In fact, so little effect did the evidence have that each of the defence counsel turned down the opportunity to cross examine Lachmann. At the time I felt this was to some extent a missed opportunity, at least, I thought, they should have asked him about the strange case of the threatening phone call. Or did defence counsel not know that Lachmann was slightly more than he seemed? 

* * *

In February 1999 Hungarian-born Dr Arpad Pusztai, an established geneticist at the Rowatt Institute in Scotland, discovered that mice fed genetically modified potato suffered stunted growth and depressed immune function. The time of his finding was unfortunately propitious. Two years earlier New Labour had a landslide victory at the polls and Tony Blair headed up a government packed with Liberal industrial interests that had turned parliament into something resembling a stock exchange.

The bio-industrialist Lord Sainsbury, a life time Liberal who was to gifted around £6M to Blair's election victory war chest, between 1996 and 2001, was thanked for his contribution by a knighthood and given the position of head of science and technology inside the Department of Trade and Industry; Czar of all matters scientific, especially research.

 This was the period when the brilliant US journalist Greg Palast wrote his dream-shattering book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and coined the term Lobbygate to describe the scandal that he uncovered in the offices of Westminster. It was a time when Britain and everything in it was up for sale, auctioned off by elected and selected politicians and those YUPPIES in double breasted suites who might only a decade earlier have been called civil servants.

Lord Sainsbury and his trusted lieutenant Liberal peer Dick Taverne, both with an involved history with pharmaceutical and PR corporations, were hell-bent on introducing genetically engineered (GM) crops into Britain at Monsanto's behest. Accusations that he might have taken this tack because he was himself the owner of massive GM concerns worth millions of pounds, were laid to rest when he told the public that all his estates and Trusts were blinded for the duration of his time in ministerial office. 

But of course it was hardly Dr Pusztai's fault that the results of 35 years hard work, hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and a commitment to honest scientific research, should produce such results at exactly the same time that the moneylenders had squatted the temple. Within weeks of his announcing the results of his research, Pusztai's career was terminated, and he became Public Enemy Number One. Having talked on Newsnight and the World in Action programme Pusztai was accused of breaking the rules of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funding by breaking a gagging clause that prohibited scientists from becoming 'involved in political controversy on biotechnology and biological science'. Now as his life went rapidly down the tubes, he was, it was suggested, a second-rate research scientist, and, at age 68, past it: ‘an old man who had muddled his results’. His grants were withdrawn, he lost his position at the Rowett and the 18-strong research team that he had assembled was dismantled. 

Sainsbury, who since he assumed his position as head of Trade, Industry and Science had, amongst other covert operations, begun to put together what was later referred to by a Guardian correspondent as a GM 'rebuttal unit', was, even then, building a science fire brigade, ready to rush to the scene of any research finding that did not suite it's funders. After a rather shaky start using the amateur crisis management scientists at the Royal Society, the rebuttal unit settled in at the Royal Institution and became the Science Media Centre. In the early days, however, it was just a loose collection of scientists briefed by one of Sainsbury's personal staffers at the Dti on how to fight off claims by those who 'got their science wrong'.

Pusztai was no push-over and although corporate and government interests tried to make him, in another word coined by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four, an 'unperson', he pursued his agreement with Dr Richard Horton of the Lancet to make ready his research paper for publication. Of course trying to stop a journal from publishing a paper is quite a different kettle of fish from taking a paper out of a journal once it had been published.

However, the rebuttal unit - some of the most decorated scientists in Britain - put their heads together and came up with what they saw as a good solution and in the Autumn of 1999, Dr Richard Horton revealed that a senior fellow of the Royal Society had threatened him with the loss of his job if he published Pusztai's research. The threat was carried out in the manner of all good thrillers, over the phone, probably with a white handkerchief over the handset, and although Horton, always the slippery gentleman, wouldn't name his antagonist, intrepid reporters from the Guardian newspaper took only a short time to deduce who had made the threat. 

Chief amongst those in the Rebuttal cabal was Professor Lachmann, a vehement opponent of the precautionary principle whose extensive CV included at that time, a position on the scientific advisory board of the pharmaceutical giant SmithKlineBeecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), vaccine manufacturers that invested heavily in biotechnology. If you imagine that Lachmann's role in this unsavoury affair earned him a serious rebuke from his peers you imagine wrongly. In the Alice in Wonderland world of British science, the Neanderthals rule and the odd threat to a journal editor is seen only as robust science strategy.

In retrospect, the GMC Fitness to Practice Hearing looks increasingly like a fairground during a power cut glimpsed over the shoulder of a man on the run. Increasingly as well one's mind is blocked with a traffic jam of thoughts about how it might be possible to get some of its leading prosecuting actors into criminal court and then to Jail where they belong.

Martin J Walker is an investigative writer who has written several books about aspects of the medical industrial complex. He started focusing on conflict of interest, intervention by pharmaceutical companies in government and patient groups in 1993. Over the last three years he has been a campaign writer for the parents of MMR vaccine damaged children covering every day of the two year hearing of the General Medical Council that tried Dr Wakefield and two other doctors. His GMC accounts can be found at www.cryshame.com, and his own website is www.slingshotpublications.com.