Royal fury

According to a report in the British broadsheet The Guardian yesterday (October 2), the UK's extensive field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops show that "two out of three…oil seed rape and sugar beet, appear more harmful to the environment than conventional crops and should not be grown in the UK."

But the trial results are not yet published--they will appear in eight papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 16 October—and the Royal Society is furious. It immediately issued a statement attacking The Guardian "for putting its own commercial interests ahead of the public good by publishing a speculative article."

Stephen Cox, executive secretary of the Royal Society, said in the statement: "This attempt by The Guardian to summarize in a soundbite the entire contents of the eight scientific papers has not been checked for accuracy by either the authors of the papers, who carried ...