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Study Linking GM Maize To Rat Tumors Is Retracted
ananyo writes "Bowing to scientists' near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology has fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper which claimed that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats after the authors refused to withdraw it. The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012, showed 'no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,' said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal. But the small number and type of animals used in the study means that 'no definitive conclusions can be reached.' The known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat 'cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups,' it added. Today's move came as no surprise. Earlier this month, the journal's editor-in-chief, Wallace Hayes, threatened retraction if Séralini refused to withdraw the paper, which is exactly what he announced at a press conference in Brussels this morning. Séralini and his team remained unrepentant, and allege that the retraction derives from the journal's editorial appointment of biologist Richard Goodman, who previously worked for biotechnology giant Monsanto for seven years."
who uses the term maize any longer??
Scientific researchers for starters. And anyone who speaks Spanish.
When big pharma pays a publisher to publish a fake journalâ¦
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
really?? I mean sure it is proper but who uses the term maize any longer?? (for those who are not up to date, maize is the native american term for corn)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize
TL;DR Maize is preferred in formal, scientific, and international usage because it refers specifically to this one grain, unlike corn, which has a complex variety of meanings that vary by context and geographic region.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Come to Europe. We grow corn too - but our corn is a different plant entirely.
When European settlers came to the new world, they found a lot of new species they had no names for. So they named them after something familiar from back home. 'Corn' was named because it was the staple crop, just like the 'corn' back home - otherwise known as wheat, or the stuff cornflakes and bread are made from. This is also why you have a robin that isn't even in the same family as the european robin: It has a similar red breast, so it was called a robin.
Gan: Corn is defined as a small hard grain/seed
Wheat is corn
Rice is corn
Rye is Corn
Millet is Corn
Maize is also corn
The term Corn used in supermarkets is actually slang....
If you are going to be a vocab critic then at least get the vocab right!
"Corn outside North America, Australia, and New Zealand means any cereal crop" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize)
That's quite a good reason for being specific.
Also Maiz is the Taino (native american) name for the plant, Maize is a modern derivative of that and the technically correct name.
Albanian - misër
Cebuano - mais
Danish - majs
Dutch - maïs
Esperanto - maizo
Estonian - mais
Filipino - mais
Finnish - maissi
French - maïs
German - Mais
Haitian Creole - mayi
Italian - mais
Norwegian - mais
Spanish - maíz
Swedish - majs
Turkish - misir
It's poor science, yes, but it's an intriguing data point in which further study is required.
That's often how research is done - you work with a limited set of resources to see if the hypothesis is even correct. Like say, "vaccines cause autism". Well, you do a study, and find that yes, it does in your study, which warrants further study. Or you find that no, it doesn't, which shuts down the entire line of thinking.
Starting with a small sample size is perfectly OK, as long as one realizes that further study is required to see if the issue discovered was related to small sample size (e.g., local effect or other thing).
But no, you don't withdraw published papers for bad science - you release another one proving the original was bad. (Unlike the original Lancet paper, which was discovered to be fraudulent which does demand removal).
Unless the paper was done to engage in fraud, it should stand. It doesn't matter if the authors are biased, if the sample size is too small, or the paper uses "teh" everywhere. It should be judged as it stands. And if other studies show otherwise, well, they should be published as well, and that's how knowledge is obtained - you have done more studies that discredit an earlier study because of some variable that was uncontrolled.
When does ambition or the will to believe begin to look more like fraud?
The biggest criticism from both reviews is that Seralini and his team used only ten rats of each sex in their treatment groups. That is a similar number of rats per group to that used in most previous toxicity tests of GM foods, including Missouri-based Monsanto's own tests of NK603 maize. Such regulatory tests monitor rats for 90 days, and guidelines from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) state that ten rats of each sex per group over that time span is sufficient because the rats are relatively young. But Seralini's study was over two years --- almost a rat's lifespan --- and for tests of this duration, the OECD recommends at least 20 rats of each sex per group for chemical-toxicity studies, and at least 50 for carcinogenicity studies.
Moreover, the study used Sprague-Dawley rats, which both reviews note are prone to developing spontaneous tumors. Data provided to Nature by Harlan Laboratories, which supplied the rats in the study, show that only one-third of males, and less than one-half of females, live to 104 weeks. By comparison, its Han Wistar rats have greater than 70% survival at 104 weeks, and fewer tumors. OECD guidelines state that for two-year experiments, rats should have a survival rate of at least 50% at 104 weeks. If they do not, each treatment group should include even more animals --- 65 or more of each sex.
''There is a high probability that the findings in relation to the tumor incidence are due to chance, given the low number of animals and the spontaneous occurrence of tumors in Sprague-Dawley rats,'' concludes the EFSA report. In response to the EFSA's assessment, the European Federation of Biotechnology --- an umbrella body in Barcelona, Spain, that represents biotech researchers, institutes and companies across Europe --- called for the study to be retracted, describing its publication as a ''dangerous case of failure of the peer-review system.."
Yet Seralini has promoted the cancer results as the study's major finding, through a tightly orchestrated media offensive that began last month and included the release of a book and a film about the work. Only a select group of journalists (not including Nature) was given access to the embargoed paper, and each writer was required to sign a highly unusual confidentiality agreement, seen by Nature, which prevented them from discussing the paper with other scientists before the embargo expired.
Hyped GM maize study faces growing scrutiny [Oct 2012]
Thank you for that, now i feel foolish for posting heh
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No, it wasn't a sample size of 1 with no control group. But according to one expert, the control group was way too small to derive statistically valid results from. According to UCD researcher Martina Newell–McGloughlin, quoted in the Discovery article (from 2012), here's what they did wrong:
So yeah, while it's not as bad as the vaccine hoaxers, it was apparently not good research.
John
On what grounds do you base that?
Go eat it. See what e coli does to you. These are the kind of irrationalities ant-GMO fanatics get into (I'm not saying you are a fanatic, just that fanatics get caught in these irrationalities).
Using cow manure has killed people in the past, and it will continue to kill people in the future if it is used. When glyphosate is used on food, it is safe by the time it gets to the store.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The study wasn't just unconvincing. It was riddled with serious flaws. The first and clearest complaint: they didn't do any statistical analysis. At all. Plus, some of the GMO and pesticide groups lived noticeably longer than the control group. The highest-dose pesticide or GMO group rarely did the worst, and sometimes did the best among the groups.
But perhaps the most damning problem of all is that the very design of the study was such that it was guaranteed that they would be able to find something wrong with the GMO/pesticide groups (at least superficially). This is due to the virtue of having in effect 20 different experimental groups of 10 mice each (10 male, 10 female for 10 different dosages of GMO's or pesticides). And they measured dozens of different things over the course of the study. In essence, if the rats in the GMO/pesticide groups hadn't had (superficially) more tumors, they would have had something else wrong with them more often, just due to random chance.
Whether this execrable excuse of a paper is so terrible due to abject incompetence or outright fraud, it deserves to be retracted. It should never have been published in the first place, but I'm glad the journal has decided to retract it in the end.
Provided the stats are done correctly, the p-value you quote means that if you were to do that identical experiment a large number of times on two groups that were NOT different (two placebo groups, for example), you would expect to see a difference equal to or greater than the one you observed in 3% of the runs. Flipped around, if you take your results and proclaim they show a real effect, you have a 3% chance of being incorrect. I can't tell you what the chance of replication is because you haven't told me the value of beta, or equivalently, the power of your study.
What is a "precise" prediction? How do I know if I've made a precise prediction or not? If I say 53.183% of people who drink magic water will get better have I made a precise prediction?
I also do medical research. I'm not sure what kind you do, but mine is most definitely science and is all about testing people's theories, from "such and such a disease is caused by a malfunction in such and such a system" to "this drug will make people better in such and such a way."