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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."
Imo, withdrawing papers makes sense mainly if there is indeed, "evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data". Faked data doesn't help advance science, and should be purged from the record.
But merely questionable conclusions are another story. Science is a back-and-forth process: someone publishes a study purporting to show X, and then someone else criticizes their conclusions, re-analyzes their data, attempts to replicate it, etc. Then they publish their own conclusions, purporting to show not-X. Withdrawing the original study in this case doesn't make sense to me, if it was not fraudulent: we don't typically retroactively go into old journals and blank out the articles that have subsequently turned out to be wrong. We just write new articles with better analysis.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
Wasn't Willie Maize the Catcher in the Rye? Or am I thinking about Yogi Berra?
rewriting history since 2109
It's very easy to prove that something is unsafe; you simply show meaningful and reproducible examples of harm caused
You can't prove that something is safe because you can't say beyond a doubt that something will never ever cause harm in the future. What you *can* do is show multiple studies that were looking for harm and could not meaningfully find any.
What we know about GMOs is that there are no known examples of harm caused by them that can be reproduced by scientific peers.
Corn is a major export crop of the United States.
Europe government wants to promote food that is grown within the Union. It really makes sense that a European scientist would feel pressured to find evidence against a primary US import.
As the US agriculture system is very efficient at making low cost food.
I know it is trendy to be Anti-American as it must be some conspiracy from big US companies to hide the truth, like with Big Tobacco.
But what if GM Food is actually perfectly safe like the science says it is.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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!
Funny how Monsanto isn't required to definitively prove their crap is safe, but everyone else is required to definitely prove that it isn't.
It's not that way for either party and shouldn't be ("definitively prove" is a ludicrously high threshold). This was apparently half-assed research which didn't "prove" anything.
Maize is the term used in the UK, where corn means, usually, wheat - sometimes barley.
Many dictionaries say that "corn" means the local most common grain crop, and therefore each grain type needs another name for use where it is not the most common.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Billy Maize is the Pitcher in the Rye.
...Slashdot needs a comment filter for bad pun density.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
And, more importantly, having worked at Monsanto should automatically exclude you from being considered from holding an editorial position like this. You mostly have to assume these guys are going to be paid shills who have already made up their mind that it's safe, and he's basically just demonstrated that Food and Chemical Toxicology isn't interested in objective science.
Ignoring that working for Monsanto is one avenue to getting the sort of experience in the field that can make one a good editor, everyone has some sort of conflict of interest. I guess we'll just have to do without editors, huh?
"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.
Like it or not, even big companies are innocent until proven guilty. Pending FDA approval, anyway.
In this case it looks like the researchers were out for blood and let their dislike for Monsanto get in the way of doing the science properly—not only did they use cancer-prone rats like it says in the summary, but they didn't do enough replicates to determine if the results were actually statistically significant: the control group definitely got fewer tumours, but given the unreliability of the rat breed's tumour-forming rate it's hard to say that it wasn't just a coincidence. (And using a cancer-prone rat isn't exactly realistic to begin with; tumours grow faster whenever they get cheap and easy nutrients.)
The paper was under close scrutiny immediately when it was published, and not just from Elsevier or Monsanto.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
Well that explains a lot of things - Healthcare, Democrat, Football.
No wonder we're so confused. It's all your fault.
USA! USA! USA!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's because it is reasonable to assume that it is safe based on what we know about biology. Furthermore, there are no real-world indications that it is not. At this point, if you want to claim it's unsafe, you better have some strong data to back it up.
According to objective science, every widely used organism produced by genetic manipulation is safe to consume.
Yeah! It's time to get this hunt started. We need to start asking the most important scientific question of all:
Does Monsanto weigh the same as a duck?
really?? I mean sure it is proper but who uses the term maize any longer??
Oh dear, you just opened a can of whoop-ass on yourself....
No sig today...
It's *really hard* to prove that something is safe, you pretty much need to test every possible interaction.
It's relatively simple to prove that something is not safe--you just need to find one thing demonstrating lack of safety and then you're done.
That said, I think there should be some level of due diligence required before bringing a GM food to market. That said, the current alternative to GMOs is irradiating DNA to force it to mutate, which causes way more changes in unrelated areas and offers all the dangers of GMOs, but currently has basically no labelling requirements.
GMOs produce toxins. Those toxins have already been shown to stay in the human body almost indefinitely, compromising the human immune system. And, in perfect correlation to the spread of GMOs, all sorts of illnesses are growing and a rapid rate.
They turned me into a newt!
This is why they refuse to do any long-term studies.
I got better.
So basically we've got an evidentiary double-standard where Monsanto et al get to say "perfectly safe until proven otherwise"
I don't want to call you ignorant, but you should actually look at the tests that are done with GMO crops before they are allowed to be eaten, even by the researchers who made them, and then before they are allowed to be sold. Monsanto actually is required to prove they are safe (within a margin of error, which is all you can do in science). You should look up on Wikipedia and understand the tests that are done before posting again.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm more of a no witch hunts fanboy.
Hardly no one looks for examples of harm from non-GMO corn either. All corn, really all agricultural products, are heavily genetically engineered, the difference is some is engineered with selective breeding and hybridization, and the other by resequencing. The only reason we pay attention to the latter is there's a contingent of motivated believers who think that "natural" food contains Maggi Health Fairies, and that Big Science and Corporations kill the fairies by Playing God(!!1!@1!). it's really hard to get funding to try studying anything against Big Ag's corporate profit interests
"It's impossible to disprove Darwinism, because the Darwin lobby controls all granting in the life sciences!" "It's impossible to disprove general relativity, because the government suppresses that truth!"
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Uh, no, the paper was about GMO corn causing tumors in rats - are you high on weed or something?
Anyway, there is a broad scientific consensus about the safety of GMOs. There are over 600 studies - you can start here: http://www.biofortified.org/genera/studies-for-genera/. Do you want to claim that Monsanto has the entire scientific community locked up in their sphere of influence? That's about as sensible as claiming that human-caused global warming proponents in academia are all part of some liberal conspiracy to implement communism.
Re: "GMOs produce toxins" the only toxins that are being produced are GMOs that have been modified to produce the Bt toxin which is COMPLETELY harmless to humans. The mechanism of action of the Bt pesticide only affects insects - the digestive system of the human is completely unaffected by it. Also, you may not be aware, but Bt is available as a spray and is approved for use even on USDA Organic crops. So even if you're eating organic food, there is a very good chance you're consuming the Bt pesticide.
If you think Bt is unsafe to humans then PROVE IT. Put up or shut up.
Direct health effects of GMO foods are IMHO only the third most important potential concern with GMOs.
The first concern is that whatever you have engineered, it is self-reproducing and could potentially take over a niche in a whole ecosystem, displacing other species or naturually adapted varieties, and you in general could not stop this if it happened. So eco-systems then become fully the responsibility of human biology tweakers.
This seems generally unwise. The consequences of such ecosystem shifts is too complex to be predicted.
A second concern is that each genetic engineering modification needs to be fully assessed separately from all others, due to the complexity of the systems into which they are being inserted. Or at least, very narrow equivalence classes of modifications need each to be individually, and in combination, re-tested for long term effects, viability, viability and effects of likely mutations of the tweak etc, each time they are tweaked.
The cost of such repeated and long term safety testing is well beyond the capability of the companies producing the products, so we can be sure that such rigorous, long term, and repeated (when product is varied) testing is not being done.
Instead, smaller numbers of specific tests on a subset of engineered varieties are generalized in alleged applicability and conclusion, to save money.
So there is still a lot of know unknown and unknown unknown out there, and it is the kind of product that in general, self-reproduces and also expands in range.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
But then, this is the man who worked tirelessly to reintroduce circumcision to the US as a preemptive way discourage masturbation, so screw him.
Corn flakes were a variation on that theme. Kellogg was a follower of the ideas of Sylvester Graham (who also invented the "masturbation causes blindness" nuttery). He believed that spicy or sweet foods led to "passions" and "impure thoughts".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
BILLY MAIZE HERE!
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Recall, in this particular case, the specific genetic modification in question: glyphosate resistance, allowing massive quantities of glyphosate herbicide to be dumped on everything. This isn't engineering to make bigger, sweeter kernels or boost crop density. Glyphosate kills the heck out of weeds because it's highly biologically active, designed to interfere with metabolic processes --- the kind of thing you might have big a-priori safety concerns about, above and beyond genetic modification to speed along selective breeding processes for traits not directly related to dumping massive amounts of toxins onto food products. So, yes, humans have been doing "genetic engineering" for a long time, but less so for capabilities to saturate fields with weird shit that kills all the other plants.
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
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637
The study involved 200 rats, half female, split into 10 groups.
As I understand it, the greatest 'statistical significance' comes from the female rats.
Taking one part, and closely analysing it.
'Up to 14 months, no animals in the control groups showed any signs of tumors whilst 10–30% of treated females per group developed tumors, with the exception of one group (33% GMO + R). By the beginning of the 24th month, 50–80% of female animals had developed tumors in all treated groups, with up to 3 tumors per animal, whereas only 30% of controls were affected.'
Starting with the first statement. 'up to 14 months, 1-3 rats in some of the groups developed tumors, whereas no rats in the control group or the group fed GMO + roundup did' So, of 7 groups, 2 groups were cancer free.
Going onto the next part.
3 rats got cancer in the control group.
5-8 in the other 6 groups.
But, half of those 6 groups were also fed roundup.
So, a total of between 9 and 15 extra rats got cancer, apparantly, if you multiply up the control group.
But - the whole basis of this paper now rests on two rats.
If in the control group at the 24th month, 5 rats would normally have gotten cancer, and 2 happened to get lucky, the paper largely becomes non-statistically significant.
I am not a statistician.
If normally, half of rats get cancer at 24 months, then you would expect 5 rats, not 3 in the control group to have it.
How likely is it that only three rats would die?
Only if this chance is under 5% does the rest of the paper have any weight whatsoever.
the kind of thing you might have big a-priori safety concerns about, above and beyond genetic modification to speed along selective breeding processes for traits not directly related to dumping massive amounts of toxins onto food products. So, yes, humans have been doing "genetic engineering" for a long time, but less so for capabilities to saturate fields with weird shit that kills all the other plants.
Interestingly, they've been dumping actual shit on plants for a long time before that, which is probably more dangerous than the glyphosate that you are (for some unknown reason) afraid of.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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."
What we know about GMOs is that there are no known examples of harm caused by them that can be reproduced by scientific peers.
You mean like Monsanto's Newleaf Potatoes?
There was first the Dr. Arpad Pusztai study that showed it caused "damage to the intestines and immune systems of rats fed the genetically modified potatoes."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rp%C3%A1d_Pusztai
Industry and the Royal Society of Medicine declared Dr. Arpad's study flawed and his study was considered discredited.
Then it turns out the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences had conducted a similar study that found similar results. Except this study had been suppressed by Monsanto for 8 years.
Major US food companies, like McDonald's and Frito-Lay, used Newleaf Potatoes for a few years before consumers complained about GMO "frankenfries."
It would be one thing if GMOs were being developed to taste better, grow larger, etc. However, most GMOs that are being developed either seem to be for either producing their own pesticides or to allow more pesticides to be used on them. It's not complex logic that putting new and more poisons on our food could cause us harm. Especially, when so many studies are coming out linking various diseases to pesticide use. Slashdot just recently an article linking Parkinson's to pesticide (http://slashdot.org/story/13/11/26/1956243/how-heroin-addicts-helped-scientists-link-pesticides-and-parkinsons). Pesticides have been linked to being a cause of Autism (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404662/) and other diseases.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
And, they generally use sample sizes similar to the numbers used in this study under question --- the 200 rats studied was a moderately "ordinary" number by industry standards.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers. Nature reports 20 total rats were used. The Nature article illustrates a number of other problems with the study, please at least become aware of them before further commenting.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I wouldn't go so far as to assume that the FDA is completely overrun. A little under 50% of drugs fail FDA approval on their first application. FDA rejection is costly, and companies have been increasingly been aggressive about doing their own testing first in order to make sure that they don't languish forever in a nightmarish backlog like the one that the USPTO suffers from. I used to know someone who had exactly the sort of near-executive-level pharmaceutical responsibility; as far as I could tell, a lot of the collaboration between FDA people and companies is actually about trying to expedite testing and safety.
On top of that, you have competitive pressures. Nothing is better for a company if they can discover that their competitors have cheated regulations or produced an unsafe product; the battlefield is aggressive and collaborations usually end in backstabbing. If you can produce evidence that another company lied to the FDA or that their products pose a health risk, it can potentially destroy that company. This is one case where a competitive market can be a positive force if the rules are set up right.
That all being said, the FDA does have corruption issues. The Wikipedia article on on regulatory capture lists some much more perverse cases, though, like how the agency responsible for cleaning up after oil spills was renamed and then restructured into oblivion in the days following the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Note, the "Nature report" isn't itself one of Nature's peer-reviewed articles --- it's a news commentary piece, passing along the views of lobbyists and industry-captured governmental bodies (also staffed with former Monsanto officials). The scientists responsible for peer reviewing the article, when it was initially published, and then again under renewed pressure from industry lobbying groups, found nothing scientifically wrong with the study. Statistically weak results do not invalidate science --- they simply require appropriate interpretation (e.g. that this study doesn't definitively prove the GMO products cause large cancer rates, but does lend support to such effects existing), and provide guidance for where to take a deeper look.
Do I think Nature is entirely controlled by Monsanto? Not the parts responsible for selecting, peer reviewing, and publishing scientific research. But, could Monsanto's gigantic PR/lobbying effort (which is way better funded than industry-independent scientific researchers) pressure an editorial fluff hit piece outside regular scientific channels? Pretty sure they could, and just did.
Glyphosate itself is harmless, the problem is in surfactants - they are much more dangerous. It's like drinking concentrated detergent (which is also lethal at about 200ml dose).
Here's the Seralini team response to FCT. Basically, Seralini is challenging them to also retract the Monsanto study (e.g., Hammond et al. 2004):
http://gmoseralini.org/professor-seralini-replies-to-fct-journal-over-study-retraction/
Professor Seralini replies to FCT journal over study retraction
Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team have responded to the letter from A. Wallace Hayes, editor of Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), telling Prof Séralini that he intended to retract his study on NK603 maize and Roundup.
Here’s the retraction notice from Elsevier, the publisher of FCT: http://prn.to/1euTk2W
Response by Prof GE Seralini and colleagues to A. Wallace Hayes, editor of Food and Chemical Toxicology
28 Nov 2013
We, authors of the paper published in FCT more than one year ago on the effects of Roundup and a Roundup-tolerant GMO (Séralini et al., 2012), and having answered to critics in the same journal (Séralini et al., 2013), do not accept as scientifically sound the debate on the fact that these papers are inconclusive because of the rat strain or the number of rats used. We maintain our conclusions. We already published some answers to the same critics in your Journal, which have not been answered (Séralini et al., 2013).
Rat strain
The same strain is used by the US national toxicology program to study the carcinogenicity and the chronic toxicity of chemicals (King-Herbert et al., 2010). Sprague Dawley rats are used routinely in such studies for toxicological and tumour-inducing effects, including those 90-day studies by Monsanto as basis for the approval of NK603 maize and other GM crops (Sprague Dawley rats did not came from Harlan but from Charles-River) (Hammond et al., 2004; Hammond et al., 2006a; Hammond et al., 2006b).
A brief, quick and still preliminary literature search of peer-reviewed journals revealed that Sprague Dawley rats were used in 36-month studies by (Voss et al., 2005) or in 24-month studies by (Hack et al., 1995), (Minardi et al., 2002), (Klimisch et al., 1997), (Gamez et al., 2007).Some of these studies have been published in Food and Chemical Toxicology.
Number of rats, OECD guidelines
OECD guidelines (408 for 90 day study, 452 chronic toxicity and 453 combined carcinogenicity/chronic toxicity study) always asked for 20 animals per group (both in 1981 and 2009 guidelines) although the measurement of biochemical parameters can be performed on 10 rats, as indicated. We did not perform a carcinogenesis study, which would not have been adopted at first, but a long-term chronic full study, 10 rats are sufficient for that at a biochemical level according to norms and we have measured such a number of parameters! The disturbance of sexual hormones or other parameters are sufficient in themselves in our case to interpret a serious effect after one year. The OPLS-DA statistical method we published is one of the best adapted. For tumours and deaths, the chronology and number of tumours per animal have to be taken into account. Any sign should be regarded as important for a real risk study. Monsanto itself measured only 10 rats of the same strain per group on 20 to conclude that the same GM maize was safe after 3 months (Hammond et al., 2004).
The statistical analysis should not be done with historical data first, the comparison is falsified, thus 50 rats per group is useless
The use of historical data falsifies health risk assessments because the diet is contaminated by dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans (Schecter et al., 1996), mercury (Weiss et al., 2005), cadmium and chromium among other heavy metals in a range of doses that altered mouse liver and lung gene expression and confounds genomic analyses (Kozul et al., 2008). They also contained pesticides or plasticizers released by cages or from water sources (Howdeshell et al., 2003). Historical