Science And GMOs Are Not The Bad Guys Here

[roseBudd]

20. False. Seralini used Sprague-Dawley rats....

who spontaneously develop tumors. Ten control animals are inadequate. Seralini discovered nothing but noise.

The peers have spoken, and it doesn't lead to Seralini's science was peer reviewed. it tomk 700 scientists demanding he release his fraudulent data.

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/700_researchers_call_gilleseric_seralini_release_gmo_test_data-95574

http://esciencenews.com/sources/scientific.blogging/2012/10/23/700.researchers.call.on.gilles.eric.seralini.to.release.gmo.test.data

http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Hundreds-of-scientists-urge-Seralini-to-release-full-GM-maize-study-data

http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2012/10/22/scientists-call-out-french-researchers-to-release-gmo-test-data/#.Uh6HYNJzFGM

Bet you won't read this

A scientific analysis of the rat study conducted by
Gilles-Eric Séralini et al.

http://www.vib.be/en/news/Documents/20121008_EN_Analyse%20rattenstudie%20S%C3%A9ralini%20et%20al.pdf

The results of the experiment
Despite the abovementioned fundamental errors in the research design, we will subject the results
to further scrutiny. What do we discover?

Negative checks in comparison with the treatments

The results of Séralini et al.’s experiment show that there were fewer deaths among the male
animals whose diet comprised food with 22 or 33% genetically modified maize (= negative control)
(the left hand side of the figure below). This is remarkable given that the genetically modified maize
was herbicide tolerant, and no new properties that may have had health advantages for the rats. We
see the same result after Roundup was added to the drinking water. There were fewer deaths among
the male rats that had drunk the highest concentration of Roundup than among those who had
drunk pure water (the right hand side of the figure below). And this while Roundup certainly does not
contain any known life-extending properties. The researchers should have taken these observations
as a warning that there was something wrong with the experiment, because if these results were
correct it would mean that consuming large amounts of genetically modified NK603 maize or
Roundup would be a way to live longer. These strange findings are not interpretable because as
noted previously there is something fundamentally wrong with the research design.

Analysis of the death rate

There is no statistical analysis of the number of deaths in the manuscript. Based on the figures, there
are virtually no reliable differences in the death rates to be found among the males. This is probably
because the average death rate within the control group is virtually the same as the average of all
the treated groups put together. Among the female animals, there were differences, but this is
probably because the average death rate in the control group is low in comparison to the treated
group, but is also half as low as it is for the male animals.

The research design once again plays a role in the analysis. Because there are not enough control
groups and control animals in the study, there is also insufficient reliable data on spontaneous death.
If Séralini et al. had included a control group for each treatment, or a control group that was twice as
large as the treated group to compensate for the lack of internal standards, then they would most
probably have found a variance in death rate among the control group that they have now avoided.
It is not clear whether all the animals died of tumors.

The conclusion is that Séralini et al. did not find any reliable differences in the death rates between
the treated and untreated animals.

Analysis of the tumors

Séralini et al. make an unusual distinction between small and large tumors and between external
palpable tumors and internal tumors. In carcinogenicity studies, tumors are normally always
investigated separately: the incidence per type of tumor is looked at and compared with the
incidence in the control animals, and with the historical incidence in the lab itself (which is lacking in
this study).

Séralini et al. find differences in the number of large tumors; in the differences in the number
between the males and the females in the control group; and a difference in the number of large
tumors among the treated and control female animals. The size of a tumor, however, is not related,
on the face of it, to how serious it is. Séralini et al. had to put down all the female control animals
that developed tumors before the end of the experiment to put an end to their suffering, which is a
measure of the seriousness of the tumors

What they fail to report, however, is that the observed effects in many cases overlap with the effects
that were observed in the control groups. They can only invoke non-dose-related effects as an
explanation if these effects are not observed in the control group, and that is not the case. Over
and above this, in their conclusion Séralini and his team attribute the non-dose-related effects to the
non-linear endocrine-disrupting effects of Roundup. They ignore the fact that comparable non-linear
effects can also be seen in the treatments that did not include Roundup, perhaps because this would
undermine their conclusion. And, as we noted previously, for several of the treatments the lowest
mortality was among those who had been given the highest doses. Mortality increases in line with
the dose when the substance is in actual fact carcinogenic.

Because of the small number of control animals and the absence of adequate controls, the reliability
of the limited data is seriously compromised and so Séralini et al. go to great lengths to find
explanations for their findings. They ignore, however, the most obvious explanation, namely that
the established variability in the data is not supported by a proper research design, which
precludes adequate interpretation of the data. Moreover, they use an unorthodox statistical
method (‘two class discriminant analysis’) that aims at finding differences instead of investigating
differences between the treated animals and the control group.

In other words, they are only looking for interpretations that support their theory.

Dose-effect relationship

Further analysis of the data in the study shows that no relationship was found between the dose
(the amount of GMO and/or Roundup) and the effect (tumors/pathologies/death rate). Séralini et al.
acknowledge this in their article and explain it by claiming that:
“As is often the case for hormonal diseases, most observed effects in this study were not
proportional to the dose of the treatment (GM maize with and without Roundup application,
Roundup alone), non-monotonic, and with a threshold effect.”

Misleading

There are also other places in the publication where there is evidence of incorrect interpretation of
the results or a one-sided presentation of these. For instance, there is only a photograph of a treated
rat that developed a tumor. There are no photographs of control rats. It was this photo of the rat
that was sent around the world. And, to show the pathologies that developed in greater detail, rats
from the control group that had not developed tumors were selected, while from the treated group
rats were selected that had developed tumors. On the basis of previous publications as well as from
data from Séralini’s study, we know that rats in control groups also develop tumors.

Conclusion

The two-year long rat study conducted by Séralini and his colleagues displays, from a scientific point
of view, considerable shortcomings. The most serious of these can be found in the fact that the study
used far too few rats per treated group and that there were too few control groups. In one fell swoop
this entirely removes the basis for the conclusions that Séralini et al. draw. In addition to this, for
every conclusion that they draw there is sufficient evidence in their own text to undermine them
completely. There are also other shortcomings and numerous other questions that remain
unanswered. One thing is clear: Séralini et al. have not been able to substantiate in any way
whether genetically modified NK603 maize or Roundup is harmful or not. The only thing that the
study confirms is that Sprague-Dawley rats, like many other laboratory rats, develop relatively
speaking many pathologies and that, as a consequence of this, many of the animals do not reach two
years of age. But we have known this since the 1960s.