Slashdot Mirror
Roundup Tolerant GM Maize Linked To Tumor Development
New submitter spirito writes with this snippet about rats fed Roundup laced water: "The first animal feeding trial studying the lifetime effects of exposure to Roundup tolerant GM maize, and Roundup, the world's best-selling weedkiller, shows that levels currently considered safe can cause tumors and multiple organ damage and lead to premature death in laboratory rats, according to research published online today by the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology. ... Three groups were given Roundup in their drinking water, at three different levels consistent with exposure through the food chain from crops sprayed with the weedkiller: the mid level corresponded to the maximum level permitted in the US in some GM feed; the lowest corresponded to contamination found in some tap waters. Three groups were fed diets which contained different proportions of NK603 – 11%, 22% and 33%. Three groups were given both Roundup and NK603 at the same three dosages. The final control group was fed an equivalent diet with no Roundup or NK603 but containing 33% of equivalent non-GM maize."
The Chicago Tribune reports that not everyone's convinced of the results: "Experts not involved in the study were highly skeptical about its methods and findings, with some accusing the French scientists of going on a 'statistical fishing trip.'"
Yeah, we should ban evil pesticides! Down with evil chemicals and modern GM farming! Organic all the way!
Now, all we have to do is figure out how to feed 7 billion people using old-fashioned organic farming that could barely feed 1.5 billion people in the 19th century. Let's see, there are about 10 million people in NYC alone. No problem, a few rooftop gardens should about cover it.
Or maybe we could just convince 6 billion people to commit suicide for the cause. Hippies, you go first.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
All right, we get sick of Slashdot editor bashing, but this needs to be addressed.
The link to the Chicago Tribune is from a Reuters newsfeed. The attribution should be to Reuters, via Chicago Tribune.
For quick reference, any "feed" stories from tribune company are going to have "sns" in the title. Other papers will vary.
(From a former Tribune Co. Employee).
The headline suggests that GM corn causes cancer. This is ludicrous and only feeds the ignorant paranoid anti-GM crowd.
It's ROUNDUP exposure that's linked to tumors - NOT genetic modifications. I am not at all surprised.
I've been saying for years that there is nothing particularly risky about GM foods - it's dumping horrendous of herbicide on things that's risky... this is obvious to me, but not to the ignorant masses.
Don't give the freaks ammunition, please.
Now that the problem has been identified, they just need to focus on developing Roundup tolerant GM humans.
1. Analyze a dangerous poison.
2. Modify a crop's genes to be resistant against said dangerous poison
3. Treat modified crop liberally with dangerous poison
4. Have cattle eat crop treated with dangerous poison
???
6. Be amazed at what the poison does to non-resistant life forms.
Experts not involved in the study were highly skeptical about its methods and findings...
Come on, now; isn't it dishonest to refer to them as anything other than what they are... which is (directly or indirectly) industry representatives)?! :p
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote." - James Bovard
And I'll continue buying my GM modified food that's cheaper, as tasty (if not tastier), and often more nutritious.
The only thing I dislike about GM foods is that we have a single strain that could be hugely impacted by a disease, but otherwise... Organic is just stupid.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
He says that this is guaranteed to produce Roundup impervious weeds. At some point these super weeds will need very toxic chemicals to kill. The real problem is that vast areas of monoculture are unsustainable.
Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it up with what can tolerate the environment.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
You know what has also become Roundup resistant? Giant ragweed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19585341
So, you're telling me that these researchers don't know the difference between giving a chemical with food as opposed to just with water? There's a big difference in how the body (rat or human) absorbs chemicals depending on how it gets there, and what is in the stomach.
It's more than just the concentration. Look at medication sometime: "Take this drug with a full glass of water." "Take this drug with food." etc. etc.
Maybe they should have the rats chomp down on some of the actual GM food that is supposedly so bad?
... to live in a society where issues like this are no brainers.
The USA have regulations that allow a minimum amount of poison x and poison y and poison z in their tap water?
Hello? That is considered to be a first world country? Your tap water contains weedkillers, that is ridiculous!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So, these people fed rats with Weed Killer and some GM food. The rats got cancer, so of course it's the GM food that caused it.
EH?
roundup is linked to the tumors not GM food.
Surprise surprise, poison is bad for you.
Of course there's a simple solution to this. Don't just genetically modify the maize to be resistant to roundup, genetically modify people to be as well. There, problem solved. And Monsanto should love that since everyone needs a patent license from them to have a kid.
Researchers found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 Roundup tolerant GM maize, or given water containing Roundup at levels permitted in drinking water and GM crops in the US, died earlier than rats fed on a standard diet. They suffered mammary tumors and severe liver and kidney damage.
The fact that we are allowed a dose of roundup in our water is what should scare you
You do realize that nearly everyone's already decided one way or the other, based on their political brainwashing, and your sane and reasonable reality-based statements are useless, right? It's the same as a nuclear power argument; you're just ringing a bell for Pavlov's dogs, who will now slobber all over you.
Why not Ford or Chrysler farming? Hmmmm?! And then there's Toyota farming that I hear just keeps growing without the ability to stop.
Really. Cut the following things out of your diet if you want to loose weight and/or avoid diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
1) Wheat
2) Sugar
3) MSG
4) Corn
5) Fruits and Vegetables
5) If you're fat - All carbohydrates
Also make sure that:
1) The cow meat you eat is from grass fed cows.
2) The cow milk you drink is not pasteurized and is from grass fed cows
3) The eggs and chickens you eat were raised outdoors on a diet of bugs and greens.
The science has been pointing this way for a long time now, but most people are blind to it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Mark Lynas ( https://twitter.com/mark_lynas ) picked some interesting points out of the paper (and links to a mirror of the paper).
30% of the 20 control rats also got tumours.
Here is the key sentence in the article:
(emphasis mine)
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
One of the skeptics says:
"If the effects are as big as purported, and if the work really is relevant to humans, why aren't the North Americans dropping like flies? GM has been in the food chain for over a decade over there - and longevity continues to increase inexorably,"
But US life expectancy is actually decreasing:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-09/life-expectancy-in-the-u-s-drops-for-first-time-since-1993-report-says.html
NK603 is as dangerous as cell phone radiation.
I tried to find this paper online but I don't think its available as a preprint yet. But I did find that the lead author has been stuffing rats with assorted GMO foods for many years. Sometimes its kidney failure, sometimes its cancer, maybe sometimes nothing happens. The important thing is how many negative results he's had and not published. That's statistical GMO cherry-picking.
"Monsanto and Dow Chemical experts not involved in the study were highly skeptical about its methods and findings, with some accusing the French scientists of going on a 'statistical fishing trip.'"
Since the dawn of civilization, rats have caused humanity lots of trouble. Thank goodness Monsanto has figured out a way to get rid of them!
We knew that already. GM tolerant crops don't necessarily have more weedkiller in them, they thrive more with the same given level of weedkiller otherwise.
Electronics are soo cheap I can't see it being unreasonably difficult to produce an army of robots which manually tend to fields 24x7 harvesting or killing only the weeds. Perhaps hyperpsectral camera and pattern matching algorithms could be enough for reasonable machine recognition of weeds.
There may be a large investment in R&D up front yet over the years performance, reliability and affordability would greatly improve. They could even be armed to the teeth with lazers to get rid of any bugs who may be interested in sampling the harvest.
This will save the world from having to deal with side effects of weed killers on humans and the environment... Ultimatly as dead labor drives down costs the system should become cheaper and more effective to deploy with little chance of evolutionary adaption not solvable by a simple firmware update or machine learning algorithm.
I dropped my carb intake to around 60-80 grams per day and fill the rest of my diet with animal meats and fats and saturated fats from things like coconuts.
Results:
No more sugar crashes. Joint pains gone. Only eat two meals a day and don't feel hungry. Have more energy and alertness. I got sick once in the whole year and it was mild and I got over it in only a couple of days, while others were knocked out several times during the same year. (I didn't get a flu shot, btw.)
Also, my body has gotten stronger. My beard grows faster, hair is thicker. Flab gone, more muscle without working on it. I feel and look pretty awesome, actually. Skin doesn't break out anymore and people are saying I have a "Glow about me". Nice!
I recommend this kind of eating to others, and I see fat, sick and bleary people in a very new light. People are eating the wrong fuel and it's blunting their effectiveness in life.
One warning: it takes about 3 weeks of weird feelings to switch over to being a fat burner, and then another three months before your energy picks up and exceeds the carb diet levels you started from.
If we're midway into the MTBF for the human race, it's only 100, 000 years away. If we're midway into the MTBF of civilization, in any form, it's only 3000 years away. If we're midway into MTBF of industrial civilization, it's only 125 years away.
The use of Db's and high-speed analytics in pursuit of success measured by financial gain (and not the progressive development of society) is leading us toward, rather than away from, another collapse of civilization. The Limits of Growth are real, and where Malthus might have seemed a little extreme in his time, the ignorance of his message is less and less tenable as we reach a point when wealth has stagnated in Japan and is failing in the Middle East, EU and the U.S.
Your friend's observation is of minor consequence when stacked up against the same effects regarding the use of antibiotics. We're breeding super weeds that evolved to live in the commune that is the human body.
What does your friend think of tumors?
The lead investigator of this study is Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen. He's been the author of a variety of papers that have been repudiated by national regulatory agencies for use of shaky data and questionable statistical methods in the past.
He also usually receives his funding from Greenpeace, an activist organization with a strong agenda.
Personally I would attach very little credibility to anything with this author's name on it.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637
From what I can tell in the first graph, the results are pretty sketchy. There are just 10 male rats and 10 female rats per group. There are 10 groups with different levels of exposure, but the margin of error seems pretty large. I'm no expert in statistics, but the male control group has 3 deaths before 600 days (out of 10 rats), so +- 2 deaths is statistically insignificant. The 33% GMO male group has less mortality than the control, while the 11% GMO group has much more. That sounds like a fluke to me.
It's not a toomah!
It's long overdue to admit that, just like Republicans can blatantly lie without any lasting effects, corporations are free to kill without any real recognition nor punishment, other than affordable costs of doing business.
From the Middle East, to West Virginia coal mines, to the Gulf of Mexico...such is the way of the real world, and thus ends the lesson.
I bet they are, given their field (heh). Criticizing Monsanto would be just as deadly career-wise as opening a titty bar in Mecca would be in real life.
I have been reading about this all day, and I keep getting flummoxed by something. Am I not reading this correctly?
Genetically Modified(Roundup resistant) corn was fed to some rats
Normal Corn to a second group
Normal corn with Roundup to a third group
The GM corn group and the Roundup group had similar health problems. This makes sense, because the GM corn was probably sprayed with a lot of Roundup(why else would you grow it). Now, the conclusion everyone seems to make is that this proves that the GM corn causes health problems. It seems really odd that drinking Roundup or eating GM corn would cause nearly identical health problems. It makes more sense that Roundup caused problems in both samples, and the GM corn was rather meaningless. Even using that very cursory understanding of the research, it seems to me that the study has almost nothing to say about GM crops, yet "GM" is in the title of every article.
Again, here is the PRIMARY ARTICLE that the articles reference:
.00000001% Round-Up [amount found in some tap waters] .09% Round-Up [amount found in some US feed] .5% Round-Up [working dilution used to spray crops directly]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637
I'd like to point out the Herald Article is a press release written by the "Sustainable Food Trust"- which is an organic foods movement group:
http://www.sustainablefoodtrust.org/
So, let's assume the Press Release is fairly biased and that those that wrote it have modest scientific literacy.
On to the paper!
Compressing the whole thing into a few digestible sentences isn't doing anyone favors, but that's what I'll try to do. I'd encourage people to read the actual article.
I think the idea of growing corn, spraying it, and feeding animals diets consisting of 11, 22, and 33% of that corn is gimmicky. If the hypothesis is: "Round-up is cytotoxic and carcinogenic at currently consumed levels" then you feed them controlled doses of Round-up and an identical balanced diet - which they did in addition to the silly corn experiments, which don't account for the difference in nutrient intake over 2 years.
So anyhow, I think that part of the study is uncontrolled. They also looked at "200 rats", but broken into 10 rats / group, where group is feed-type and sex split. So for any given treatment they only have 10 rats to gain statistics on, which anyone with a relative statistical background can tell you is insufficient for any analysis if your control group is also presenting with effects (untreated rats died and acquired tumors during the study). Also if you look REAL CLOSE you'll realize that they only actually tested 10 rats of each sex for the "no treatment" subgroup. It's the same "0" treatment data on each graph. So in total they looked at 20 rats for the null treatment to compare to 180 rats of various other treatment types. Bummer.
So if we discount that any given dose-set is the sum of 10 animals of the same sex, and want to get anything out of this study, we want to look at the animals fed water laced with Round-Up. That's where the data is useful. So let's look at that.
Group A: Water +
Group B: Water +
Group C: Water +
I'm not crazy about the idea of feeding animals straight from the crop-duster dilutions for two years to prove a point (group C), but I see where they're going with A and B. I'm not sure that Group C has any real-world relevance, unless some farmer is getting really thirsty out in the field. Also, this brings me to an aside regarding controls. Untreated is great, but positive and negative controls are also informative. I imagine feeding rats Water + 0.5% mineral oil for 2 years would cause oncogenic phenotypes. The best experiment would have been to feed mice known environmental carcinogens or inert substances at the same doses and compared the relative carcinogenic index of Round-Up.
For males there's no real effect. Straight off the plane pesticide for two years caused metastasis in 1-2 rats. Not sure what the spontaneous metastasis rate in these rats is, would need more untreated control mice to know if that's even relevant. Something odd to note. Figure 1 shows 1 rat in Group A needing to be put down due to huge tumor growth, but in Figure 2 none of the Group A mice were documented as acquiring anything apart from small internal tumors. So there's a data disconnect there.
The female rats are weird. Even untreated rats acquired tumors so large they had to be put down before the 2 year period was up. This isn't exactly the "control" group I'd want to use to prove carcinogenicity of a substance. Even so, there's no real difference between trace amounts of Round-Up and 100,000x that amount, some metastasis in the
It's not the GM RoundUp-Ready crops that cause the problem, it's the RoundUp itself. Organophosphate herbicide is bad for you? Big fucking surprise. Wash your goddamn produce.
.: Semper Absurda
http://michaelgrayer.posterous.com/in-which-i-blow-a-gasket-and-get-very-uppity
Sample size of TEN. The article goes more in depth, but for fuck's sake...
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
You've already made up your mind about everyone else.
Lack of adjustment for multiple comparisons can be a huge problem. If you compare too many things, there is a high likelihood of finding some that meet the "standard" criterion for "statistical significance" purely by chance. There does not seem to be adequate justification for the nonstandard statistical approach taken, and one can't help wondering if they chose this analysis because standard methods, with proper adjustment for multiple comparisons, did not find "statistical significance." Minimally, the issue of multiple comparisons should have been addressed in the discussion, and standard statistical analyses (e.g. ANOVA) should have been provided in addition to the complex regressions.
Another troubling thing is that I could not find any statement that the experiments were done "blind" such that the investigators were unaware of which rats got which feed until after the experiments and analysis were complete. It is very easy to bias your results if you know which was which, even unintentionally. The absence of a clear dose-repsonse relationship is also more suggestive of artifact than a genuine toxicological effect.
Now the rats who eat our corn will die!
In Reason We Trust
I guess you must have missed the word nearly in my post.
It's not a toomah!
have not been properly done.
Their trials are just like the tobacco industry trials; durations too short, improper controls, no follow-up, no real attempt to find problems, rather, every serious attempt to conceal them.
http://geneticroulettemovie.com/
They'll add the following to their marketing:
* Now shown in studies to control rodents and other pests!
A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health
From the Abstract published in 2009 ...
"We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn.". .... This is what you are saying - that the damage could be from the pesticide residue..
But you dismiss the possibility of the the effects being from the genetic modifications, and the scientist doing this study don't. .
Instead they close the by abstract saying ...
"In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded."
Toxins produced by and applied to GMOs are already found in most North American human blood samples including fetal blood of those consuming typical diets. This is an experiment without fully informed participants. I say experiment, because it's happening to us without any conclusive safety data.
We're getting more and more powerful genetic analysis tools and longitudinal sample sets are of course more available with time.
My point is: Don't be dismissive. Keep an open mind. Be a good scientist.
The data isn't in yet and you know it.
I reccommend trying out scholar.google.com with two Greasemonkey scripts: "Google scholar citation explorer" and if you don't have journal access (get it via your local libray site?) try "Google scholar immediately available highlighter".
Keywords: GMO, toxicity, GM corn, rat, NK 603, MON 810, MON 863
Why not just call it corn?
Monsanto is liable for every medical procedure on every person whose tumor can be reasonably statistically attributed to the presence of RoundUp and all wrongful deaths resulting from RoundUp exposure.
If this bankrupts the company, oh well. If it more than bankrupts the company, then the past and present corporate officers' assets should be dissolved to service the outstanding debt. If that doesn't cover it the past and present corporate officers will have their future earnings garnished until the debt is paid or they die.
There. We just deterred THAT kind of anti-social corporate behavior forever after.