modified potatoes. He also said, "If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat it," and "I find it's very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs." This resulted in a media frenzy, and the director of the Rowett Institute, Philip James, after initially supporting Pusztai, suspended him and banned both him and Susan Bardocz from speaking publicly. He also used misconduct procedures to seize the raw data. The Rowett Institute eventually published an audit criticizing Pusztai's results and sent the raw data to six anonymous reviewers, who also criticized Pusztai's work. Pusztai sent the audit report and his rebuttal to scientists who requested it, and in February 1999, twenty-one European and American scientists released a memo supporting Pusztai. James and the Rowett Institute released a statement on August 10 falsely accusing Pusztai of using a lectin (Concanavalin A) that was a known toxin. This wasn't true. Pusztai had used the snowdrop lectin, but a gag order prevented him from defending himself publicly until 1999. Pusztai's experiment was eventually published as a letter in The Lancet in 1999. Because of the controversial nature of his research, the letter was reviewed by six reviewers - three times the usual number. One publicly opposed the letter, another thought it was flawed, but wanted it published "to avoid suspicions of a conspiracy against Pusztai and to give colleagues a chance to see the data for themselves," while the other four raised questions that were addressed by the authors. The letter reported significant differences between the thickness of the gut epithelium of rats fed genetically modified potatoes and of rats fed the control diet. The Royal Society of Medicine declared that the study ‘is flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis’ and that ‘no conclusions should be drawn from it’. For example, too few rats per test group were used to derive meaningful, statistically significant data. He was one of several scientists interviewed in the 2010 documentary Scientists Under Attack: Genetic Engineering in the Magnetic Field of Money who, based on their findings, have criticized the use of genetic modification for food. Aftermath Pusztai's annual contract at Rowett was not renewed following the incident and he moved back to Hungary. He has been giving lectures on his GE potato work and on claimed dangers in general of genetic engineering of crop plants. In 2005, he received the Whistleblower Award