Industry manipulation of research results on Bt corn and monarchs

I am writing to provide a first hand perspective on articles stating that "Bt corn poses little risk to monarchs" which have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, St Louis Post Dispatch, and other papers in the past two days. Some of these articles are below. I attended Tuesday's (Nov 2) meeting in Rosemount, Illinois, on Bt corn and monarchs that is described in these articles. With the exception of an article in today's NYTimes (also below), these articles all stated that the meeting would reach a conclusion that Bt corn poses little risk to monarchs -- even though most of the articles were written before the meeting was even held!!

Luckily, Carol Yoon from the NY Times attended the meeting. During the afternoon, she stood up and said that she had just talked to her editors and that they had received a press release from industry stating that the meeting would conclude that Bt corn presented little risk to monarchs. (See BIO's press release, below.) Carol asked if participants agreed with this conclusion. The answer was a clear "No" from a number of researchers.

To be frank, I am appalled by industry's manipulation of a scientific meeting at which a number of researchers -- many of which have only analyzed some of their data and thus have only preliminary results to report -- were supposed to discuss their work in a careful and deliberate manner.