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Transgénicos - La Verdad Que Las Multinacionales Ocultan "Científicos Bajo Ataque - Ingeniería Genética en El Campo de Atracción del Dinero", un documental de Bertram Verhaag, que muestra cómo las corporaciones multinacionales agroquímicas impiden la publicación de conclusiones negativas, en estudios que científicos realizan sobre los alimentos transgénicos.
En los años 90 la Multinacional de agroquímicos Monsanto, introdujo varias plantas modificadas genéticamente en el mercado, que es el equivalente a una revolución agrícola para algunos, que podría resolver todos los problemas alimentarios del mundo.
Otros consideran que estas plantas son una destrucción irrevocable de la biodiversidad en el planeta, que debe ser combatido con fiereza.
En el documental aparecen las declaraciones de algunos hombres de ciencia que manifiestan horrorizados los graves perjuicios en la salud humana que provocan estos productos genéticamente alterados y como sus investigaciones independientes son silenciadas y censuradas en salvaguarda de las multinacionales agroquímicas y sus intereses económicos.
Ambos sufrieron el destino de aquellos
que desafían los vastos intereses que dominan la industria del agro
y la investigación científica. Fueron desacreditados e intimidados,
se hicieron esfuerzos para suprimir y desacreditar sus
investigaciones, y sus carreras fueron destruidas.
Ambos científicos eligieron mirar el fenómeno de la ingeniería genética. Ambos hicieron importantes descubrimientos. Ambos sufren el destino de aquellos que critican los poderosos intereses que ahora dominan el mercado y la investigación científica.
El gran peligro a la libertad de la ciencia y nuestra democracia es evidente.
Puede el público - todos nosotros - aun confiar en los científicos?
Vea
el video...
Genetic Engineering in The Magnetic Field
of Money 13 October 2010
from
GMWatch Website
Both
suffered the fate of those who challenge the powerful vested
interests that dominate agribusiness and scientific research. They
were vilified and intimidated, attempts were made to suppress and
discredit their research, and their careers were derailed.
His experiments turned up no less than 36
significant differences between GM-fed and non-GM-fed animals. Pusztai, encouraged by his research institute, gave a 150-second
interview on British TV in which he summarized his findings and said
it was unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs for GM foods.
His research team was disbanded and his data were confiscated. Lies were circulated about his research that he could not counter due to the gagging order, lifted only later when he was due to appear before a Parliamentary Committee.
For Pusztai’s co-researchers,
the gagging order remains in place for life.
That came when he was asked to review safety submissions from the GM industry for crops we were already eating - and found that they were scientifically flimsy.
Another scientist whose run-in with the GM industry is featured in the film is Ignacio Chapela, a molecular geneticist at UC Berkeley.
His research, co-authored with
David Quist and published in the
journal Nature, revealed that Mexican maize had been contaminated
with GM genes. The finding was explosive because Mexico is the
centre of origin for maize and the planting of GM maize there was
illegal.
As Chapela points out in the film, the editor's action flew in the face of scientific method. In the normal way of things, a journal editor publishes a study that he and peer reviewers judge to be sound. It is for subsequent published studies to confirm or correct the findings. It is not for the editor to state that he would not have published a study had he known then what he knows now - without the benefit of further peer reviewed scientific input.
The editor's move showed how the GM industry is
rewriting the rules of science for its own ends.
If the industry were interested in scientific truth, it would push for studies to be repeated with the alleged "flaws" corrected. But this never happens.
Instead, GM companies use their patent-based
ownership of GM crops to deny scientists access to research
materials - the GM crop and the non-GM parent line control. So the
original research showing problems with GM crops is buried under a
deluge of smears and follow up studies are not done. For the public,
the difficulty and expense involved in accessing full research
papers makes it hard to find where the truth lies.
In 1998, UCB entered into a $25 million research partnership with biotech company Novartis (now Syngenta). The deal provoked angry debate on campus and was criticized by a number of faculty members, including Chapela.
Then in 2007, UCB entered into a $500 million research deal with oil giant BP.
The partnership was negotiated in secret, without consultation even within the university. In return for its money, BP gained access to UCB’s researchers, control over the research agenda, and co-ownership of commercial rights over inventions.
Chapela says of BP,
The partnership was later spun as one of BP's "beyond petroleum" projects that would take us out of the age of dirty oil and into the new age of solar and renewable energy.
But the small print makes
clear that the deal focuses on genetic engineering for biofuels - proprietary technologies that will be patented and owned by BP.
But as Scientists Under Attack memorably shows, at UCB it's played out on the physical level.
UCB is a divided campus, reminiscent of Berlin before the Wall came down. There is the public area, which looks like everyone’s idea of a pleasant university campus. Then, enclosed in high-security fencing and ringed with “no entry” signs, there is the privatized area, the part of the university that’s been co-opted by BP.
No amount of reading about the UCB-BP deal can
prepare you for the sight of what was once a great public university
being turned into something resembling a top-secret military
installation.
Once a celebrated centre of free speech and academic
debate, UCB has become a place where tree-sitting students
peacefully protesting against the felling of old oaks on campus are
caged inside three rows of high-security fencing. In contrast, the
university's colony of (not very dangerous) hyenas are judged only
to need two.
In Scientists Under Attack, he says:
Chapela adds that the most powerful censorship does not come directly from the GM industry but from closer to home:
In other words,
it's not so much that the GM industry has taken away our power, but
rather that we've given it away.
Here again, no amount of reading about the issue can match the visual impact of weeds effortlessly smothering a field of GM soy plants in Brazil.
Only a few years
previously, as part of the marketing drive for GM soy, farmers had
been invited to a party with free booze. They were told to arrange
their hoes in a circle and ritually burn them. The idea was that
hoes were redundant because weeds could be controlled with glyphosate. Now, glyphosate no longer works and farmers are being
forced back to hoeing.
He points out that trout eat caddis-flies, which can be killed by Bt maize toxin leaching into rivers. Kimbrell says the GM industry follows a linear economic model based on a drive towards more and more production, regardless of the cost to nature and ourselves.
He says this model of progress is a delusion:
Kimbrell concludes the film by saying that industry hasn't grasped that we need to evolve into a stable economy enmeshed in ecology:
Watch
the video...
Científicos Bajo Ataque / Scientists Under Attack Agosto 29, 2011 from YouTube Website (Subtitulado en español)
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