Jonathan Jones

Prof Jonathan Jones is a Fellow of the Royal Society and senior scientist at the Sainsbury Laboratory of the John Innes Centre (JIC) (1988-present as at June 2010).

Mendel Biotechnology

Jones is on the science advisory board of the Two Blades Foundation. His biography on the Two Blades Foundation website says:

Dr. Jones has co-founded 2 companies; Mendel Biotechnology, founded in 1997 to carry out genomics experiments to discover and exploit key regulators of crop productivity, and Norfolk Plant Sciences Ltd, to combine health promoting traits and disease resistance traits in potato and tomato. Dr. Jones was elected a Professor at the University of East Anglia in 1997, a member of EMBO in 1998, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003.

As well as being a co-founder of Mendel Biotechnology, he is also on its advisory board. Monsanto is an investor and collaborator in Mendel Biotechnology. Monsanto's vice president, biotechnology, Stephen Padgette, is listed as being on the advisory board of Mendel Biotechnology in its Annual Report 2008.

As at July 2010, Mendel had been granted over 20 biotechnology and GM patents, as listed on its website. Its interests include developing "energy grasses" for biomass and biofuels.

In its 2008 Annual Report it lists two lines of business that were central to its growth in that year:

• a collaborative project with Monsanto on soybean yield, "the basis of which is a Mendel technology"
• the establishment of "the first-ever field trials of genetically diverse Miscanthus varieties for biomass production in the

United States"

Career history

Jones has undertaken research at UC Berkeley.

Since the late 1980s he has headed a lab within the Sainsbury Laboratory, using molecular biology and genetics to better understand plant disease resistance with a view to engineering disease resistance genes into crop plants. In 1998 Jones wrote, 'I've worked with transgenic plants for 15 years, in the US and the UK. The more I do it, the less I worry about it.'

It was environmental concerns which, according to Prof Jones, led him into a career in plant biology as a source of high-tech solutions. He has written, 'It simply is appalling how rainforests are cut down, fisheries fished out and water resources are overutilized and polluted. But the solutions require more science, not less.'

Attacking GM critics

Unusually for a biotechnologist, Jones has at times been willing to criticise the biotech industry, outside of the area of GM crops. He wrote to The Guardian to support George Monbiot's concern about Monsanto's genetically engineered cattle drug BST, 'George Monbiot and the Guardian have got wrong much of their coverage on GM foods and GM crops. But he is certainly right to highlight concern... about milk from cows treated with bovine somatotropin (BST). It appears suspect both on animal welfare and human health grounds'.

However, his keenness to communicate the benefits of GM crops has led him to adopt a less tolerant attitude towards environmental critics of GM crops like George Monbiot. In fact, while the JIC's Director, Prof. Chris Lamb, has publicly expressed his concern at the 'polarisation of discussion about agriculture', and declared it part of the JIC's vision to seek to foster balanced debate, Jones has adopted an often highly aggressive tone in public meetings and in some of the material he has written for publication.

He attacks critics of GM crops at public meetings as 'self-serving' fundamentalists, calling them 'the green mujihadeen'. On the JIC website he has posted material complaining of 'George Monbiot's periodic eruptions of green bile on the subject of GM crops' and of 'George Monbiot and his bigoted, myopic, mystical, anti-scientific, organic farming business interest friends'.

During the Pusztai crisis in February 1999 Jones penned an article at the request of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, on the benefits of GM crops. The government's spin doctors then tried to place the article in a national newspaper. The material turned up 'partially summarized' in a Sunday Times editorial on 14 February 1999. The following day the Daily Telegraph reported how the piece had been hawked around the press by Number 10. The fact that Jones worked for a laboratory founded and funded by Labour's Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, who is a leading advocate of GM crops, attracted critical comment.

In the article, Jones wrote, 'Grandstanding does not resolve scientific questions', and he concluded, without any apparent sense of self-contradiction, 'The future benefits (for consumers and the environment) will be enormous [from GM] and the best is yet to come. In the meantime, let's have more information and less rhetoric.'

Jones has also attacked GM critics for 'quite literally leading everyone up the garden path.' But he has himself faced criticism for making baseless claims in support of GM crops.

At public talks, Jones has repeatedly claimed that GM crops have made aerial spraying of pesticides unnecessary in the US, resulting in 'crop dusters' going 'out of business because plants are so [pest] resistant, there's no business for applying insecticides indiscriminately from aeroplanes'. However, according to a leading US agronomist, Dr Charles Benbrook, in an email to GMWatch, insecticide use in the US has actually been on the increase. While crop dusters are indeed going out of business, says Benbrook, this is because 'fewer and fewer pesticides may be applied aerial, because of drift. Virtually all the new chemistry is incompatible with aerial application.' Dr Benbrook's conclusion on Jones' much repeated claim that crop dusters are going out of business because of GM crops: 'This fellow does not know what he is talking about.' So where did Jones get his data? He told GMWatch he read it in a newspaper - The Christian Science Monitor.

Ironically, in his article about the media storm over Pusztai's research, Jones wrote, 'As a scientist myself I can only say "show me the data". Grandstanding does not resolve scientific questions.'

Promoting GM on BBC website

In July 2010 the BBC website carried an article by Jones ("Fussy eaters - what's wrong with GM food?") promoting GM food as a solution to the world's food security issues. In contrast with most reputable scientific journals, the BBC does not declare Jones's conflicting interests in writing the article, i.e. he has interests in Mendel Biotechnology (see above) and so stands to gain if GM is accepted in the UK and Europe.

In the article, Jones blithely dismisses the risks of GM foods:

In the early 80s, we did wonder about - in Rumfeldspeak - "unknown unknowns; the unknowns we didn't know we didn't know about", but 27 years later, nothing alarming has been seen.

In this statement, Jones is wilfully ignoring the large and growing body of scientific evidence indicating risks and harm from GM food and feed.

Jones also makes unjustifiable claims in the article for benefits of GM crops - "increased yield, decreased agrochemical use and reduced environmental impact of agriculture". In fact, independent research has discredited all these claims: GM crops have been found not to increase yields or decrease overall chemical use and neither have they reduced the environmental impact of agriculture. The BBC seemingly has not asked Jones to provide evidence for his pro-GM claims. It is valid to ask if a critic of GM could get away with making similar unsubstantiated claims on the other side of the argument in a BBC news article.