GM Freeze Report: The Science Media Centre, the Food Standards Agency, and how to undermine trust in the food system
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is considering using the controversial Science Media Centre to help it raise awareness about so-called precision breeding, according to a disclosure made during its September 2025 board meeting.
Just 5% of people know what “precision breeding” means[i]––a shocking statistic given that the British public may soon be exposed to genetically modified organisms classified as precision bred (PB-GMOs) following a recent change in the law.[ii]
The Science Media Centre (SMC) has been credited with setting the science agenda in the press. It publishes briefings and fields scientists for media interviews and comments, including those involved in genetic modification. It has been described by GMWatch as a “government and corporate-funded PR messaging service”.
In this article we take a deep dive into the SMC. Given that the FSA is part-way through its five-year ‘Food You Can Trust’ strategy, we call into question whether the SMC is really a suitable partner.
In this report
Money and influence
Whose science?
The witch-hunt of Connie St Louis
The Séralini affair and its toxic legacy
The SMC’s GM agenda
Burying Fields of Gold
Ultra-processed foods in the headlines
Fox’s news
Taking stock
The FSA, trust and a triple bill?
Appendix 1: Crunching the numbers
Appendix 2: Backed by biotech
Money and influence
In 2024, the prominent physician and TV presenter Chris Van Tulleken told a parliamentary committee: “It’s hard to overstate the SMC’s influence over public discourse around science in the UK: many, perhaps most, of the science stories you read in the press will have come from the SMC”.
The lion’s share of the SMC’s income comes from corporations and government. Of its 2023-24 turnover of nearly £800k, just under 20% came from the government via various agencies, including the Food Standards Agency. Companies and trade groups have been estimated to provide roughly 30% of its income. Other funders include research institutes, publishers, universities, media organisations and medical bodies, including charities. See Crunching the numbers section below for further analysis.
A number of the SMC’s funders in the 2023-2024 financial year have direct interests in genetic engineering, including the BioIndustry Association, the Earlham Institute, BP International, BASF, the John Innes Centre and the Sainsbury Laboratory. See the Backed by biotech section below.
Former funders include Bayer/Monsanto, Corteva and Syngenta. Between them, these companies control the vast majority of patents related to genetically engineered crops. The SMC has also taken money from “novel weapon” government spin-off Qinetiq and big food, cosmetics, pharmaceutical and energy companies, including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, AstraZeneca and Shell.
The SMC claims that its funders have no influence over its editorial decisions in return for their donations. However, in August 2024, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published findings from an analysis of SMC expert comments on science in the news. It concluded: “These findings suggest that SMC amplifies industry-friendly findings, and suppresses industry-unfriendly findings.”
Former sociology professor and founder of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch, David Miller, analysed SMC output in 2014 and found that a fifth of the most quoted ‘experts’ were not scientists but corporate lobbyists and senior company officials. The topics it covered reflected “the priorities of their funders”, according to Miller.
Miller told the Center for Media and Democracy in 2014:
The problem is that SMC pretends it’s promoting the best science, but in fact it promotes a certain kind of science––those kinds of science that corporations and governments stand by in the area of science policy and want to see developed in terms of markets, like cloning, GMOs, and to some extent pharmaceuticals as well. These are areas where there’s a huge amount of potential profit to be made. Once it steps from supporting science to supporting science policy, SMC becomes political, even though it pretends not to be.”
Whose science?
In 2013, the Columbia Journalism Review published a head-to-head between the SMC’s Director, Fiona Fox, and Connie St Louis, who then worked at City University, London, and was president of the Association of British Science Writers.
St Louis had conducted a study to check the impartiality of SMC’s science. She gave a damning account of the SMC and its impact on science journalism:
A decreasing pool of time-pressed UK science journalists no longer go into the field and dig for stories. They go to pre-arranged briefings at the SMC. It is a science PR agency that sets the science journalism agenda…
It has cast biased press briefings such as one on GMOs, funded by Monsanto, and invited unwitting and time-starved journalists. The results have been catastrophic. The quality of science reporting and the integrity of information available to the public have both suffered, distorting the ability of the public to make decisions about risk.”
St Louis highlighted the SMC’s role as a lobbying and PR agency. She described the money the government was giving to the SMC to lobby itself as “wasted public money”. Her final parting shot: “…there is no such thing as an ideal world, and even in an imperfect one we don’t need science media centers”.
The witch-hunt of Connie St Louis
St Louis was out of a job two years later. The apparent catalyst for this was the fact that she (along with two other scientists) called out Nobel Prize winner Sir Tim Hunt for making chauvinist remarks at a lunch sponsored by the Korea’s Federation of Women’s Science and Technology. Hunt, who was apparently a friend of SMC Director Fiona Fox, was subsequently forced to stand down from a number of prominent positions. St Louis believed that Fox arranged for an interview in the Observer, in which Hunt claimed he had been “hung out to dry”.
Fiona and Claire Fox with Sir Tim Hunt. Image: Byline (captured from GMWatch)
St Louis told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that the interview “initiated what can only be described as a witch-hunt on me”, intended to destroy her reputation. An internet campaign ensued, during which she received sexist and racist abuse and death threats.
Then, alarmingly and in murky circumstances, City’s MA in Science Journalism, the postgraduate course which St Louis directed, was suspended in May 2016. St Louis told the Science and Technology Committee that the university claimed that not enough students had been recruited. It was later discovered, however, that students who tried to apply were told the course was not taking any applications and had closed.
She said:
Things will not improve in science, unless someone is prepared to say something and speak up. This is not just about Fox or the SMC. Though someone should investigate why a government funded organisation can behave in the way that it did and seemingly outside the remit of its charitable status. It’s also not about Prof Sir Tim Hunt. It’s about equality. Equality for all women wherever they work and whatever they do. It’s also about science journalism, the profession that I care about. Independent science journalism is needed now more than ever.”
Fellow journalist Dan Waddell also submitted evidence to a parliamentary committee about the activities of the SMC in relation to St Louis. He said it had “undermined the aims of several prominent institutions, the integrity of science journalists, public trust in science journalism, and effectively grossly misused its position of power to “spin” a story.” He pointed out that was is “quite the opposite of the SMC’s stated aims”.
Connie St Louis has disappeared from public view, and British higher education has lost the powerful voice of one black female academic, who wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as she saw it. In consequence, in her own words, St Louis was “picked off and silenced… at great personal and professional cost.”
The Séralini affair and its toxic legacy
As insightful as St Louis’ analysis continues to be, perhaps the most telling comment from her exchange with Fox in the Columbia Journalism Review came from Fox herself. Reflecting on a decade of work, Fox said that the SMC’s “help” for journalists “often keeps stories out of the media or pushes them off the front pages”.
One example of this appears to be the notorious case of French scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini and his studies into the health impacts of Monsanto’s GMOs and their associated chemicals.
In 2012, the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal published a study by Séralini, who had found serious health problems in rats fed Monsanto’s GMO corn and low doses of the herbicide glyphosate. According to an article on Spinwatch, the SMC spearheaded an attack against Séralini, “spoon-feeding journalists with ready-made quotes from scientists savaging the study“. The result was very little media coverage of the study in the UK. Director Fiona Fox told the Times Higher Education she was proud that SMC’s “emphatic thumbs down” to the story had prevented it from getting widespread coverage, and those that did cover it used quotes supplied by the SMC.
Eventually the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal retracted Séralini’s paper. More than 150 scientists called this an “attack on scientific integrity“, but Séralini’s reputation was badly damaged.
The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency classed glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. In the years since Séralini’s paper was retracted, glyphosate use has taken a deadly toll. In the USA, around 170,000 cancer victims have filed lawsuits against Bayer, which merged with Monsanto in 2018. Countless lives have been affected or cut short. The cases have already cost the company £11 billion.
The SMC’s GM agenda
The SMC opened in 2002 with a mandate to “help renew public trust in science” following a House of Lords report that had identified negative perceptions of “science associated with Government or industry”, specifically mentioning biotechnology, IT and the cow disease BSE.
A founding document of the SMC was a report detailing the results of a major consultation with key stakeholders, which formed “the basis on which the SMC opened”. This states that the organisation will “operate like a newsroom, reacting to the news agenda while pro-actively promoting a spectrum of scientific opinion”.
GM foods are mentioned repeatedly in the Consultation Report, and it seems apparent that the SMC was founded in part to avert the kind of crisis of public confidence that accompanied the emergence of GM crops in the UK in the late 1990s.
But the SMC’s commitment to providing a spectrum of opinions has not been met, at least when it comes to genetic engineering. In 2018, the European Court of Justice gave a hugely significant ruling which found that gene editing was genetic engineering and should be regulated as such. The SMC collated quotes from 15 scientists working at (or retired from) nine different organisations, all with a significant interest in policies in this area. Every one of them criticised the ruling.
At the bottom of this “expert reaction” to the ECJ ruling, the SMC published the conflicts of interests of the individual scientists quoted. However, it failed to disclose its own interests: more than half of the organisations represented by the scientists it quoted were also its funders.[iii] Of the others, one was the British Society of Plant Breeders, a lobbying organisation whose members include biotech companies that do fund the SMC. The other three organisations were universities where genetic engineering was conducted.
In a BBC article about the ECJ ruling, three of the quotes collated by the SMC were used verbatim. The BBC did not quote any scientists who supported the ruling other than GM Freeze’s then-Director Liz O’Neill, but it did not mention her background in biological sciences.
On the SMC website, searches for organisations which fund it which also conduct genetic engineering, such as the John Innes Centre, Rothamsted Research and the Sainsbury Laboratory, each generates pages and pages of results. The are mostly in the form of “expert reactions”, but also news generated by the organisations themselves, for example, about the development of particular genetically engineered crops.
So whilst it may be strictly true that funding the SMC will not lead to a particular editorial line, it would also appear to be the case that it can lead to preferential access to the media for the scientists that work at organisations that fund it.
Burying Fields of Gold
In 2002, the SMC found itself in the media spotlight for its involvement in generating a wave of criticism of the BBC film about GM crops, Fields of Gold. According to the journal Nature:[iv]
[SMC Director Fiona] Fox got hold of an advance copy, invited leading scientists to a viewing—complete with free popcorn—and sent their reviews to reporters. ‘Then the shit hit the fan,’ Fox says. Robert May, then president of the Royal Society, called the film ‘an error-strewn piece of propaganda’ and some newspapers echoed his and other scientists’ criticism. The film’s two writers, one of whom was Alan Rusbridger, editor of newspaper The Guardian, hit back, accusing the SMC of being a pro-GM mouthpiece for the companies that fund it.”
Ultra-processed foods in the headlines
You don’t have to delve too deeply into the work of the SMC to find other examples of views that conveniently favour industry or government.
In November 2023, the SMC caused controversy with an online briefing for journalists about the health impacts of ultra-processed foods (UPFs). According to an article in the BMJ, the evidence of the health harms of UPFs were “judged to be not black and white” by the scientists on the panel. Some news outlets duly reported that UPFs are “not always” bad for us.
But The Guardian ran with a different story, pointing out that three of the five scientists on the panel had links to food companies including Nestlé and Coca-Cola. The conflicts of interest were disclosed by the SMC, but were not reported in the news articles which gave a positive spin on UPFs. But even the Guardian failed to pick up on the fact that four of the five scientists on the panel worked at institutions that have funded the SMC.[ix]
A global study published by The Lancet in December 2025 found that deteriorating diets are an “urgent public health threat”, and that coordinated policies and advocacy were required to “regulate and reduce ultra-processed foods”. It stated: “This rise in ultra-processed foods is driven by powerful global corporations who employ sophisticated political tactics to protect and maximise profits.”
Fox’s news
The SMC’s Chief Executive Fiona Fox OBE is no stranger to controversy. She was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and a prolific contributor to its publication Living Marxism (later LM Magazine) under the pseudonym Fiona Foster. She also edited a related publication, Irish Freedom,
A number of people have raised the alarm about Living Marxism, including the journalist George Monbiot. In an interview published in 2008 by LobbyWatch (archived) he described Living Marxism as “just about as far from a Marxist journal as you could possibly get”. He was worried by the covert pursuit of an agenda: “It seemed to me that the title was a direct and deliberate attempt to distract attention from the fact that this was a far right wing libertarian publication which was using the terms of the left to make it look as if the positions it was taking were new and unusual ones.”
Monbiot found that, in real terms, this extreme libertarianism meant campaigning against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and supporting genetic engineering, human cloning and freedom for corporations. LM personnel were influential in the channel 4 series Against Nature, in which environmentalists were cast as ‘the new enemy of science’ and comparable to the Nazis.[v]
LM Magazine was “sued out of existence” in 2000 for publishing claims that ITN had misrepresented the Bosnian war. It was reinvented as the web magazine Spiked Online[vi]. Also rising from the LM ashes was the thinktank the Institute of Ideas (later to become the Academy of Ideas). It was, and continues to be, headed by Fiona Fox’s sister and fellow former RCP member Claire Fox. This Fox, who was given a peerage by Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fatally undermined her claims to left-wing allegiances when she stood as a Member of European Parliament for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019.
A loose collection of people affiliated with Living Marxism, including Fiona Fox’s husband Kevin Rooney, became known as the LM network. Observers, including Monbiot and SpinWatch, noticed that a number of them went on to take up positions in science-related lobby groups, including the SMC and another science public relations body of a similar persuasion, Sense About Science.
In a 2003 article, Monbiot described “how a cruel and bizarre cult colonised the interface between science and the media”. He drew attention to the fact that people from the LM network with “no scientific credentials at all” were able to move into a significant number of different but related organisations.
A full analysis of the LM network and what has been alleged to be the infiltration of the British scientific establishment is beyond the scope of this report. However, it is worth noting that the SMC’s Fox has been described by GMWatch as leading a double life. Some of the more unsavoury positions published under her alias have included denial of the Rwandan genocide and unequivocal support for the IRA even in the face of civilian causalities.
GMWatch’s founder Jonathan Matthews considers it revealing that “someone whose ideologically-driven journalism has been called ‘shoddy’ and ‘an affront to the truth’, and has proved enormously controversial, was selected as the director of an organisation which claims the role of making sure that controversial scientific issues like GM crops are reported accurately in the media.”[vii]
Taking stock
The outcome of the Connie St Louis case is that the government continues to pay for a corporate-friendly, corporate-backed science press agency whilst having cancelled a proper science journalism course in a well-respected London University. It would seem that this is in no small part thanks to the activities of the SMC.
Another significant outcome of the SMC is that it is successfully exporting its model of journalism around the world. There are now seven official members of its network, in countries including Taiwan, Spain and Australia. There’s also an unknown number of variants encouraged, including in the USA.
St Louis raised concerns: “There is growing evidence that the existence of SMCs is also encouraging news organizations to downgrade science reporters. Recently the newspaper The Australian sacked its science reporter, Leigh Dayton. The reason she was given by the editors was “they could rely on the supply of press releases from the Australian SMC so that their general reporters could write the science news.” (Dayton is reported to have later denied the claims).
The SMC should be recognised as a press agency for the type of science favoured by government and industry. But the stories of St Louis, Séralini and Fields of Gold all serve to highlight the fact that it must also be acknowledged for the role it has played in keeping certain stories out of the news, and the voices it has silenced.
The FSA, trust and a triple bill?
At the Food Standards Agency September board meeting, its Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor Rick Mumford was tasked with acknowledging the public’s near-total ignorance of so-called precision breeding. He was asked whether there were other organisations that the government agency could work with to “help promote” consumer awareness about precision breeding. There are “some of the other entities that are out there that we could use,” he said. “Science Media Centre, for example.”
Mumford’s casual reference to the SMC belies the complexity of such a decision. It is impossible to conceive that the organisation would present a balanced assessment of the ‘science’ of so-called precision breeding. This would, in any case, be impossible because the definition is not a scientific one but rather a political construct designed to allow the deregulation of newer forms of GMOs.
But the FSA is in a tricky position because of the significance it places on being a trustworthy organisation. It measures public trust via its Consumer Insights Tracker on an ongoing basis. If it gets into bed with the SMC, this key metric could be undermined.
St Louis pointed out in 2013 that double spending was going on with science communication, with the government paying once through the grants it gave to UK science research and again via the SMC. If the SMC is successful in winning a contract with the FSA, we, the public, would be triple paying. And the message we will get for our money is that new GMOs do not pose environmental or health-related risks.
Many scientists disagree with this, and people need access to all the available information in order to make up their own minds. We certainly wouldn’t trust the SMC to do that.
Appendix 1: Crunching the numbers
The SMC publishes a list of the 100+ organisations it received money from in 2023-2024 on its website, broken down into bands ranging from £0-£2k up to over £35k. We’ve categorised the organisations by type.
In the financial year to April 2024, the SMC’s four top staff, including Chief Executive Fiona Fox OBE, received 44% of its income, or £348k.
Appendix 2: Backed by biotech
A number of the SMC’s funders in 2023-2024 are directly involved in genetic engineering.
The SMC received up to £5,000 from BASF in 2024. The company is one of the world’s largest chemical and agricultural science companies and has lobbied to ditch safety rules on new GM crops even if they increase pesticide use.
Another funder, the Biochemical Society, says in its position statement on GMOs that “there is no scientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms”.
In 2024, up to £20,000 of SMC’s funding came from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which in turn gives £2m to the Sainsbury’s and John Innes research centres, which both conduct genetic engineering and publicly support the UK’s new and flawed GM regulations.
The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) says that “legislation should focus on the end-product and not the technology used… organisms modified by GE that do not contain foreign DNA should not be regulated as GMOs.”
TSL is also funded by companies including Google, Bayer and Biopotatoes, which is developing GM potatoes.[viii] Genetic engineering appears to be a significant part of TSL’s activities.
Another SMC funder––the Earlham Institute––is involved in genome sequencing, and one of its major research themes is providing the genomic tools for wheat-breeders to genetically engineer crops. A two-year field trial with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center bred wheat with “exotic DNA from wild relatives”.
Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB) was another funder keen to back the gene editing deregulation, stating that they were “pleased to note that the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill would be introduced to enable gene-edited products to be brought to the market”. The Quadram Institute is conducting human trials of genetically engineered tomatoes developed at the John Innes Centre.
Unsurprisingly, SMC funder the BioIndustry Association was also delighted by the UK’s reckless “precision breeding” regulations. Their main role is that of lobbying on behalf of the life sciences and biotech industry.
And finally, the Science Media Centre also receives funding from BP International, which has a penchant for “extreme genetic engineering”. According to The Ecologist, BP invested millions of dollars in synthetic biology, “building the DNA of entirely novel microbes from scratch in order convert sugar plantations, corn fields and forests into biofuels to keep the car economy gassed up”.
Footnotes
[i] As of September 2025, according to the Food Standards Agency’s Consumer Insights Tracker. At the FSA’s September Board Meeting, its Annual FSA Science Update referred to statistics from the March survey, which found that 4% of people knew what “precision breeding” meant and an additional 9% had heard of it but didn’t know what it meant.
[ii] Precision breeding has no meaningful scientific definition, and its legal definition is so imprecise that court challenges seem inevitable. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 defines an organism that has been precision bred as one that has been produced using “modern biotechnology” but which “could have resulted from traditional processes”. The Regulations that operationalise the GenTech Act came into force in November 2025.
[iii] As listed on its website on 25/02/2026.
[iv] Cited in Sourcewatch: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Science_Media_Centre#cite_note-nature-4
[v] According to an article in The Media Leader, Channel 4 was ordered by the Independent Television Commission (ITC) to broadcast an on-screen apology to four environmentalists who were interviewed for Against Nature on the basis that their views had been distorted and misrepresented. The complainants were Lord Melchett, then chief executive of Greenpeace; Dr. Barbara Maas of Pan-African Wildlife Conservation Network UK; Tony Juniper, then campaigns director for Friends of the Earth, and Professor Norman Myers of Green College, Oxford.
[vi] In March 2026, the Spiked website promoted a book written by its Chief Political Writer Brendan O’Neill: Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy.
[vii] By email, 3rd March 2026.
[viii] https://www.tsl.ac.uk/news-and-insights?
[ix] According to the information disclosed on the SMC’s website in March 2026. These were: University of Leeds, the Quadram Institute, Queen’s University Belfast and the Food Standards Agency.
