The curious affair of the Edinburgh International Science Festival Invitation

In July 2000, the McCarrison Society recommended me as a speaker to the Edinburgh International Science Festival. This recommendation was accepted almost immediately and then mysteriously declined. I present here a full story of what happened, with letters between the two societies.

If you want to go straight to the letters, click here. Otherwise you can read the background story below.


The Background

A great hullabaloo is usually made by the scientific and political establishment that the issues concerning GM food have been hijacked by the media and anti-GM pressure groups and therefore it is impossible to have a rational, balanced and scientific debate on the pros and cons of the merits of GM food. For greater transparency and to show up the insincerity and hypocrisy of this view I have previously put the correspondence between the Royal Society and myself and the text of their unnamed referees'reports together with my observations and comments on these on my website. Any reader could therefore make up his/her own mind whether the Royal Society truly and sincerely wanted to have a balanced debate on the merits (or otherwise) of GM food.

Another prime example of the insincerity of the scientific establishment was demonstrated by the events surrounding my invitation to speak at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 2001 and the subsequent dramatic withdrawal of this invitation at short notice by the Festival Organizers. The McCarrison Nutrition Society after first having obtained my consent to speak as their sponsored speaker at the Festival, nominated me to the Festival Organizers. In a letter dated 17.07.2000 my nomination was accepted by the Adult Events Manager of the Festival. The Society and the Organizers of the Festival in fact started discussing the format and the details of my presentation. It therefore came to the Society as a bombshell of a surprise when in a letter dated 25 September 2000 the same Manager wrote to the McCarrison Society that for a number of reasons the Festival Organizers changed their mind and they could no longer accept me as a "bona fide" speaker at the Festival. Great many letters then have then been exchanged between the Festival Organizers and the McCarrison Society to try to come to some accomodation (which I was totally unaware of) but, despite the pleadings of the officers of the Society, the Festival Organizers were unwilling to accept me as a speaker at the Festival. Eventually, the McCarrison Society organized a meeting of its own at which Professor Tony Trewavas and I gave presentations on the rights or wrongs of the GM technology, followed by a public debate, thus showing an example that it is possible to have a truly balanced and scientific debate even on such a contentious issue as GM food.

I thought, and the McCarrison Society agreed, that it would be instructive for anyone who may be interested in the hypocrisy and the methods used by the Scientific Establishment to suppress the views of sceptical and dissenting scientists, to put the whole correspondence between the McCarrison Society and the Festival Organizers on my webpage.

As a postscript, the text of my presentation at this public meeting on 31st March 2001 will be published in the March 2002 issue of Nutrition and Health. Unfortunately, Professor Trewavas declined to submit the text of his talk to the Journal owing to lack of time.


The Documents

I have had various letters between the McCarrison Society and the Edinburgh International Science Festival scanned so that they can be put on the web page here. The pages are scanned at a resolution of 100 dpi, in 256 tone grayscale. The sizes of the scanned pages range between 30K for the smallest to 159K for the largest

Date Sender Recipient Link to message
17/7/2000 Science Festival Adult Events Manager McCarrison Society letter
25/9/2000 Science Festival Adult Events Manager McCarrison Society letter
13/10/2000 McCarrison Society Science Festival Adult Events Manager letter
27/10/2000 Director, Edinburgh International Science Festival McCarrison Society
page 1
page 2
30/10/2000 McCarrison Society Director, Edinburgh International Science Festival letter
8/11/2000 Director, Edinburgh International Science Festival McCarrison Society
page 1
page 2
Undated (before 31/03/2001) McCarrison Society The Media in General
page 1
page 2
Undated (before 31/03/2001) The McCarrison Society Everybody (Flyer for Lecture) flyer

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