That Appalling Seralini GMO Cancer Paper Has Been Withdrawn
As my colleague Jon Entine notes that seriously bad paper claiming that GMO crops gave lab rats cancer by Seralini et al has been withdrawn.
In a stunning development, Food and Chemical Toxicology, which last year published the controversial rat study by Gilles-Éric Séralini that claimed to show that genetically modified corn could lead to a high incidence of cancer will be retracted and evidence of it expunged from the journal’s database.
The editor of the journal, A. Wallace Hayes, sent the French scientist a letter saying that the paper will be withdrawn if he does not agree to do it voluntarily. According to Le Figaro, which broke the story, Séralini rejected Hayes’ findings.
Excellent news: when it first came out I was highly critical of it. And prompted by a commenter here I was able to show that the paper must be wrong.
The argument was quite simple. Seralini was claiming that lab chow made with Roundup Ready corn was causing these tumours in the lab rats. We’d certainly like to know if that were true. However, I went and contacted the maker of the lab chow that was used in the experiment. And, indeed, the lab chow that is used extensively across both the US and Europe.
And that company does not keep GMOs, including Roundup Ready corn, out of its supply chain. Well, not deliberately it doesn’t. However, there is a natural experiment here. For their European lab chow is made from locally grown, European ingredients. And there’s very little GMO or Roundup Ready corn in Europe. But of course it is entirely pervasive right through the American supply chain. So, if it were true that Roundup Ready corn produced tumours in these lab rats then we should have seen an explosion of such tumours in US lab rats and a much lower level of them in Europe (for this breed of rat is known to get these tumours anyway). But we haven’t seen such an explosion therefore we must assume that the paper itself is wrong.
In essence, between the EU and US populations of this breed of rat, we’ve been carrying out exactly the same experiment for the last decade or more, through several generations of rats used for all sorts of other experiments. And given that we haven’t seen an explosive change in cancer rates in those two populations then the original thesis must be wrong.
forbes.com |
