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... GLPBAL NEWS... NEWS ... Few people believe that now, he said. Besides aliens, Mitchell talked about being freed of prostate cancer during a healing ceremony and about his epiphany while returning from the Moon. (Source: St Petersburg Times, Florida, USA, 18 February 2004, http://www.sptimes.com/) "It is highly scientific. Brain fingerprint- ing doesn't have anything to do with the emotions, whether a person is sweating or not; it simply detects scientifically if that information is stored in the brain," says Dr Farwell. "It doesn't depend upon the subjective interpretation of the person conducting the test. The computer monitors the informa- tion and comes up with information present or information absent." Brain fingerprinting has profound impli- cations for the criminal justice system. (Source: BBC News, World Edition, 17 February 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/science/nature/3495433.stm) have results favourable to them than those funded by others. All this matters greatly because 70 per cent of trials in major medical journals are funded by the drug industry. Companies often buy reprints of these articles to use in promoting their drugs. Virtually all research on drugs is funded by the industry, because governments have taken the view that public money can be better spent elsewhere. The end result is that information on drugs (on which Britain spends £7 billion a year) is distorted. (Source: The Guardian, 14 January 2004) BRAIN FINGERPRINTING: THE FAILSAFE LIE DETECTOR? Saute. Washington — A controversial technique for identifying a criminal mind using involuntary brainwaves that could reveal guilt or innocence is about to take centre stage in a last-chance court appeal against a death-row conviction in the United States. The technique, called "brain fingerprinting", has already been tested by the FBI and has now become part of the key evidence to overturn the murder conviction of Jimmy Ray Slaughter, who is facing execution in Oklahoma. Brain fingerprinting, developed by Dr Larry Farwell, chief scientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, is a method of reading the brain's involuntary electrical activity in response to a subject being shown certain images relating to a crime. During the test, the suspect wears a headband equipped with sensors that mea- sure the electrical activity. Unlike the polygraph or lie detector to which it is often compared, the accuracy of this technology lies in its ability to pick up the electrical signal, known as a p300 wave, before the suspect has time to affect the output. AP Fe OUOLUL HE Er oentey MONSANTO'S GM FAILURE DRUG COMPANY-FUNDED Anse project to develop a geneti- TRIALS HAVE MORE cally modified/engineered crop for FAVOURABLE RESULTS Africa has failed. lhe public is being regularly deceived Three years of field trials have shown by the drug trials funded by pharma- that GM sweet potatoes modified to resist a ceutical companies, loaded to generate the virus were no less vulnerable than ordinary results they need, according to the editor of varieties, and sometimes their yield was the British Medical Journal. lower, according to the Kenya Agricultural Pharmaceutical companies spend hun- Research Institute. Embarrassingly, in dreds of millions of pounds to bring anew Uganda, conventional breeding has pro- drug to market, and tens of millions of | duced a high-yielding resistant variety pounds to do the clinical trials that are nec- — more quickly and more cheaply. essary for both registration and marketing. The GM project has cost Monsanto, the Understandably, they prefer not to get World Bank and the US government an results from these trials that are estimated US$6 million over the past unfavourable to their drug. decade. It had been held up worldwide as A review published in 2003 found 30 an example of how GM crops will help studies that had compared the results of tri- revolutionise farming in Africa. One of the als funded by drug companies with those _ project members, Kenyan biotechnologist funded by other sources. Trials funded by Florence Wambugu, even toured the world companies were four times more likely to promoting the work. Monsanto says it plans to develop further = ( _ varieties. } (Source: New Scientist, vol. 18], no. 2433, 7 et . ee February 2004) REMOTELY TRIGGERED CAR IMMOBILISERS ON THE WAY he battle to cut car crime is moving up a gear with the advent of immobilisers that can be triggered remotely. A control box fitted to the car incorporates a miniature cellphone, a microprocessor and memory, and a GPS satellite positioning receiver. If the car is stolen, a coded cellphone signal will tell the unit to block the vehicle's engine management system and prevent the engine being restarted. There are even plans for immobilisers that shut down vehicles on the move, though there are fears over the safety implications of such a system. For now, such devices are only available ue BlooiverRseTy 8 = NEXUS APRIL — MAY 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com