Klaus Ammann

Klaus Amman is Director of the Botanical Garden, University of Bern, Switzerland.

With John Beringer, Julian Kinderlerer, Alan McHughen and Mark Tepfer, Amman formed the International Society for Biosafety Research, whose journal, Environmental Biosafety Research, he edits.

He sits on steering committees for the following groups:

The European Science Foundation group, Assessment of Impacts of Genetically Modified Plants (AIGM) Gensuisse, a GM promotion group funded by the pharmaceutical industry body Interpharma Internutrition - a promotion group for GM foods. It has in its working group representatives from the food industry (e.g. Nestle) as well as chemical/GM companies Monsanto, Hoffmann LaRoche, DuPont, and Syngenta.

He is on the Executive Board of the European Federation of Biotechnology, an organisation of scientists wishing to promote biotechnology, which has an extensive corporate membership.

Amman is co-editor of the Bio-Scope Frankfurt-Bern website, supported by GM industry group Europabio.

With CS Prakash and others, Amman signed an 'Open Letter to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development' (April 2000). The letter warned the Commission against 'needless over-regulation' of GM on the grounds of "the very real threat that an overly-strict adherence to precautionary regulation could pose to both the environment and to the well being of human populations around the world."

Amman edits a pro-GM e-mail list and played a leading role together with CS Prakash in circulating and encouraging the attacks on Quist and Chapela and their paper on Mexican maize contamination published in Nature.