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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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."
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!