On March 16, 2011, Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, the Chairperson of ENSSER, and Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini, member of ENSSER, were informed by the Executive Secretary of the Public Research and Regulation Initiative (PRRI) that PRRI has sent a letter to Commissioner John Dalli Claiming complaining about their presentations at the ALDE GMO risk assessment workshop in Brussels on Jan 12, 2011. PRRI accuses Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini and Dr. Angelika Hilbeck to have presented “criticisms about EFSA’s approach that would not stand the test of proper peer review”. This accusation of PRRI lacks any substance and stands in a line with other comparable diffamatory claims.
Prof. Séralini informed PRRI that his lecture was based on a peer-reviewed, open-access publication (Séralini et al. 2011).
Likewise, Dr. Hilbeck has recently published a peer-reviewed, open-access review that was one basis of her lecture (Hilbeck et al. 2011). She will further submit a paper dealing specifically with the critical issues of the EFSA Guidance for peer-review and publication, PRRI will provided with a copy as soon as possible.
On March 18, 2011, Dr. Hilbeck responded to PRRI in the name of ENSSER, stressing that “there is scientific disagreement on a number of issues regarding the risk assessment of GMOs (including how and what to include in the assessment of agro-ecological adverse effects resulting from the resistance evolution among the target organisms, and the loss of the target effect of the GM technology). … ‘It depends how you define damage.’ ”
ENSSER encourages PRRI “to take future opportunities to engage the broader scientific, public, and decisionmaking communities with your views so that they can be addressed in an open and constructive debate”.
