Genetically modified organisms have only been in our food supply since the mid-90s, and a correlation between a rise in diseases and disease conditions has resulted ever since.
Recently, the former director of J.R. Simplot and team leader at Monsanto, Dr. Caius Rommens, revealed the hidden dangers of the GMO potatoes he created in a wide ranging interview for Sustainable Pulse on the same day his book ‘Pandora’s Potatoes: The Worst GMOs’ was released on Amazon.
The interview included his admissions about the controversial GMO root vegetable, which was released to the market in limited qualities without clear labeling that it is a GMO.
It was conducted in 2018 by the Sustainable Pulse team, but remains just as relevant to this day considering that the potatoes are still unlabeled and most who consume them probably are not aware that they were genetically modified in a laboratory.
“I Truly Believed My GM Potatoes Were Perfect”
According to the interview, Rommens has worked over 26 years as a genetic engineer, creating hundreds of thousands of different GMO potatoes at a cost of about $50 million.
He started his work at universities in Amsterdam and Berkeley before continuing at Monsanto and moving on to the J.R. Simplot company, one of the largest potato processors in the world.
He said he rarely left the laboratory to visit the farms or experimental stations at this time, believing that his “theoretical knowledge” of potatoes was sufficient enough to improve them.
“This was one of my biggest mistakes,” he said.
Rommens did everything he could to improve the GMO potatoes, but he cautioned the world during the interview that they were only approved as being safe by “evaluating our own data,” he said.
In other words, the company was responsible for its own safety standards.
“How can the regulatory agencies assume there is no bias?” he asked.
“When I was at J.R. Simplot, I truly believed that my GM potatoes were perfect, just like a parent believes his or her children are perfect.
“I was biased and all genetic engineers are biased. It’s not just an emotional bias. We need the GM crops to be approved,” he said, adding that there was a “tremendous amount of pressure to succeed” and to “justify our existence” by creating crops to create “hundreds of millions of dollars in value.”
“We test our GM crops to confirm their safety, not to question their safety,” he said.
Regulatory Petitions Full of “Meaningless Data”
According to Rommens, the regulatory petitions for deregulation of these GM potatoes were full of “meaningless data” but “hardly include any attempts to reveal the unintended effects.”
The petitions hardly give any measurements on the levels of potential toxins or allergies, Rommens added.
The GMO potatoes have since been approved by Canadian and Japanese agencies, with approvals pending in several other countries.
“I Believe Now That We Were All Brainwashed”
Looking back on the experiment, Rommens said he believes that he and his colleagues didn’t quite know what they were getting into when they signed on for the GMO potatoes project.
He said he and his team were far from experiments, adding that they “knew as little about DNA as the average American knows about the Sanskrit version of the Bhagavad Gita.”
There is concern that this type of mRNA technology could “silence” genes, including bee genes, and the safety of GM crops such as GMO potatoes has repeatedly been called into question in independent scientific studies like these ones, contrary to the mainstream narrative.
“I dedicated many years of my life to the creation of GMO potatoes, and I initially believed that my potatoes were perfect but then I began to doubt. It again took me many years to take a step back from my work, reconsider it, and discover the mistakes,” he said in the interview, which can be read in full here.
“Looking back at myself and my colleagues, I believe now that we were all brainwashed; that we all brainwashed ourselves. We believed that the essence of life was a dead molecule, DNA, and that we could improve life by changing this molecule in the lab.”
J.R. Simplot’s Response to the Interview
Following the release of the interview, the GMO potato company J.R. Simplot called Dr. Rommen’s book “defamatory” and says it is “filled with false and misleading statements and speculation about the development and safety of our bioengineered potato varieties.”
For more information on Rommens and his current viewpoints on the potential risks and side effects of GMOs and genetic engineering, read this interview from the website Eco Farming Daily.
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About Nick Meyer
