Scientist Offers Monsanto $10M to Prove Him Wrong on Ominous Findings in GMO Soy

Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is so confident about his research on Monsanto’s genetically modified soy, he is offering to sign over his $10 million building in Cambridge, MA if Monsanto can prove him wrong.

“If this is what it takes to bring the truth to the American people, then I am more than willing to do it,” Ayyadurai stated in a press release.

Dr. Ayyadurai released a bombshell in July when his peer-reviewed study found that GMO soy accumulates formaldehyde, a carcinogen, and disrupts plant metabolism. Instead of engaging the MIT graduate and systems biologist, Monsanto and its propaganda arms have launched character attacks.

Ray Seidler, a former EPA senior scientist, said of the study,

Formaldehyde is a known class 1 carcinogen. Its elevated presence in soybeans caused by a common genetic engineering event is alarming and deserves immediate attention and action from the FDA and the Obama administration. Soy is widely grown and consumed in the U.S., including by infants fed baby food products, with 94% of soy grown here being genetically engineered.

Dr. Ayyadurai’s findings are as much a challenge to the current U.S. regulatory system as they are a reminder of how GMO crops could pose a human health risk.

The current regulatory framework of “substantial equivalence” used for approval is outdated and unscientific, as it was originally developed in the 1970s for assessing the safety of medical devices.

The current criteria for assessing “equivalence” considers only basic nutritional and superficial characteristics such as taste, sight, smell and touch, for declaring GMOs safe for human consumption, allowing them to be fast-tracked to market without independent scientific testing.  If formaldehyde and glutathione were criteria, then the GMO would likely not be deemed “equivalent” to its non-GMO counterpart. This finding calls into question the FDA’s food safety standards for the entire country.

Since biotech companies acquire patents on their GM crops, they can legally bar anyone else from conducting research for safety assessments. Their own industry “research,” which is known to be falsified, is usually the only information used by FDA to give the green light to GMO crops.

“The results demand immediate testing along with rigorous scientific standards to assure such testing is objective and replicable. It’s unbelievable such standards for testing do not already exist. The safety of our food supply demands that science deliver such modern scientific standards for approval of GMOs,” said Dr. Ayyadurai.

With genetically modified foods, “a ‘small’ and single GM creates ‘large’ and systemic perturbations to molecular systems equilibria,” as Dr. Ayyadurai explains in his paper’s abstract.

For this reason, the safety assessment procedure for GMO crops is woefully inadequate. The biotech industry has maintained that direct modification of a plant’s genetic material is a harmless extension of the natural process of plant breeding, but this claim is more spurious than ever with Dr. Ayyadurai’s research.

“This is not a pro- or anti-GMO question,” Ayyadurai wrote. “But [rather], are we following the scientific method to ensure the safety of our food supply? Right now, the answer is no. But we need to, and we can if we engage in open, transparent and collaborative scientific discourse, based on a systems approach.”

Justin Gardner writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com