Is he arguing that the laws of probability are different in this case?

Or the absorption of intact DNA by gut cells is a common event?

This last seems to be the gist of Arpad’s argument, given the comments you report. Arpad would like to leave the impression that DNA is taken up often in the intestine.

If this were very common, we would know about it because we would be able to see the consequences. The food you eat is full of promoters from animals, bacteria, viruses, insects and plants. Most of the foods you eat contain some proteins that are dangerous. If it was a common event to have transient expression of these dangerous proteins in high enough quantities, people would be getting sick all the time from eating food. This is clearly not happening. Therefore, Arpad would have us believe that the consequences are not dangerous, with the exceptions of the Roundup Ready and Bt genes. However, we know these proteins are not dangerous. You eat bacteria containing these proteins and their genes all the time. So Arpad would have us believe that these proteins only become dangerous when the gene is coupled to the CaMV 35S promoter. Viral genes coupled to the CaMV 35S promoter are not dangerous, just these genes. Now that is sophistry.

By the way, you might also like to ask Arpad how I misquoted Myhre et al‘s paper. Myhre et al. conducted two relevant experiments. They transfected cells with the luciferase gene attached to a variety of promoters. They quantified expression and found it was 100% when driven by a mammalian promoter 0.8% when driven by CaMV 35S and 0.08% with no promoter. They did the same with the GFP. This protein glows green when you shine certain light on it. Fluorescensce was not quantified, but it was stated that many fewer cells expressed the protein when driven by the CaMV 35S promoter. From this I would conclude that only about 1 in 125 (0.8%) cells that were transfected expressed the protein. Perhaps Arpad has some sort of other conclusion?

Well done isitreallysafe, Arpad Pusztai is indeed an internationally reputable scientist and the source of the most compelling reason for why I do not trust GM foods. As such a reputable scientist, he was chosen for a government grant to undertake GM food testing (to prove that GM food was safe) but only 6 months into his 3 year term he was so concerned of the results, he went public warning consumers. His project was immediately canned and it was found that 140,000 pounds was paid by Monsanto into Rowett University at the same time he was dismissed. Apparently there was also significant US pressure on the UK government to sweep the problem under the carpet.

It is extremely reckless of those pushing GM to permanently contaminate the worlds food supply with a product that has not been tested thoroughly to address the concerns of reputable scientists such as Arpad Pusztai.

Agronomist and d(David Tribe), if you genuinely believed what you were saying, you would be supporting wholeheartedly independent health testing to dispel these fears.

If the patent was removed from GM technology, the drive to force GM on a reluctant population would disappear.

I would have to see what Arpad says about your comment but I would like to address sophism:- The modern usage of sophism according to the wikidpedia dictionary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist “The essential claim of sophistry is that the actual logical validity of an argument is irrelevant (if not non-existent); it is only the ruling of the audience which ultimately determine whether a conclusion is considered “true” or not. By appealing to the prejudices and emotions of the judges, one can garner favourable treatment for one’s side of the argument and cause a factually false position to be ruled true.

The philosophical Sophist goes one step beyond that and claims that since it was traditionally accepted that the position ruled valid by the judges was literally true, any position ruled true by the judges must be considered literally true, even if it was arrived at by naked pandering to the judges’ prejudices – or even by bribery.

Critics would argue that this claim relies on a straw man caricature of logical discourse and is, in fact, a self-justifying act of sophistry.

So if this is how you arranged your “truth” by bribery, pandering to judges” then yes I would believe that you could classify yourself as a sophist

I also got some opinions by someone experienced in the human health angle:
For agronomist:
DNA can survive digestion and be incorporated into tissues of the body, including tissues of the immune system. There is good experimental scientific evidence for this. Perhaps "agronomist" isn't aware of this because he is an agronomist and therefore has no training or experience in human health? In particular, agronomist believes that the whole promoter sequence and the RR sequence would have to survive digestion to cause ill- health. This is rubbish. All he does is show his ignorance. Animals and people suffer from a great number of ill-health effects. For most of these, we still don't know the cause. We have only recently begun to look at how DNA can survive digestion and where it goes, and as the area progresses and we get further experimental information, we may find that this constant, low-grade foreign DNA assault on our bodies may cause or be a contributing factor to many diseases such as cancer and auto-immune diseases. For example, if this foreign, ingested DNA enters the tissues of the body at the site of an oncogene, then it is possible that it may cause cancer. Just because agronomist doesn't believe that it could happen, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen and that it will not have consequences for health. But this is for "ordinary" DNA. GM DNA has an extra problem. It is designed to jump species. In particular, the CaMV promoter sequence has a reputation for being a recombinant "hot spot". It may therefore be more likely to jump into the human or animal genome and do some damage. This argument is strengthened by the fact that a human trial of gene therapy, where GM DNA was put into people to try and correct ill-health, was stopped because so many of the trial participants got leukaemia. The GM DNA had entered an oncogene to cause leukaemia.
(cont...)

(...cont)
Agronomist says (2 March) that the amount of soy in the UK would have been miniscule before 1998. Is he nuts? Soy has been in bread and processed foods for a very long time. Soy milk has been on supermarket shelves for decades. Almost the whole UK population would have been getting almost daily exposure to it pre 1998. You wouldn't be expecting to see much allergy in the US compared to places like India for Bt cotton. Cotton is picked and processed largely by machine in the US, and largely by hand in India. So, if there were allergies to be found from Bt cotton, you would expect to find them in India and not necessarily much in the US.

From Agronomist 1 March: The chances of that DNA carrying a CaMV 35S promoter is smaller again. In a GM food, the promoter might represent 1 millionth of all the DNA. The chances that the promoter would then work in the human cell would be 1 in 125 (from Traavik’s work). This is giving a chance of at most 1 in 125,000,000,000,000 that a protein attached to a CaMV 35S promoter would be expressed in a gut lining cell

Pity that agronomist can't do simple multiplication. From my calculations, this would be 1 in 125,000,000 or 1 in 125 million that the CaMV promoter virus sequence would be expressed in gut cells. Even if agronomist's calculatuions are correct, he ignores the fact that over the life span of a human, with the many millions of cells cells lining the gut being replaced about every three days, many billions of cells will be exposed to the CaMV promotor sequence. So the chances that a gut cell will take-up and express the sequence becomes a certainty by probability alone, based on his calculations. And of course the concern is that it may enter an oncogene in the gut cell and create stomach or bowel cancer. He's better hope that his own gut wall is unusually resistant to it.

You might find that 1 in a million times 1 in a million times 1 in 125 comes up with the probability I mentioned.

We have been eating the CaMV 35S promoter for 10s of thousands of years. If it were to do all these things you are suggesting at a near certainty, why hasn’t it done so by now? Why is it only when attached to the Roundup Ready gene is the CaMV promoter likely to be dangerous? Why are not other promoters in things that we eat?

Did your expert tell you that CaMV promoter sequence might turn on oncogenes? Or was that something you made up? The viral family that is responsible for oncogene-based cancers are the retroviruses. These are RNA viruses, not DNA viruses. You might like to look at the links http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc431/cellcycle/cellcycl3.htm, http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc431/cellcycle/cellcycl5.htm and http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/VL/GG/diagram.html to get an idea of how this works. Then you might be able to tell a dumb agronomist like me how a DNA sequence can do this.

“if this foreign, ingested DNA enters the tissues of the body at the site of an oncogene, then it is possible that it may cause cancer.” Who made this up? All human cells contain oncogene sequences. They are in our DNA and provide important functions. DNA entering into the cell is unlikely to enter the chromosomal DNA unless there is a sequence that matches so recombination can occur. As there are no matches to plant viral sequences or the Roundup Ready sequence, how could this happen?

GM DNA is designed to jump species? Is this also the opinion of your expert? Perhaps you can explain how GM DNA jumps species in a way that “ordinary” DNA does not.

Lastly, I would like to give you a primer on evolution, but unfortunately I don’t have the space. Suffice to say that if low grade foreign DNA was constantly causing us to get sick, individuals who were able to tolerate the low grade foreign DNA would have been selected millennia ago.