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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.
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.
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
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.