn't happy with what he saw, he would hardly have kept quiet about it.

So we asked Michael Khoo about this. He told us that, contrary to what Morris claimed, it had been apparent in every way that he and Greenpeace disapproved of pretty much everything Morris and his co-researchers were up to.

Khoo said, "I well remember when I visited the experimental farm, which was a bit of a propaganda lab. Jeff [Wilson] and he [Shane Morris] took me around for a while, they were friendly, I took some pictures and spoke to their intern who had been conducting the "study".

Shane himself well knows that I thought his consumer testing booth had no validity, I told him so. I certainly never endorsed anything there and he is self-delusional if he says he remembers otherwise.

I formally request that my photo be removed from his website, as it only serves to blatantly misinform the public."

Khoo also said he remembered discussing with the Star's Stuart Laidlaw "how their 'study' lacked basic methodological integrity, principally because there were leading elements like the 'wormy' corn sign."

Khoo was subsequently quoted by Laidlaw in an article in the Star as saying, "It's junk science." The article said that in Khoo's view, "the study was deliberately skewed to favour Bt corn, out of fear that consumers would reject the controversial technology." (Altered food tested at the market, Toronto Star, October 8, 2000)

Morris seeks to attack Laidlaw's credibility

Morris has also sought to undermine Stuart Laidlaw's credibility. Laidlaw is a leading journalist at the Toronto Star - at one time serving on the paper's editorial board before choosing to go back to reporting. He was invited to join the Star's board as a direct result of the articles on food and farming that formed the basis of his book.

Shane Morris, however, implies on his blog that journalistic peers give Laidlaw a doubtful rating. To this end he quotes extensively from a review critical of Laidlaw's book. The piece was published in a farming paper, the Manitoba Co-operator.

What Morris doesn't tell his readers is that the piece by Jim Romahn was about the only bad review the book received. Laidlaw's book was widely praised in major papers across Canada, even to a surprising extent in the pro-business Globe and Mail. The book has also, incidentally, been on reading lists at Queen's and Wilfrid Laurier universities, the University of Manitoba and, we understand, Doug Powell's own University of Guelph.

There were also positive reviews in the farm press, and even the Manitoba Co-operator, which ran Romahn's review, later ran a favourable column about Laidlaw and the book. It's also ironic that Shane Morris sets such store by a piece in the Co-operator, given that the same paper also ran a damning editorial about an article by Morris and Doug Powell that it chracterised as "offensive" propaganda marked by "irrational views" and "virulent attacks on respected scientists." (Rude Science , John W. Morris, The Manitoba Co-operator, June 21 2001)

Finally, it's worth noting that Stuart Laidlaw - currently the Star's Faith and Ethics reporter - is someone anxious to maintain his journalistic integrity. When we contacted him for his comments on Morris's claims, he was keen not to be seen as partisan in his responses: "I do no want to be drawn into this, other than to stand by my reporting."

That reporting includes not only the evidence of bias in the signs, but the evidence of bias in the literature available to the store's customers and the overt attempt by Powell to influence a customer's attitude and future purchasing preferences. This latter type of intervention is not only indicative of flagrant bias but also has direct significance, given that the store, as Powell's paper notes, had a high number of repeat customers. This, of course, is equally relevant to the bias in the literature customers could pick up at the store.

Morris claims he wasn't there

In his initial response to the information from Stuart Laidlaw's book, Shane Morris claimed on his blog, "I wasn't even in the Country for your alledged (sic) 'sign' fraud!!"

Morris said he only arrived in Canada in mid-September 2000. Even if this were true, his own paper shows the consumer preference part of the study as running till October 6, so for several weeks of the study Morris cannot claim to have been out of the country. Michael Khoo, of course, says that he was shown around the study by Morris.

And any absence cuts both ways. How can Morris declare there were no misleading signs during the data collection period when, according to his own testimony, he was not even there for a significant part of the time?

Conclusion

The pro-biotech sales pitches Laidlaw documented at Wilson's farm store are consistent with the origins of this research. The editor of The Manitoba Co-operator, describes the lead researcher, Doug Powell, as someone who "morphed into a full-blown apologist for biotechnology, while still operating under his 'food safety' umbrella" at the University of Guelph. Powell is widely seen like this - as an aggressive biotech propagandist operating from within an academic setting. The dressing up of agitprop antics as scientific research is entirely consistent with this.

Initially, in their search for publicity, Powell and his co-researchers seem to have felt little need to disguise their lack of experimenter neutrality. After all, nobody engaged with these issues in their locality would have been in any doubt about where Powell et al were coming from. The extensive funding of Powell's "food safety" activities by the biotech industry and big agribiz corporations was also widely known.

This is how the Toronto Star reported on the research at the time:

“the study, a subject of intense criticism from organic farmers and activists opposed to GM foods, seems more likely to inflame the debate over biotechnology than settle any arguments... For supporters, it will be taken as proof of consumer acceptance of GM foods. For critics, it will be proof the biotech industry cannot be trusted to conduct a proper study of the issue."

It's revealing that the researchers were considered so partisan as to be synonymous with the industry. Such a perception is perhaps unsurprising. The biotech industry-funded Council for Biotechnology Information was amongst the study's backers, as was the Crop Protection Institute of Canada (the trade body of the agro-chem/biotech corporations - now known as Croplife Canada). And even in their press release for the media day the researchers had no qualms about devoting significant space to Wilson's assertions that reduced pesticide use is what his customers really wanted, and that Bt corn was already helping to meet this consumer demand. Their findings would later precisely mirror these assertions.

As they presented their research more widely, however, and sought to have it published, the researchers seem to have realised that, in order to have an impact, the propagandist origins and character of what they had been doing would have to be written out of the story. At this point the line between transparent farce and outright deceit seems to have been irretrievably crossed. Six years on, at least one of the researchers seems prepared to engage in a brazenly Orwellian effort to deny what actually happened and to present the study and the researchers as entirely non-partisan.

Whether reviewers and editors will continue to collude with such behaviour remains to be seen. Either way, important questions need to be posed about a culture of science and the academy that allows scientists who raise questions about GM, and other corporate interests, to suffer a barrage of criticism and abuse, and even terminal damage to their careers; while those whose opinions and findings support GM are validated and affirmed, regardless of whether their claims stand up to critical scrutiny.

This is the context within which a publicity showcase came to be rewarded as exemplary science.


© GM Watch MMII :: 22 May 2007 ::

Ever since the early 1990s claims have been made that GM food would be just as safe as conventional food, and that it's only because of campaigns of (mainly European NGOs) that consumers would just be to scared to eat it. Consumers who would be informed properly would not avoid GM food. To prove this point Douglas Powell, a Canadian scientist wanted to see whether consumers would prefer GM or conventional sweet corn. In to their scientific paper in the British Food Journal (105: 700, 2003) they described that the bins were "fully labeled" - either "genetically engineered Bt sweet corn" or "Regular sweet-corn", and they explain in detail how they made sure that buyers would not be biased, for example by regularly refilling the binsto the same level. The study itself is rather simplistic: giving consumers the choice in one shop for a few weeks to buy one or the other product without any controls or repetions, and without any control over what information the shop personal might give out already leaves a lot of room for improvement. One might wonder whether biologists are the best suited scientists to study shopping behaviour. In the end Powell et al. found that in a farm shop in Canada GM sweet corn even out-sold the conventional

This has been heralded a devastating result for anti-GMO compaigners... or so it seemed until a Canadian journalist spoke out. Toronto Star reporter Stuart Laidlaw had visited the Wilson's farm where the experiment took place a couple of times and found that the conventional maize was labelled as "wormy" and the GM maize as "quality". Needless to say that it's quite unusual fort a farm shop to promote its own products as "wormy", so Bernhard Weil, photographer of the Toronto Star, took pictures of the signs. Laidlaw used them to illustrate the case in his book Secret ingredients (2003). And just to be clear: those photos were taken on a media day that Powell and Wilson attended.

It's not really surprising that a study like that was not as unbiased as it was claimed to be, and the description of material and methods in the scientific paper clearly left out important information. When Powell was asked about it, he admitted that those signes were there. He just didn't consider them a problem. And to prove that he even links to a photo showing the complete setup, including the additional handwritten signs. However it is unclear when the big sign in the middle was added.

So this could have been the end of it... A biased study that wasn't well designed to start with, a scientist who apparently is not aware that he already is biased himself, and a study that should be retracted because the decription of the method used is so different from the actual method that the conclusions drawn from it cannot be considered valid.

Then Shane Morris entered the stage... As a research assistent and co-author of the scientific article he first claimed in his blog that there were no misleading signs, but the photo that he produced as evidence clearly shows them. It is the same photo that Powel also refers to, and it shows the signes that Laidlaw published, even if in contrast to Weil's photo it has an additional poster in the middle. As the GMWatch article explains in detail, the handwritten signs seem to have been moved but they are clearly the same.
Morris then went on claiming that Greenpeace Canada did not object the study, started to undermine Laidlaw's credibility, and even ended up claiming that he himself wasn't even in the country. (see GMWatch

Morris, himself does not work as a biologist anymore, but as Consumer Analyst for the Canadian Government. According to GMfree Ireland, he played an important role in getting funding withdrawn for a conference title "Green Ireland".
Now he has taken this a step further and forced the provider of GMWatch to take down their complete site, gloating about it in his blog.

According to the Canadian Government Electronic Directory Services on 22 July 2007, Shane Morris is currently employed as a Senior Consumer Analyst at the Consumer Analysis Section of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (download proof of employment at  http://www.gmfreeireland.org/morris/ShaneMorris.pdf).

Note that Canada is the world's second largest producer of GM crops.

Comment from Joe Cummins (Emeritus Professor of Genetics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada):

"I think it is worth reminding people that Shane is a bureaucrat in Agriculture Canada and his views are supported by that Ministry. It is very clear that the Canadian government hired Shane and promote him in the Ministry as a way of promoting GM crops. Shane's attacks may seem like sheer lunacy to most of us but the Canadian bureaucrats think that he is brilliant in damaging the detractors of GM crops. I expect that they will hire other nationals who will attack those opposed to GM crops in their home countries."