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IRT Speakers Bureau
With the latest Nielsen Poll naming non-GMO as the fastest growing new label for store brands, the leading international non-GMO health risk spokesperson, Jeffrey Smith, is this year’s must-see speaker.
Jeffrey M. Smith – Called “the best science communicator alive today” by Claire Robinson of GM Watch.
Contact: Charles Burkham charles@responsibletechnology.org
Jeffrey Smith regularly meets with world leaders and speaks to standing room only audiences around the world. Author of the world’s # 1 best-selling book on GMOs, he has been the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) for more than a decade. Smith’s proactive new media outreach strategies, filmmaking and free informative consumer education materials, like the free Non-GMO Shopping Guide, have been credited by the industry leader, Supermarket News, for growing consumer concern. Smith’s meticulously researched papers, books and films continue to expose and document how the world’s most powerful Ag biotech companies bluff and mislead safety officials, critics, and consumers alike, to put the health of society at risk. Jeffrey Smith is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, and is a member of the Genetic Engineering Committee of the Sierra Club, and the Communications Committee for the Non-GMO Project. He has a master's degree in business administration and lives with his wife in Iowa, surrounded by genetically engineered corn and soybeans.
Dr Arpad Pusztai MSc, PhD, FRSE
Contact: (April to October): Hungary; phone/fax 36-87-432670;
(October to April): Aberdeen, Scotland, UK; phone/fax: 44-1224-594954;
E-mail Dr Arpad Pusztai , www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai
Dr. Arpad Pusztai (pronounced ARE-pod POOS-tie) is one of the world's leading protein scientists. He has published over 300 primary scientific papers and 9 scientific books, presented at hundreds of scientific meetings, and co-owned major international patents.
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1930, he received his first degree in Chemistry at the Eotvos Lorand University Natural Sciences Faculty, Budapest in 1953. He then became a scientific associate worker with Prof. E. Szorenyi at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Biochemistry Institute in Budapest. Pusztai fled Hungary in December 1956, after the Soviet invasion, and went to London on a Ford Foundation Scholarship where he received a PhD degree in biochemistry and physiology from the University of London. He did postdoctoral studies at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, and then, at the invitation of the Nobel-laureate Dr R.L.M. Synge, joined his protein chemistry department at the Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland in 1963. Pusztai was also a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Biological Chemistry of University of Illinois Medical Center between 1967 and 1968. Although Pusztai "officially" retired as a senior scientist at the Rowett in 1990, at the request of the Institute's Director, he continued there as a Senior Research Fellow, coordinating six major research programmes, and several national and European research programmes.
One such program was a large grant from the British government, in which his 20-member team from three research facilities were to design the first safety testing protocol for genetically modified (GM) foods. In 1998, as a result of his disclosures about the unexpected health damage found from his GM-potato work, Pusztai's contract was prematurely terminated and not renewed for 1999. Since 2001, he has been collaborating in a Norwegian Research Council-funded GM food research programme at the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology, University of Tromso. He is married to Dr. Susan Bardocz, a well-known scientist who was a part of the research team on GM-potatoes and is currently a collaborator in the Tromso research project on the safety of GM foods.
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