MONDAY 8 MARCH 1999

PROFESSOR PHILIP JAMES and DR ANDREW CHESSON

  240. What were you hoping to achieve, in agreeing that Dr Pusztai would appear on World In Action?
  (Professor James) I was hoping to achieve the statement that under no circumstances were we in the business of suppressing any scientist with disparate views, if those views had been published, and he had actually presented his views on two previous television programmes. I thought it was entirely proper for Dr Pusztai to be able to highlight the fact that if lectins were being used transgenically we had to be clear about the potential effects of those lectins, not just on insects but also on the mammalian gut.

  241. And did you make it clear to Dr Pusztai, in agreeing that he should appear on the programme, that he should not discuss unpublished results?
  (Professor James) Absolutely, and repeatedly.

  242. Do you think there are any circumstances when it is acceptable to discuss unpublished research, publicly, in this way?
  (Professor James) That last phrase allows me to say, I do not think it is.

  243. And yet your press release discusses unpublished research; it refers to preliminary findings?
  (Professor James) Yes. That is why that was an issue. What were we going to do, everybody was talking about all this data. Our attempt was actually that that was the only statement that would be made, which I deeply regretted having to make, at the time.

  244. So, whilst you did accept that more research needs to be done, you do not make it clear that these are unpublished results and that, normally, you would not discuss unpublished results, but you have been forced to do so because of Dr Pusztai breaking what you saw as the agreement that he should not discuss unpublished results?
  (Professor James) I think I should have had a relook at those press releases. If you look at the bottom of that press release, I think it just does talk about that we are not in the business of presenting unpublished data and we are going to process it through the proper channels, does it not?

  245. It says they are going to "be extended and a full analysis will be published as soon as possible."
  (Professor James) That is right.

  246. Be extended? it is still your intention to extend these experiments?
  (Professor James) The experiments are still under way.

  247. There is a real problem for us here, and that is that you say that it is not right to discuss unpublished work; as I understand, all of the evidence taken by the advisory committee in that report comes from the commercial companies, all of that is unpublished. This is not democratic, is it? We cannot discuss the evidence because it is not published; there is no published evidence. So we leave it completely to the advisory committee and its good members to take all of these decisions on our behalf, where all of the evidence comes, simply, in good faith, from the commercial companies?
  (Professor James) Now you are shifting, through you, Chair, the—

  248. There is a hollow democratic deficit here, is there not?
  (Professor James) I think it is a very fair challenge, that much of the information that comes into these expert groups comes from commercial companies, usually in a confidential mode, and there is a need to make sure that there is public interest research in this dimension. But I think it is unwise for you to put the strict parallels between a scientist presenting data actually which had not been done, but let us leave that for a time, but scientists who produce evidence that has not been scrutinised by others and peer reviewed and then suddenly talking about it in public, that is a different point. If you had said to me: "Why shouldn't Dr Pusztai's unpublished data go to the Novel Foods Committee, in comparable mode to that of commercial data?", of course they should.

  249. But how is the general public out there to decide on the safety of GM foods when nothing is published on the safety of GM foods?
  (Professor James) That is why, Chairman, in our submission, we actually take this on. You have been concentrating—and I have suddenly realised, at the beginning—you are making the Dr Pusztai episode as an interesting thing to try to unravel the process of advisory groups. It seems to me that—forgive me for saying so—it is not really a very good way of exploring the issues, because, as we set out in the first two-thirds of our paper, there are major questions of concern, and it really is quite important to try to get it right. I think that, what I termed at the time the muddle, is actually singularly unhelpful, in any mode of operation. What we have been attempting to do is to suggest a new principle in terms of food standards; I have actually been going for the principle of openness. So there is absolutely no suggestion, under any circumstances, that I would have suppressed Dr Pusztai's views, if they were difficult for a government, or industry, or anybody.

  250. But you have?
  (Professor James) I have not.

  251. He was retired with a gagging clause.
  (Professor James) He was retired with the specific injunction that he should produce the papers through the proper scientific mode, and then I offered him, publicly and in writing, a press conference as soon as those were published.

  252. You announced an audit of Dr Pusztai's work the day after all the concerns were raised about the interpretation of his research. Why did you conduct this inquiry through an audit mechanism, when audits are usually associated with investigating fraud?
  (Professor James) Because there was a system in Britain, with the Medical Research Council, where, frankly, we had been assuming for two days that there had been a whole set of experiments, and, as is displayed in our evidence, factually, those experiments had not been conducted. In fact, the major study, the accounts on the immunology, had not even been started. On the Tuesday, when I discovered this, let alone when filming took place, there were groups telephoning us, across the world, saying they did not believe a word of it and they wanted to come and see the primary data, because they did not believe that the studies had been done. Therefore, it was a defence of Dr Pusztai. I did not for a minute believe that Dr Pusztai had actually been guilty of fraud. That is totally out of character, and, therefore, he was temporarily suspended for 12 days, and only from that part of his work relating to lectin.

  253. Do you accept Dr Pusztai's assertion that the audit was not conducted properly?
  (Professor James) Dr Pusztai actually does not believe that the individuals who were chosen to conduct that audit were competent across the range of expertise that he construed to be appropriate. Following that audit, he received the audit's report, was asked for comment, we think we went through the proper procedures, and he was asked for comment and he was invited to present his views to the Scientific Sub-Committee. He was invited to present his views to a broader grouping, and, in the end, as a result of our discussions, we came to the conclusion that we did not want to proceed with these alternative processes, as I understood it. And after a very short time Dr Pusztai wanted everything in writing, and therefore it was much more difficult to have the sort of discussions that you might expect me to have. And, therefore, if you look at the correspondence, we were desperately trying to nurture an outstanding scientist, who has done an enormous amount of good work, but who had now got himself into a terrible fix. The best way to actually cope with that, in my view and in the view, I believe, of most scientists around the world, was to process it, and we were desperate for him to process it rapidly for publication. That has not happened, unfortunately.

  254. In the background paper that you gave us, Professor James, it refers to a fear that Dr Pusztai continuing with his research might "generate controversial research inimical to either the NGO or big industrial interests". Is that a good reason for retiring him?
  (Professor James) No, it is not; but the point is that if, in fact, without this saga, we had not had to institute an assessment of whether or not, in fact, he had conducted the studies, that would not be an issue. In my Institute we have 20 groups, often doing highly controversial research, in relation to NGOs and so on; the problem was that we would be challenged in the future. If you have had to look to decide whether those experiments had been done on this occasion, how are we going to cope with the challenge, did he do it, did he actually conduct these new experiments? And the logic of that was, let us get around and have a different system, where we are not faced with that challenge; it was a logical consequence, it seems to me.

  255. It has been quite a PR disaster all the way through really, has it not, and there is plenty of experience, in the Food Research Institute and in cancer developments, that people go to the press with stories, and it does not end up in this terrible way? How would you stop it happening again, what lessons have you learned, and how would you organise things better?
  (Professor James) Thank you for that question, because I think that one of the most startling things that came to me, and the same was spontaneously said to me by my colleagues throughout Europe, was that the media response to this story was truly quite beyond anything I had ever imagined. And, just to give an illustration, we were `phoned to be told that, on German television, all three channels were going with updates every three hours, on what was new and what we could do, and it was accelerating from the Monday, through the Tuesday, into the Wednesday. And I think that what has come home to my colleagues, as well as myself, is that when we are dealing with these issues, we, in the scientific world, have underestimated the extreme anxiety about food safety that relates to these mysterious processes that are controlled distantly from the individual. I do not think that I had understood that. So I actually believe that we should have taken, in retrospect, far greater precautions to make sure that Dr Pusztai was helped in not actually even putting a nuance across, in World In Action. In retrospect, it would have been wonderful, would it not, if he had not taken part; but that is retrospect.

  256. Would it not have been better to have made sure that he said accurate things on the programme?
  (Professor James) Exactly.

  257. You say that you underestimated the public concern. Why did you underestimate it; and do you think that the public concern has been heightened because of disasters like BSE?
  (Professor James) Why did we underestimate it: every individual that I know involved in food safety, public health, throughout the globe, has been astonished by the reaction. So I am not alone in being phased. And what I have been trying to do, in response to Dr Gibson, is to learn from that. And what I think I have learned is that we have, as a society, completely underestimated the way in which—I do not think it is just BSE—that has amplified it in Britain, but if it were just BSE why would one have the same extraordinary response in Japan, Australia, Denmark, Finland. I think it is the fact that we are in a new dimension relating to food and safety and public health. I did an analysis for the European Union, to try to persuade them of this problem, and, if you actually analyse the public's approach, they are terrified by something over which they have no control, that is either unnatural, that they are not told about, and so on, and so on, and you can categorise the ten things—

  258. But, Professor James, all you had to do was to pick up a `phone to Grahame Bulfield, at Roslin, who went through the same experience, did he not, with Dolly the sheep, thousands of cameras there, but they handled it much better; the unknown human cloning, and so on, they did not have the same repercussions? There was an instant reaction from politicians, in the States and here, on that issue. So why had you not learned from that experience, and it is in the same country, after all?
  (Professor James) Thank you. Talking to Grahame Bulfield, they actually realised that they were into a mega-issue, and they prepared for it beforehand. In fact, Graham decided to put a team, if I remember correctly, he was talking to me about this a short while ago, I think it was a team of six, they decided to assign to it; they found that they had to completely change their strategy, but, in fact, they were astonished themselves. But they did not have, one, a completely unexpected thing; two, the whole issue of human cloning was a consequence of this concept, it was not a direct issue relating to something that actually was being fed to you in the supermarket, over which you had no control, and so on and so forth. I think it is not fair to make the parallel.

  Chairman: We have only got a few minutes left. We have got five questions really, on advisory systems and regulatory bodies, and the first one is with Dr Kumar.

  259. In your submission, you say that "the UK has an exceptionally good reputation for the quality and the range of scientific advice available to it for policy-making purposes". Would you say that the structures providing that scientific advice are suitably open to inputs from non-scientific quarters; and how important is such input?
  (Professor James) I think it is well known that major groups of industrialists are very keen, it would only be understandable if they looked at the various groups of advisers and attempted to make sure that they understood where those advisers were coming from; so I think that the industrial interest in advisory groups is extraordinarily intense. That is why I believe that these advisory groups have to operate in a very open and proper way, and that was part of my series of proposals for a Food Standards Agency.