MS. GENTILE: Good afternoon. Can you hear me?

MR. ALLBEE: I'm going to, before you start, I'm going to give you three minutes. Then I'm going to ask you to summarize.

MS. GENTILE: This last 2 minutes and 45 seconds. But it's a slow speech.

I believe people should be able to refuse food that to their best information leads them to believe is poison. Or may be poison.

That seems a pretty basic tenet. And yet here we are in the United States, and some very rich corporations trying to force bio-engineered products on countries who scientists warn them of some frightening possible health risks associated with these products.

Looking back over years of history, we can find a few things that most of us will agree on. When the Nazis performed medical experiments on children in concentration camps, the world was horrified and repelled. Records show that one major German corporation, Bayer, took part in these experiments. One of Bayer's doctors described the experience of entering a ward of terrified children that he could experiment on as quote "like entering paradise," unquote. He was looking at it from a scientist's point of view.

Sometimes corporations do lose their way. Wealth doesn't guarantee wisdom, or even common sense. And now here we are again together with the chance to say no, to those who want to test the products on all of us and our children.

I ask: If government-sanctioned experimentation on the unwilling population was an atrocity in Nazi Germany, why isn't it an atrocity here? To me, it seems all the worse because we are being pressured to be the experimenters, to experiment on our own families, simply to make very rich corporations richer.

Food is not just a commodity. Food is holy, and I believe the small farmers of Vermont and the small farmers all over the world can benefit only from providing foods people know is healthy. Bio-engineered foods have not been proven healthy. New studies every day raise more concerns.

People should be able to refuse food that their best information leads them to believe might be poison. And I believe that if Dante was still writing, he would create a special circle of hell for those who ask us to experiment on our own children.

MR. ALLBEE: Thank you.

(Applause).