David Schubert replies:

Suzanne Harris has four concerns about my letter in the September 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology1. She claims that I implied Parrott's comments were made as a representative of the International life Sciences Institute (ILSI), that I misstated the ILSI agenda and lobbying status, and that I incorrectly stated that ILSI was banned from World Health Organization activities.

The first is simply not true. Nowhere was this implied, for my only goal was to demonstrate that Parrott is not an unbiased academic observer in the transgenic food debate because he has associations with industry-sponsored institutions, such as ILSI. He has, in fact, in the past co-authored letters with industry-backed scientists to Nature Biotechnology similar to that of Harris2.

The remaining concerns relate to the legal definition of lobbying or are subjective in nature. With respect to the latter, I will only furnish a few additional references, from which interested readers can make up their own minds.

With respect to the agenda of ILSI, although I may be wrong, it seems logical to me that an organization that is heavily funded by the world's largest food, tobacco and transgenic seed companies is going to promote the interests of their support group. Although I did quote a referenced website regarding another group's assessment of the ILSI 'agenda', I recommend an examination of additional documents that some may say reach a similar conclusion. These include citations relating to ILSI activities in “Integrity in Science”3 published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI; Washington, DC) and an article by Michael Jacobson4 that outlines the various ways industry is able to manipulate science and public health policy.

With respect to lobbying, I was not aware of the legal definition of a lobbying group, and in this context both my cited source for this claim and I misused the word. I apologize for this mistake. It should be pointed out, however, that there are many ways to influence policy independently of formal lobbying, including those outlined by Jacobson4, as well as the 'sound science' approach promoted by Newt Gingrich and the Bush administration5.

Finally, with respect to the ban of ILSI from WHO activities, I did not claim that they were banned from all WHO activities. Because of space limitations, I cited a text that was heavily referenced regarding the details of the WHO incident. Additional references include the Associated Press6 and CSPI3.

My conclusion that Wayne Parrott is not simply a public sector plant biologist and should not have been introduced as such remains the same and was in fact confirmed by Nature Biotechnology7. However, it should be the responsibility of Nature Biotechnology to document these conflicts of interest, not a concerned reader, such as myself. A similar conflict with industry-funded plant biologists representing themselves as neutral commentators in the transgenic food debate was documented in these pages many years ago8.