GMO Potato Scientific Founder Says GMO Potato’s are a Pandora’s Box of Troubles

Caius Rommen was the scientist who invented the GMO potato. GMO stands for genetically modified organism. The GMO potato has been modified to include insecticides and herbicides in them. This way when a bug bites into the potato plant, or worse yet, an underground bug bites into a budding potato, the insecticide inside the potato forces the bug’s stomach to grow until it explodes.

Likewise, a herbicide has been genetically implanted into GMO potatoes. This kills weeds to within three feet of each potato plant.

Quite naturally, you eat the herbicide and the insecticide when you eat the GMO potato. Somehow, at the time of its development, Caius Rommen thought the GMO potato was good for human consumption and health.

Rommens was director of research at Simplot Plant Sciences from 2000 to 2013 where he led development of the company’s genetically engineered Innate potato. But over time, Rommens started to have serious doubts about his work and worried about potential health risks from eating the GMO potatoes, which are now sold in 4,000 supermarkets in the United States.

Rommens wrote the book, Pandora’s Potatoes, which is about how his enthusiasm for genetic engineering turned into doubt and fear as he realized the hazards the technology can create.

In a recent interview with EcoWatch, Rommens told his story.

“I left my position as team leader at Monsanto,” he said, “to start an independent biotech effort at Simplot. During the 12 years I worked there, I designed a genetically modified potato that I believed was resistant to bruise and late blight, and that could be used to produce French fries that were less colored and less carcinogenic than normal fries.”

In his book, Rommens writes that he silenced genes called RNAi. In his interview, Rommens said, “Silencing is not gene-specific. Any gene with a similar structure to the silencing construct may be silenced as well. It is even possible that the silencing that takes place inside the GM potatoes affects the genes of animals eating these GM potatoes. I am most concerned about bees that don’t eat GM potatoes but may use GM potato pollen to feed their larvae. Based on my assessment of the literature, it appears that the silencing constructs are active in pollen.”

Rommens also wrote that silencing the PPO (polyphenol oxidase, a gene responsible for browning in potatoes) gene increases toxins that accumulate in the GMO potatoes. He admits these toxins are harmful to human health.

Rommens said, “Ex-colleagues of mine had shown that PPO-silencing increases the levels of alpha-aminoadipate by about six-fold. Alpha-aminoadipate is a neurotoxin, and it can also react with sugars to produce advanced glycoxidation products implicated in a variety of diseases.

(A Monsanto GM corn variety, LY038, was found to have high concentrations of alpha-aminoadipate, and an application for its approval in Europe in 2009 was withdrawn after regulators raised safety questions.)

He went on. “Similarly, ex-colleagues had shown that the damaged and bruised tissues of potatoes may accumulate high levels of tyramine, another toxin. Such damaged tissues are normally identified and trimmed, but they are concealed, or partially concealed, and much of it is not trimmed in GM potatoes. Therefore, it seems important that Simplot should determine the full spectrum of possible tyramine levels in their GM potatoes.

Another potential toxin is chaconine-malonyl. There is little known about this compound, but ex-colleagues had shown that it is increased by almost 200 percent upon PPO-silencing. This should probably be investigated.”

Rommens also says the potatoes create additional pathogens, infections and the range in levels of toxins such as alpha-aminoadipate and tyramine.

“It is my experience,” Rommens said, “that genetic engineers are biased and narrow-minded. They may not be able to critically assess their own creations.” Of course, when you are making a ton of money producing toxic garbage for human consumption, it is difficult to think of your product as toxic garbage.

When asked, “What is your perspective on genetic engineering now after your work with the GMO potato and misgivings about it?”

“My concern,” Rommens said, “about genetic engineering is that the absence of unintentional effects can never be guaranteed. It may take dozens of years before these effects reveal themselves, and we should be extremely cautious applying the technology.”

Because GMO food products are loaded with insecticides and herbicides, they reduce the labor necessary to grow the food, making them less expensive to produce, and providing the corporate producers with higher profit margins. And that is why they are on the market.

Bayer owns Monsanto, and along with Syngenta, BSAF, Dupont, and Dow Chemical, these corporations are the big six of the GMO poisons. They are so called because they dominate the agricultural input market, that is, they own the world’s seed, pesticide and biotechnology industries.

Read Full Post »

The US Government and The Great GMO Cover Up

The GMO corporations are following the same practice of deceit as the tobacco industry did for decades when it came to the relationship of cancer and tobacco products, as well as the oil industry in its denial of the relationship of oil products and global warming. Exxon spent hundreds of millions of dollars denying this relationship, and now it has come clean, and told us the truth its management has known for over forty years.

According to extensive Food and Drug Administration (FDA) memos made public through a lawsuit, and which can be found on the web, the overwhelming consensus of the agency’s own scientists was that genetically engineered foods pose abnormal and unique risks including new toxins, allergens and nutritional problems. The scientists called for rigorous safety tests to protect our health. Tragically, a political appointee at the FDA covered up the warnings and allowed genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on the market without requiring any testing. That official in charge of GMO policy was formerly an attorney representing the GMO giant, Monsanto. He later became Monsanto’s Vice President and is now back at the FDA as the “US Food Czar.”

Monsanto claimed its GMO products had no unhealthy impacts of rats, yet the studies we were told about only tested the rats for two months. A few years ago, a French scientist discovered that horrible tumors began to develop on rats fed a diet of GMO beginning at three months. One has to wonder if Monsanto’s experiment’s on rats went up to three months or more, but having discovered GMOs caused tumors at three months, the company only reported its findings on rats for up to two months. Cover-ups and lies are not new to this and other industries.

Syngenta is the second largest GMO producer in the world. After claiming its GMO poison’s did no harm, one of Syngenta’s own studies leaked to the public showed that its GMO milk cow feed killed cows, and it was still selling the poison throughout the world. See

GMO Corn: Killing the Cows Whose Milk We Drink

Over 90% of US GMOs are engineered to withstand being sprayed with Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup. Glyphosate and glyphosate herbicides are classified by the World Health Organization as “probable” human carcinogens. Glyphosate is a powerful synthetic antibiotic and blocks mineral absorption. Glyphosate herbicides are endocrine disruptors and mitochondrial toxins, and have been linked to birth defects. In other words, when your eating GMO tainted food, you are eating poison.

Monsanto and others have been caught designing their research on GMOs and Roundup to hide problems, and they distort or deny adverse findings when they do arise. In truth, numerous animal feeding studies show evidence of harm, including cancer, organ damage, accelerated signs of aging, immune system problems, hormone imbalance, tumors, reproductive and developmental problems, premature death, and more.

“The results of most studies with GM foods indicate that they may cause some common toxic effects such as hepatic, pancreatic, renal, or reproductive effects…”
– Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition (A. Dona and I.S. Arvanitoyannis)

Although the industry claims that no humans have been hurt by consuming GMOs, there has been no scientific monitoring of human health reactions. Furthermore, thousands of healthcare practitioners advise their patients to stop eating GMOs, and many report that doing so has resulted in significant improvements in digestive disorders, obesity, diabetes, allergies, kidney disease, infertility, fatigue, chronic pain, inflammation, and autism.

“Over half of American children now have a chronic health disorder and this number is likely to rise. Intestinal dysfunction is evident in nearly all patients seen in my clinic. A significant number of them get better simply by switching to an organic diet. It’s that simple.”
– Michelle Perro, MD, Pediatrician

Read Full Post »

The Secret Document Reveals Exxon Mobile Has Been Preparing for Climate Change for Over Thirty Years

Scientists employed by Exxon Mobile had the data showing climate change was occurring back in the 1970s. They also came to the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions were the cause of it. Recently, the internal documents were leaked to the public.

This blog is about income redistribution, political power and corruption. Climate change isn’t a thing of interest for this blog, but corporate corruption is. This conspiracy is complete corruption.

According to the internal Exxon memo, Exxon executives decided to follow the path of Big Tobacco, which denied the link between tobacco and a variety of ailments, such as lung cancer, despite their own studies demonstrating these links. The GMO corporations are also following this format of lies when it comes to their products.

So Exxon executives began elevating offshore drilling platforms more than thirty years ago to prepare for rising sea levels while following a sustained public relations campaign to deny the relationship between their products and climate change.

“Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered…. Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”

So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.”

Last fall, a Yale study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from the Koch Brothers and Exxon played a key roll in polarizing the climate debate within this nation, even though Exxon’s own science showed the climate change was on the rise due to CO2 emissions.

The company’s sins—of omission and commission—may even turn out to be criminal. New York Attorney General Eric Scneiderman has launched a criminal investigation into this matter. This may account for why Exxon’s current CEO, Ray Tillerson, no longer claims the world is cooling, and that CO2 emissions “are having an impact” on global warming.

The Washington Post reported two months ago that ExxonMobil has a far saner view of global warming than the national Republican party.

Fred Hiatt, the paper’s centrist editorial page editor, drops this bombshell:

With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.

Exxon Mobile website states the issue clearly;

“The risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action. Increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere are having a warming effect. There is a broad scientific and policy consensus that action must be taken to further quantify and assess the risks.”

For more on this, check out the following link.

Ecowatch Reporting

Read Full Post »

We are the Lab Rats for Monsanto as it Launches Massive Propaganda Campaign Against a Fourteen Year Old Girl Using the Junk and Monsanto Paid for Science of a University of Florida Professor

According to Global News, the U.S. agrichemical lobby has targeted 14 year old Rachel Parent, a Canadian teenager as part of its “increasingly nasty and divisive public relations war over GMOs.

Rachel Parent was 14 years old when her activism around labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food caught the eye of pro-GMO corporations and lobby groups.

According to emails and thousands of other pages of documents released in a freedom of information request by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), a non-profit advocacy group funded by the Organic Consumers Association, these industry forces conspired to think of ways to discredit Parent and counter her message.

“It’s mostly scientists that they attack, but Rachel is a standout,” Gary Ruskin, the co-director of USRTK, told Global News. “The agrichemical industry is plainly quite threatened by this teenage schoolgirl, so that’s why they’re after her.”

Among other things, Global News reports that University of Florida professor Kevin Folta—whom Ruskin describes as “one of the principal attack dogs of the agrichemical industry”—was hired by Monsanto’s public relations firm Ketchum,  to make a video about Parent. Folta has been the recipient of tens of thousands of Monsanto dollars, according to Global News.

Folta is supposed to be an unbiased scientist, but he is not apparently not aware of the growing body of independent research showing likely human health problems linked with GMOs, such as scientist-who-discovered-gmos-cause-tumors-in-rats-wins-landmark-defamation-lawsuit-in-paris–Health Nut News. Nor is the professor aware of studies from the GMO corporations that have been leaked showing health risks, such as the following, Busted: Biotech Leader ‘Syngenta’ Charged Over Covering Up Animal Deaths from GM Corn Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/syngenta-charged-over-covering-up-animal-deaths-gm-corn/#ixzz3wIzkCCEj Follow us: @naturalsociety on Twitter | NaturalSociety on Facebook–Natural Society. There are numerous other studies linking GMOs to health problems that have been reported on all over the Internet, but apparently Professor Folta can’t Google very well. In my mind, that makes him a junk science professor.

According to Global News:

The video discussed Parent’s activism, her belief that all GMO food products should be labeled and addressed her apparent lack of scientific knowledge.

“So when I think about answering Rachel Parent, who’s the activist child—well, young woman—who’s running the website ‘Kids Right to Know’ … The things I just adore about Rachel is that she’s clearly very articulate, clearly intelligent,” Folta said in the video.

“The problem that I have is when Rachel starts to let non-scientific thinking really kind of cloud her final decision-making process.”

Parent said she finds the tone of the video “almost degrading.”

A poll commissioned by a coalition of consumer and environmental groups showed earlier this month that nearly 90 percent of Americans want mandatory labeling on GMO foods.

Read Full Post »

Mexican Courts Deal Monsanto Double Defeat: GMO Corn Cannot be Grown or Sold in Mexico

Opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have claimed victory after Mexico’s Supreme Court blocked last week a move that would allow the cultivation of GMO soy in the Mexican states of Campeche and Yucatan. In a separate appeals court decision, a federal judge upheld a 2013 ruling that barred companies such as Monsanto and DuPont/Pioneer from planting or selling their GMO corn within the country’s borders.

See the full story at Mexican Courts Deal Monsanto Double Body Blow–Ecowatch.com

Read Full Post »

Breaking and Good News: Scotland Bans the Planting of GMO Crops

Scotland’s Minister for the environment, food and Rural Affairs Richard Lochhead “said in a statement on Sunday that Scotland is taking advantage of new European Union rules that allow its member countries to opt out of growing EU-authorized GM crops, including GM-maize (corn) and six other GM crops that are awaiting authorization.”

“Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” Lochhead said. “There is no evidence of significant demand for GM products by Scottish consumers and I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector.”

Scotland Bans the Planting of GMO Crops–Ecowatch.com

Read Full Post »

The Smear People: Why we Need More Pharmaceutical Medicine: Biotech front group’s smear campaign against Doctor Oz spectacularly backfires as he publicly outs the felons and frauds behind it

From GMO Free USA.

Biotech is at it again, trying to discredit someone who speaks out publicly about GMOs and Roundup. The Biotech front group’s smear campaign against Doctor Oz spectacularly backfired as he publicly outed the felons and frauds behind it. Who was behind the letter to discredit Doctor Oz? Read this article to find out more about these unscrupulous “doctors”.

For more on the story, click the following link. https://www.intellihub.com/biotech-front-groups-smear-campaign-against-doctor-oz-spectacularly-backfires-as-he-publicly-outs-the-felons-and-frauds-behind-it/

Read Full Post »

Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Consider Doing This?

Read Full Post »

Why Consumers Have a Right to Know GMO Poison Is In the Food They’re Eating

Read Full Post »

The Ten Major Food Corporations Who Poison You With GMOs

Read Full Post »