Monsanto-funded spokesman, Doug Johnson, recently wrote about one of Montville's main concerns with genetically modified seeds: health.

Corporations that create genetically modified organisms (and stand to make billions when on the market) do most of the testing, along with government agencies under enormous lobbying pressure.

Independent third-party testing does not exist.

How can we know if people are having adverse reactions when labels don't tell us which GMOs people are consuming?

Perhaps the recent rise in autism is due to GMO foods?

We can thank Monsanto for PCBs and dioxin, which it tested and promised were safe and for 50 Superfund sites ("Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Pulitzer-prize winning journalists, Donald Bartlett and James Steele).

The human body is extremely resilient.

For example, a person can smoke tons of cigarettes a day for years without getting cancer or suffering severe symptoms. But eventually the body can no longer protect itself, and illness sets in.

Feeding people GMOs is a human health experiment. We simply cannot know what these products will do with a few years of profit-driven testing.

This year, Johnson never requested to attend our meetings.

Montville is full of smart, well-informed people who would have listened to him. Most, however, would have found that the information he offered had that somewhat fishy smell of propaganda disguised as science and truth.

The overwhelming majority voted to place a 10-year moratorium on GMO seeds. This ordinance has no affect on biomedical research.

Susie O'Keeffe

Montville