The Séralini affair
December 1, 2013 10:41 PM Subscribe
Controversial Seralini GMO-rats paper to be retracted
The claims:
Roundup maize causes tumours and liver and kidney failure in rats
The criticism:
Appalling
"The statistical methods are unconventional ... and it would appear the authors have gone on a statistical fishing trip."
Single-Study Syndrome and the G.M.O. Food Fight
The reaction:
Journal retraction of Séralini study is illicit, unscientific, and unethical
Ugly Legal Battle Looms.
"[O]ne [of Monsanto's] directors penetrated the [journal's] editorial office to be in charge of biotech papers, after our publication."
The analysis:
The French High Council of Biotechnology Scientific Committee Opinion articulates the reasons why the findings of this study are unreliable.
The wikipedia entry
The claims:
Roundup maize causes tumours and liver and kidney failure in rats
The criticism:
Appalling
"The statistical methods are unconventional ... and it would appear the authors have gone on a statistical fishing trip."
Single-Study Syndrome and the G.M.O. Food Fight
The reaction:
Journal retraction of Séralini study is illicit, unscientific, and unethical
Ugly Legal Battle Looms.
"[O]ne [of Monsanto's] directors penetrated the [journal's] editorial office to be in charge of biotech papers, after our publication."
The analysis:
The French High Council of Biotechnology Scientific Committee Opinion articulates the reasons why the findings of this study are unreliable.
The wikipedia entry
Drinky Die, the Wikipedia entry is really quite a good summary of the whole thing. I would recommend reading it first before the other articles.
posted by Tsuga at 11:25 PM on December 1, 2013
posted by Tsuga at 11:25 PM on December 1, 2013
The "10 rats per study group" thing is really pretty bad. The statistical power of that kind of sample size is almost nil (given the real chance that rats will come up with randomly come up with tumors or die during their lifespan). You wouldn't be able to detect any kind of subtle effect at all, which is exactly the kind of effect you'd be looking in a study examining GMO toxicity.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:02 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:02 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
This study would be like taking tiny groups of 2-pack-a-day Lucky Strike smokers and concluding that a group that had 8 cancer cases instead of the typical 6 proves that the CIA is dusting them with chemtrails.
posted by TrialByMedia at 12:27 AM on December 2, 2013 [10 favorites]
posted by TrialByMedia at 12:27 AM on December 2, 2013 [10 favorites]
These self-funded cranks who have been doing their sad song and dance for decades, where they build tests that are blatantly designed to come up with the answer they want and cry persecution whenever anyone points this out. Science doesn't work this way and it doesn't work on anyone with even the most basic of knowledge of statistics or genetics or cancer, but it doesn't need to for the donations to roll in because our collective scientific literacy is so manifestly pathetic. They know exactly what they're doing and its a cynical manipulation pushing the left up its own ass where it can do no harm to anything but itself as it wiggles around ineffectively. In throwing away any claim to self respect or intellectual honesty, they've managed to make themselves the science kings of a hill they shrink daily with their bullshit. Here is a very clear and accessible write up of how they did it here,
posted by Blasdelb at 12:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [51 favorites]
Are the findings reliable?The sample size is pathetically small, one would expect more than an order of magnitude more - and in different proportions - for a paper making claims like this. However, even if an appropriate number of mice were used, the test would still find a significant increase in cancer rates because the test was rigged. They also used wildly inappropriate mouse strains, control diets, lifespans and measures of cancer designed to create the result they wanted from the particular biology of the mouse strain, malnutrition, natural death, normal cancer - all things that are well understood by the sadly small number of people who work with them. If someone were to feed a more appropriate strain either GMO or non-GMO #2 corn, study them for their natural lifespan, and use appropriate tests for cancer then it would actually be pretty absurd to expect anything. RoundUp is toxicologically one of the better studied compounds out there and is emphatically non-carcinogenic. We know from two agricultural workers who attempted to commit suicide with it that the toxicity it does have is pretty fucked up in wildly high concentrations but cancer is not one of the concerns. Similarly the RoundUp-ready strain of corn used was created by taking genes from broad leaf weeds around the Monsanto plant that makes RoundUp that had naturally gained resistance and putting them into the corn. These genes are also really well studied, arn't expressed in the cob, and their gene products are broken down into amino acids pretty instantaneously in mammalian guts. There really isn't a conceivable way the non-GMO corn would outperform the GMO corn. In fairness, even in a better strain of mouse, there would be fantastically high rates of cancer and low general health in both the control and experimental group, because they'd be eating #2 corn. It'd be like feeding them raw potato for nutrition, and lab mice are pretty fucking sensitive to this, the #2 corn they were using was not bred for direct consumption but instead for industrial purposes.
There is little to suggest they are. Tom Sanders, head of nutritional research at King's College London, says that the strain of rat the French team used gets breast tumours easily, especially when given unlimited food, or maize contaminated by a common fungus that causes hormone imbalance, or just allowed to age. There were no data on food intake or tests for fungus in the maize, so we don't know whether this was a factor.
But didn't the treated rats get sicker than the untreated rats?
Some did, but that's not the full story. It wasn't that rats fed GM maize or herbicide got tumours, and the control rats did not. Five of the 20 control rats – 25 per cent – got tumours and died, while 60 per cent in "some test groups" that ate GM maize died. Some other test groups, however, were healthier than the controls. Toxicologists do a standard mathematical test, called the standard deviation, on such data to see whether the difference is what you might expect from random variation, or can be considered significant. The French team did not present these tests in their paper. They used a complicated and unconventional analysis that Sanders calls "a statistical fishing trip". Anthony Trewavas of the University of Edinburgh, UK, adds that in any case, there should be at least as many controls as test rats – there were only 20 of the former and 80 of the latter – to show how variably tumours appear. Without those additional controls, "these results are of no value", he says.
Aside from the statistics, are there any other problems?
Yes. Tests like this have been done before, more rigorously, and found no effect of GM food on health. The French team claims to be the first to test for the animal's whole lifespan. But "most toxicology studies are terminated at normal lifespan – 2 years", as this one was, says Sanders. "Immortality is not an alternative." And those tests did not find this effect. Furthermore, the team claims to see the same toxic effects both with actual Roundup, and with the GM maize – whether or not the maize contained any actual herbicide. It is hard to imagine any way in which a herbicide could have identical toxic effects to a gene tweak that gives the maize a gene for an enzyme that actually destroys the herbicide.
Does seeming unlikely mean that this is an invalid result?
Not necessarily. But even more damning from a pharmacological perspective, the team found the same effect at all doses of either herbicide or GM maize. That's unusual, because nearly all toxic effects worsen as the dose increases – it is considered essential for proving that the agent causes the effect. Even the smallest dose that the team applied resulted in alleged effects on the rats. That is sometimes seen with other toxic agents. The team suggests that the effect kicks in at some very low dose, hits its maximum extent immediately, and stays the same at any higher dose. But it could more simply mean the GM maize and the herbicide had no measured effect, and that is why the dose made no difference. "They show that old rats get tumours and die," says Mark Tester of the University of Adelaide, Australia. "That is all that can be concluded."
Why would scientists do this?
The research group has long been opposed to GM crops. It claimed in 2010 to have found evidence of toxicity in tests by the GM-crops giant Monsanto of its own Roundup-resistant maize. Other toxicologists, however, said the supposedly damning data revealed only insignificant fluctuations in the physiology of normal rats. French blogger Anton Suwalki, who campaigns against pseudoscience, has a long list of complaints about the group, including what he calls "fantasy statistics".
And who funded the work?
The group was funded by the Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic Engineering, or CRIIGEN, based in Paris, France. The lead author on today's study, Séralini, is head of its scientific board, and it pledges to "make every effort towards the removal of the status of secrecy prevailing in genetic engineering experiments and concerning genetically modified crops (GMOs), both being likely to have an impact on the environment and/or on health".
Don't they realize that other scientists criticise their methods?
They might. The paper is supposed to have been reviewed by other scientists before it was allowed for publication. But the team refused to allow journalists to show the paper to other scientists before the news reports were due to be published.
posted by Blasdelb at 12:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [51 favorites]
Sounds like Elsevier did a typically great job here too then. Crikey.
posted by Pre-Taped Call In Show at 12:59 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by Pre-Taped Call In Show at 12:59 AM on December 2, 2013
I'd go one further - there's really no good scientific argument why Roundup-Ready plants should cause cancer at all. Period.
To start, let's define what the study was actually looking at. Monsanto produces a pesticide - glyphosate, commonly known as "Roundup" - that kills plants via targeting a specific biochemical pathway. This pathway, called the shikimate pathway, is responsible for the synthesis of aromatic amino acids (tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine) in bacteria, fungi, and importantly in this case, plants. (Incidentally, the precursor that the pathway is named after, shikimic acid or shikimate, is consider a potential carcinogen and why it's recommended to roast fern fiddleheads before eating - as basically high-growth shoots of ferns, they'd have a higher concentration of shikimate than normal so they could produce the amino acids needed for plant growth.) Glyphosate acts as a competitive inhibitor, blocking the active site of a protein called 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS from here on out) which is a crucial early step in the synthesis process and preventing the protein from doing its job creating the amino acids a plant needs to grow. This is why glyphosate is such an effective targeted weed killer - by targeting a protein that is only truly important during rapid plant growth, Roundup severely inhibits rapid plant growth - again, think of those fern fiddleheads - while leaving plants that have already grown to their full size largely intact.
However, it's still not a great thing for plants to be bathed in, so Monsanto took a version of the EPSPS protein from a bacteria - Agrobacterium sp. strain CP4, if you must know - that has a slightly different shape than the one found in plants susceptible to glyphosate, and blocks glyphosate from being able to bind with and inhibit the EPSPS protein while still allowing the protein to function properly in plants. The paper linked above shows exactly how hard that is - they had to find a protein that blocked glyphosate, but still was similar enough to bind with phosphoenolpyruvate that glyphosate was mimicking. The version of the protein that fit into this Goldilocks zone is different from the naturally occurring EPSPS protein by one amino acid - a alanine amino acid instead of a glycine at position 100 in the amino acid sequence, where the methyl group of the alanine protrudes just enough to prevent the more neutrally charged glyphosate from binding with the EPSPS active site while allowing the more polar phosphoenolpyruvate molecule in.
This is the really important part - the only the difference is between the standard plant and a Roundup-Ready glyphosate-resistant plant is one amino acid, and one that, by design, does not alter the function of the amino acid in any way, shape or form. Roundup-Ready crops do not produce new compounds, none of their proteins function any differently than a non-GMO organism - literally all they have is one amino acid difference. There is no conformational change in the protein, there is no function change - in fact, both were actively discriminated against in testing, because this is one of the most basic proteins that all plants require to grow. Fucking with this any more than absolutely necessary would drastically stunt the growth of the plant, if it could grow at all.
And as far as something that does something as biochemically destructive as consuming the organism in question? Being a protein, it gets rendered completely inactive in the stomach by the harsh acids denaturing any and all proteins in sight, and then is torn apart by protease enzymes in the small intestine - more than enough to wipe out any changes to a protein, especially one this small. And finally, before some smartacre brings up prions - infectious proteins transmissible through ingestion - prions are, by definition, resistant to proteases, something that EPSPS has no indication of possessing. Furthermore, prions can only work by causing harmful conformational changes to already existing proteins - meaning you have to already have the protein in question, and since no human or rat yet discovered are, in fact, plants, and therefore do not possess the EPSPS protein, a mutated version of EPSPS that somehow magically escapes the protein shredder that is the mammalian digestive tract and is capable of causing harmful mutations to other versions of EPSPS would find nothing to mutate at all. Finally, prions do not cause cancer. They just make the cells die, creating the little spongy pinholes in tissue that gave spongiform encephalophathy its name.
Okay. To sum up for tl;dr readers: Roundup-Ready crops are functionally identical to natural crops, produce no new compounds, and are incapable of transmitting diddly to mammals in the first place. I know that all of this is rather dense and complicated, but I assure you that any third or fourth year biology student should be able to understand all of this. That's why the pernicious fear about GMO crops is so immensely frustrating to me - anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
posted by Punkey at 1:30 AM on December 2, 2013 [61 favorites]
To start, let's define what the study was actually looking at. Monsanto produces a pesticide - glyphosate, commonly known as "Roundup" - that kills plants via targeting a specific biochemical pathway. This pathway, called the shikimate pathway, is responsible for the synthesis of aromatic amino acids (tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine) in bacteria, fungi, and importantly in this case, plants. (Incidentally, the precursor that the pathway is named after, shikimic acid or shikimate, is consider a potential carcinogen and why it's recommended to roast fern fiddleheads before eating - as basically high-growth shoots of ferns, they'd have a higher concentration of shikimate than normal so they could produce the amino acids needed for plant growth.) Glyphosate acts as a competitive inhibitor, blocking the active site of a protein called 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS from here on out) which is a crucial early step in the synthesis process and preventing the protein from doing its job creating the amino acids a plant needs to grow. This is why glyphosate is such an effective targeted weed killer - by targeting a protein that is only truly important during rapid plant growth, Roundup severely inhibits rapid plant growth - again, think of those fern fiddleheads - while leaving plants that have already grown to their full size largely intact.
However, it's still not a great thing for plants to be bathed in, so Monsanto took a version of the EPSPS protein from a bacteria - Agrobacterium sp. strain CP4, if you must know - that has a slightly different shape than the one found in plants susceptible to glyphosate, and blocks glyphosate from being able to bind with and inhibit the EPSPS protein while still allowing the protein to function properly in plants. The paper linked above shows exactly how hard that is - they had to find a protein that blocked glyphosate, but still was similar enough to bind with phosphoenolpyruvate that glyphosate was mimicking. The version of the protein that fit into this Goldilocks zone is different from the naturally occurring EPSPS protein by one amino acid - a alanine amino acid instead of a glycine at position 100 in the amino acid sequence, where the methyl group of the alanine protrudes just enough to prevent the more neutrally charged glyphosate from binding with the EPSPS active site while allowing the more polar phosphoenolpyruvate molecule in.
This is the really important part - the only the difference is between the standard plant and a Roundup-Ready glyphosate-resistant plant is one amino acid, and one that, by design, does not alter the function of the amino acid in any way, shape or form. Roundup-Ready crops do not produce new compounds, none of their proteins function any differently than a non-GMO organism - literally all they have is one amino acid difference. There is no conformational change in the protein, there is no function change - in fact, both were actively discriminated against in testing, because this is one of the most basic proteins that all plants require to grow. Fucking with this any more than absolutely necessary would drastically stunt the growth of the plant, if it could grow at all.
And as far as something that does something as biochemically destructive as consuming the organism in question? Being a protein, it gets rendered completely inactive in the stomach by the harsh acids denaturing any and all proteins in sight, and then is torn apart by protease enzymes in the small intestine - more than enough to wipe out any changes to a protein, especially one this small. And finally, before some smartacre brings up prions - infectious proteins transmissible through ingestion - prions are, by definition, resistant to proteases, something that EPSPS has no indication of possessing. Furthermore, prions can only work by causing harmful conformational changes to already existing proteins - meaning you have to already have the protein in question, and since no human or rat yet discovered are, in fact, plants, and therefore do not possess the EPSPS protein, a mutated version of EPSPS that somehow magically escapes the protein shredder that is the mammalian digestive tract and is capable of causing harmful mutations to other versions of EPSPS would find nothing to mutate at all. Finally, prions do not cause cancer. They just make the cells die, creating the little spongy pinholes in tissue that gave spongiform encephalophathy its name.
Okay. To sum up for tl;dr readers: Roundup-Ready crops are functionally identical to natural crops, produce no new compounds, and are incapable of transmitting diddly to mammals in the first place. I know that all of this is rather dense and complicated, but I assure you that any third or fourth year biology student should be able to understand all of this. That's why the pernicious fear about GMO crops is so immensely frustrating to me - anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
posted by Punkey at 1:30 AM on December 2, 2013 [61 favorites]
The paper came under fire from the moment it appeared. In what most journalists and scientists said was an outrageous abuse of the embargo system, Séralini demanded reporters to sign a non-disclosure agreement when the study was first being released in an attempt to limit criticism. The demand was designed to turn reporters into stenographers, wrote Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch.
So there is a lot more controversy surrounding this paper than just the scientific methods used. Considering recent reports that suggest many experimentally established "facts" don't seem to hold up to repeated investigation it seems there are maybe other - non-science - reasons for calling this particular paper out?
posted by three blind mice at 1:41 AM on December 2, 2013
So there is a lot more controversy surrounding this paper than just the scientific methods used. Considering recent reports that suggest many experimentally established "facts" don't seem to hold up to repeated investigation it seems there are maybe other - non-science - reasons for calling this particular paper out?
posted by three blind mice at 1:41 AM on December 2, 2013
anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
Anyone need another data point for the hypothesis that the current state of education in America is fully intentional?
posted by mikelieman at 1:44 AM on December 2, 2013
Anyone need another data point for the hypothesis that the current state of education in America is fully intentional?
posted by mikelieman at 1:44 AM on December 2, 2013
Except the people that shout the loudest about GMO crops are usually college students and 'educated' people! GMO panic is almost exclusively the domain of the political left, who are the self-designated champions of science, reasoning and logic! GRAAAH
Sorry, mikelieman, I'm not shouting at you. This is just...something that bothers me very, very much. GMO fearmongering is not like PETA and fur. Millions of people have died from anti-GMO groups scaring starving countries into turning down GMO crops. It's annoying that people think that non-ionizing radiation from cell phones causes cancer - it is a fucking travesty that people are convincing the leaders of countries of starving people to turn down perfectly safe food because they refuse to understand basic fucking science.
posted by Punkey at 1:51 AM on December 2, 2013 [17 favorites]
Sorry, mikelieman, I'm not shouting at you. This is just...something that bothers me very, very much. GMO fearmongering is not like PETA and fur. Millions of people have died from anti-GMO groups scaring starving countries into turning down GMO crops. It's annoying that people think that non-ionizing radiation from cell phones causes cancer - it is a fucking travesty that people are convincing the leaders of countries of starving people to turn down perfectly safe food because they refuse to understand basic fucking science.
posted by Punkey at 1:51 AM on December 2, 2013 [17 favorites]
And finally, before I pass out: I do not trust Monsanto. At all. They are one of the most shady, underhanded, and conniving companies on this planet. The way they go after farmers that even accidentally end up with genes from their GMO crops in their plants (and let's think about what kind of paranoid spying is involved in catching that) is terrifying. Being wary of GMO crops because most of the companies behind them are evil steamrolling monsters that will juice their grandmothers to turn a profit, I totally get. But there is no solid science behind it, especially not with Roundup-Ready.
posted by Punkey at 1:58 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by Punkey at 1:58 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
the team refused to allow journalists to show the paper to other scientists before the news reports were due to be published.
They just wanted to surprise people with how good it was, like how movie studios surprise people with films they release without screening them for reviewers.
posted by Artw at 2:09 AM on December 2, 2013 [8 favorites]
They just wanted to surprise people with how good it was, like how movie studios surprise people with films they release without screening them for reviewers.
posted by Artw at 2:09 AM on December 2, 2013 [8 favorites]
Except the people that shout the loudest about GMO crops are usually college students and 'educated' people!
I'm not offended by your frustration. It's one of those "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" issues.
This presumes that college students do the science any more than the general population. Similarly 'educated' people, 'educated' by a broken system shouldn't be expected to 'get it' any more than the general population either.
posted by mikelieman at 2:24 AM on December 2, 2013
I'm not offended by your frustration. It's one of those "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" issues.
This presumes that college students do the science any more than the general population. Similarly 'educated' people, 'educated' by a broken system shouldn't be expected to 'get it' any more than the general population either.
posted by mikelieman at 2:24 AM on December 2, 2013
"The way they go after farmers that even accidentally end up with genes from their GMO crops in their plants (and let's think about what kind of paranoid spying is involved in catching that) is terrifying."
I also have precious little love lost on Monsanto, but this too is a myth. Farmers who honestly have their fields contaminated by traits accidentally are in no danger, and never have been. Monsanto and other companies have only ever sued farmers who intentionally plant crops they do not have licenses for and then prove it by buying concentrations of pesticide from Monsanto for their fields that would kill their crops if they hadn't used seed they didn't have license to. Monsanto would have no idea, and would have no reason to give a damn, if a farmer had their seeds and didn't use what they're for. That is in addition to one stubborn old coot who did it on purpose and then proved it by writing Monsanto a letter telling them he did it, even though he did not take advantage of it, to make a legal point he didn't understand.
So long as we are trying to have conversations about things that are real, rather than what is most grar inducingly theatrical and foisted on us, we might as well try to talk about the subtle and boring but actually reasons Monsanto is kind of shitty, even if they are a lot less exciting for how they implicate us.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:25 AM on December 2, 2013 [12 favorites]
I also have precious little love lost on Monsanto, but this too is a myth. Farmers who honestly have their fields contaminated by traits accidentally are in no danger, and never have been. Monsanto and other companies have only ever sued farmers who intentionally plant crops they do not have licenses for and then prove it by buying concentrations of pesticide from Monsanto for their fields that would kill their crops if they hadn't used seed they didn't have license to. Monsanto would have no idea, and would have no reason to give a damn, if a farmer had their seeds and didn't use what they're for. That is in addition to one stubborn old coot who did it on purpose and then proved it by writing Monsanto a letter telling them he did it, even though he did not take advantage of it, to make a legal point he didn't understand.
So long as we are trying to have conversations about things that are real, rather than what is most grar inducingly theatrical and foisted on us, we might as well try to talk about the subtle and boring but actually reasons Monsanto is kind of shitty, even if they are a lot less exciting for how they implicate us.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:25 AM on December 2, 2013 [12 favorites]
Thanks. That makes more sense than secret Monsanto seed harvesters - although I wouldn't put it past them.
posted by Punkey at 2:36 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Punkey at 2:36 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
There are conversations we need to be having about the economic structures in which the molecular genetics revolution is used, but this crank can only ever be a distraction from them. The scientific illiteracy, loose associations, and conspiratorial thinking that he promotes can only ever work to discredit the liberal cause like anti-vaxxers have done. Its the same kind of "alternative science," with the boogeymen that almost seem like identical mustache twirling villains controlling everything when viewed through the looking glass. They have the same smug secret knowledge that allows them to stand up to those damn experts, the people with recognizable names have the same kinds of shallow trappings of respectability without substance - like a cargo cult of academia, and they have the same kinds of cultish followers with watery eyed admiration. They rely on the same kind of abuse of the precautionary principle that transmutes it into something more like Pascal's wager to terrify people into line, as well as pretty much the same kinds of fake studies designed to show harms that don't exist and provide paper to wave around.
Its really, also, not so different from creationism. Its just the liberal way to place oneself among the elect few who know just how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and how there is nothing we can do about it so we might as well police ourselves for orthodoxy.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:10 AM on December 2, 2013 [7 favorites]
Its really, also, not so different from creationism. Its just the liberal way to place oneself among the elect few who know just how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and how there is nothing we can do about it so we might as well police ourselves for orthodoxy.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:10 AM on December 2, 2013 [7 favorites]
Is it still scientific to dislike Roundup ready plants because they allow for increased the use of pesticides?
posted by kokaku at 3:18 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 3:18 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
This whole controversy ignores the actual problems of spraying herbicides this way.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 3:18 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by psycho-alchemy at 3:18 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
Also, the reason that Hayes and Food and Chemical Toxicology are being coy about the abundantly clear misconduct involved in publishing this,
posted by Blasdelb at 3:20 AM on December 2, 2013
“Were FCT to persist in its decision to retract our study, CRIIGEN would attack with lawyers, including in the United States, to require financial compensation for the huge damage to our group.”These fuckers are about to sue for libel, like they have successfully in France where truth is a shockingly weak defense, and Hayes is no doubt working under the advice of lawyers to avoid needing to prove anything related to the inner workings of Séralini's twisted head to make his case easier to win.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:20 AM on December 2, 2013
I love how people say "Roundup ready crops aren't carcinogenic", pretending that that's the end of the story, when all it takes is a look at one Roundup MSDS to know that that's all a diversion from the real issue with this particular GMO crop, which is that the crop along with its genetic modifications allows for ever-stronger (ever-stronger because over time it stops working) doses of Roundup to be applied.
posted by sutt at 4:25 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by sutt at 4:25 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
Have you actually read the roundup msds? Or looked at the toxicity data?
Compared to most agents its not very dangerous. Indiscriminate use is surely bad but almost any other herbicide or pesticide is more toxic.
posted by JPD at 4:27 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
Compared to most agents its not very dangerous. Indiscriminate use is surely bad but almost any other herbicide or pesticide is more toxic.
posted by JPD at 4:27 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
Yes, I have. (Which one did you read?) And it's plenty enough for me, thanks.
posted by sutt at 4:29 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by sutt at 4:29 AM on December 2, 2013
Which one did you read? As was noted in a prior thread its only an exaggeration by a single order of magnitude to say you could drink the most commonly available concentration.
posted by JPD at 4:37 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by JPD at 4:37 AM on December 2, 2013
I mean what does the mean. Its enough for you? That makes no sense. I want to say this is some incredibly toxic product so I'm just going to assert something and say "that's enough for me !"
posted by JPD at 4:39 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by JPD at 4:39 AM on December 2, 2013
"I love how people say "Roundup ready crops aren't carcinogenic", pretending that that's the end of the story, when all it takes is a look at one Roundup MSDS to know that that's all a diversion from the real issue with this particular GMO crop, which is that the crop along with its genetic modifications allows for ever-stronger (ever-stronger because over time it stops working) doses of Roundup to be applied."The diversion and the shithead who caused it are what this FPP is about.
For those following along, here is the MSDS sheet for the original formulation of Round-up. Surely we can move away from the endless posturing that characterizes this debate to real data. To get an idea of what this means,
To have a decent 50/50 shot of killing me, weighing in at 72 kilograms after Thanksgiving, I'd theoretically need to drink a hair more than three standard wine glasses of the stuff but clinical experience from attempted suicides (the ineffectiveness of which I guess we can gratefully thank the scaremongering for) shows that it'd be unlikely to work as the stuff would burn and cause me to throw it up. Of course something doesn't need to kill you immediately to hurt you so chronic toxicity is also considered, and 13mL or two and a half teaspoons is the lowest amount likely to actually do anything, while 130 μL, two orders of magnitude lower than that, is what is currently thought to be safe for my phat self in a day. This stuff is hard to find in a google search, unless you know how to look so as to get past all the ROUND UP WILL DESTROY YOUR DNA! and ROUND-UP WILL DISRUPT YOUR PURITY OF ESSENCE (POE)!, but its still important to have conversations about things that are real rather than things that are scary.
The higher concentrations used for Round-up ready crops are entirely insignificant once reduced to functionally identical homeopathic amounts in food products after dilution over a farm field, its rapid degradation in water, and normal processing.
posted by Blasdelb at 4:50 AM on December 2, 2013 [9 favorites]
The higher concentrations used for Round-up ready crops are entirely insignificant once reduced to functionally identical homeopathic amounts in food products after dilution over a farm field, its rapid degradation in water, and normal processing.
So, in terms of actual risk, is getting food poisoning from the pickers not having a place to shit and wash their hands afterwards more or less of a concern?
posted by mikelieman at 4:53 AM on December 2, 2013
mikelieman: "So, in terms of actual risk, is getting food poisoning from the pickers not having a place to shit and wash their hands afterwards more or less of a concern?"Well, you can follow that from an epidemiological perspective with real data here. I'm pretty sure both are publicly accessible, but I'm on campus where I get automatic access to a lot of things so it can sometimes be hard to tell. If anyone would like access to this or other papers that would be useful to this academic discussion we are currently having, please feel free to memail me with an email address I can send a PDF to and a promise not to distribute that PDF further.
The Agricultural Health Study.The 'debate' over GMOs is really entirely separate from the institutional racism and callousness that regularly exposes agricultural workers to all sorts of horrendously unsafe working conditions. Its also incredibly depressing that even liberals only seem to care when doing so works as a rhetorical gambit as part of 'larger' irrelevant ideological battles.
The Agricultural Health Study, a large prospective cohort study has been initiated in North Carolina and Iowa. The objectives of this study are to: 1) identify and quantify cancer risks among men, women, whites, and minorities associated with direct exposure to pesticides and other agricultural agents; 2) evaluate noncancer health risks including neurotoxicity reproductive effects, immunologic effects, nonmalignant respiratory disease, kidney disease, and growth and development among children; 3) evaluate disease risks among spouses and children of farmers that may arise from direct contact with pesticides and agricultural chemicals used in the home lawns and gardens, and from indirect contact, such as spray drift, laundering work clothes, or contaminated food or water; 4) assess current and past occupational and nonoccupational agricultural exposures using periodic interviews and environmental and biologic monitoring; 5) study the relationship between agricultural exposures, biomarkers of exposure, biologic effect, and genetic susceptibility factors relevant to carcinogenesis; and 6) identify and quantify cancer and other disease risks associated with lifestyle factors such as diet, cooking practices, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption, and hair dye use. In the first year of a 3-year enrollment period, 26,235 people have been enrolled in the study, including 19,776 registered pesticide applicators and 6,459 spouses of registered farmer applicators. It is estimated that when the total cohort is assembled in 1997 it will include approximately 75,000 adult study subjects. Farmers, the largest group of registered pesticide applicators comprise 77% of the target population enrolled in the study. This experience compares favorably with enrollment rates of previous prospective studies.
Cancer Incidence among Glyphosate-Exposed Pesticide Applicators in the Agricultural Health Study
Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide that is one of the most frequently applied pesticides in the world. Although there has been little consistent evidence of genotoxicity or carcinogenicity from in vitro and animal studies, a few epidemiologic reports have indicated potential health effects of glyphosate. We evaluated associations between glyphosate exposure and cancer incidence in the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), a prospective cohort study of 57,311 licensed pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina. Detailed information on pesticide use and other factors was obtained from a self-administered questionnaire completed at time of enrollment (1993–1997). Among private and commercial applicators, 75.5% reported having ever used glyphosate, of which > 97% were men. In this analysis, glyphosate exposure was defined as a) ever personally mixed or applied products containing glyphosate; b) cumulative lifetime days of use, or “cumulative exposure days” (years of use × days/year); and c) intensity-weighted cumulative exposure days (years of use × days/year × estimated intensity level). Poisson regression was used to estimate exposure–response relations between glyphosate and incidence of all cancers combined and 12 relatively common cancer subtypes. Glyphosate exposure was not associated with cancer incidence overall or with most of the cancer subtypes we studied. There was a suggested association with multiple myeloma incidence that should be followed up as more cases occur in the AHS. Given the widespread use of glyphosate, future analyses of the AHS will allow further examination of long-term health effects, including less common cancers.
posted by Blasdelb at 5:58 AM on December 2, 2013 [9 favorites]
"Thanks. That makes more sense than secret Monsanto seed harvesters - although I wouldn't put it past them."
If Monsanto really wanted to they could just buy seed samples from whomever a suspected malfeasant farmer chose to sell to and get them that way, but they don't, because they don't need to. Farmers trying to cheat Monsanto need to buy Monsanto's chemicals to do it, and they implicate themselves when they do. All of the crazed bullshit about Monsanto gene ninjas trespassing on farmers' land to steal seeds that accidentally blew in to steal farms in court is just that, crazed bullshit.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:05 AM on December 2, 2013
If Monsanto really wanted to they could just buy seed samples from whomever a suspected malfeasant farmer chose to sell to and get them that way, but they don't, because they don't need to. Farmers trying to cheat Monsanto need to buy Monsanto's chemicals to do it, and they implicate themselves when they do. All of the crazed bullshit about Monsanto gene ninjas trespassing on farmers' land to steal seeds that accidentally blew in to steal farms in court is just that, crazed bullshit.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:05 AM on December 2, 2013
the subtle and boring but actually reasons Monsanto is kind of shitty
Do you have any links to hand? Wading through the morass of bullshit on this topic is sapping my will to live.
posted by inire at 6:19 AM on December 2, 2013
Do you have any links to hand? Wading through the morass of bullshit on this topic is sapping my will to live.
posted by inire at 6:19 AM on December 2, 2013
This article from Al-Jazeera reports on spikes in birth defects and cancers in Argentina's Roundup-Ready soy belt: Bad Seeds .
posted by BinGregory at 6:39 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by BinGregory at 6:39 AM on December 2, 2013
Is it still scientific to dislike Roundup ready plants because they allow for increased the use of pesticides?
No, because "dislike" is an opinion, thus, it's not a scientific reason. You can try to build a scientific case against more pesticide use, then use *that* as a scientific reason to argue against the use of GMO tailored pesticide usage, and that would be one. But just not liking it isn't a scientific reason. You have to prove your logic.
Roundup itself, as a pesticide, a pretty minor thing. It's one big toxicity, other than to insects, is that it is a fairly strong fish toxin. Compared to DDT, though, it's candy. The LD50 on mammals is, IIRC, something insane, like 1g/kg. It's meant to kill living things, so it's not truly a minor thing, but compared to most things that do so, it's one of the most innocuous, and after all, evolution has built a ton of compounds that do just that. See the various animal and plant toxins, and so forth.
(On preview, Blasdelb posts the MSDS, and the oral LD50 is over 5g/kg. You are welcome to go find the list of things in your house right now with an oral LD50 of 5g/kg. I'll give you a fast start, NaCl is 4g/kg. Yep, this stuff is less dangerous than table salt.)
The argument that was being made here was that the GMO crop itself was directly harmful, and the refutation is that the study stating so is hopelessly compromised. And, from what I can see, I cannot help but agree with it. There's far too many reasons that one population of rats here could have fared better or worse than the other, and the small control size means that simple randomness is a major factor in outcomes.
Note: This does not refute the result of the study -- this states that the study not only does not show the results it claims, but it *cannot show any result*. Basically, from what I can tell, the winner of this study is Random, followed by the Null Hypothesis, but since Random is the winner, we can't tell anything else about it, and the study is basically a big waste of time and money.
The Null Hypothesis, in essence, means the hypothesis -- what you were testing for -- doesn't exist. So if your experiment favors it over your hypothesis, the experiment is disproving your hypothesis. Random, however, means your experiment can't even test for the Null Hypothesis, and thus, it's not disproving or proving anything, it's a failed experiment.
Publishing something where the Null Hypothesis wins can be a very good thing -- it means that a former hypothesis has failed to stand up to experimental scrutiny and needs to be modified or rejected. Publishing a failed experiment, however, is a very bad thing -- it means you didn't do the rigor to tell that your experiment can't detect the difference between the tested hypothesis and the Null Hypothesis, and what it really says is "do not trust me as a researcher!"
(Aside: Identifying the Null Hypothesis is one of the big keys in understanding an experiment and the validity thereof -- and an experiment without one isn't an experiment, it's a test of a believed known condition. Thus, if I'm expecting that resistor to measure 1kΩ, and it measures almost 1, I haven't proved that resistance doesn't exist, I've proven that I've hooked the wrong resistor*.)
*Or that I'm colorblind and those goddamn color codes are a bitch to read. Not that we ever need 1 or 1K or 10K or 100K ohm resistors in the same goddamn circuit….
posted by eriko at 6:43 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
No, because "dislike" is an opinion, thus, it's not a scientific reason. You can try to build a scientific case against more pesticide use, then use *that* as a scientific reason to argue against the use of GMO tailored pesticide usage, and that would be one. But just not liking it isn't a scientific reason. You have to prove your logic.
Roundup itself, as a pesticide, a pretty minor thing. It's one big toxicity, other than to insects, is that it is a fairly strong fish toxin. Compared to DDT, though, it's candy. The LD50 on mammals is, IIRC, something insane, like 1g/kg. It's meant to kill living things, so it's not truly a minor thing, but compared to most things that do so, it's one of the most innocuous, and after all, evolution has built a ton of compounds that do just that. See the various animal and plant toxins, and so forth.
(On preview, Blasdelb posts the MSDS, and the oral LD50 is over 5g/kg. You are welcome to go find the list of things in your house right now with an oral LD50 of 5g/kg. I'll give you a fast start, NaCl is 4g/kg. Yep, this stuff is less dangerous than table salt.)
The argument that was being made here was that the GMO crop itself was directly harmful, and the refutation is that the study stating so is hopelessly compromised. And, from what I can see, I cannot help but agree with it. There's far too many reasons that one population of rats here could have fared better or worse than the other, and the small control size means that simple randomness is a major factor in outcomes.
Note: This does not refute the result of the study -- this states that the study not only does not show the results it claims, but it *cannot show any result*. Basically, from what I can tell, the winner of this study is Random, followed by the Null Hypothesis, but since Random is the winner, we can't tell anything else about it, and the study is basically a big waste of time and money.
The Null Hypothesis, in essence, means the hypothesis -- what you were testing for -- doesn't exist. So if your experiment favors it over your hypothesis, the experiment is disproving your hypothesis. Random, however, means your experiment can't even test for the Null Hypothesis, and thus, it's not disproving or proving anything, it's a failed experiment.
Publishing something where the Null Hypothesis wins can be a very good thing -- it means that a former hypothesis has failed to stand up to experimental scrutiny and needs to be modified or rejected. Publishing a failed experiment, however, is a very bad thing -- it means you didn't do the rigor to tell that your experiment can't detect the difference between the tested hypothesis and the Null Hypothesis, and what it really says is "do not trust me as a researcher!"
(Aside: Identifying the Null Hypothesis is one of the big keys in understanding an experiment and the validity thereof -- and an experiment without one isn't an experiment, it's a test of a believed known condition. Thus, if I'm expecting that resistor to measure 1kΩ, and it measures almost 1, I haven't proved that resistance doesn't exist, I've proven that I've hooked the wrong resistor*.)
*Or that I'm colorblind and those goddamn color codes are a bitch to read. Not that we ever need 1 or 1K or 10K or 100K ohm resistors in the same goddamn circuit….
posted by eriko at 6:43 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
Except the people that shout the loudest about GMO crops are usually college students and 'educated' people! GMO panic is almost exclusively the domain of the political left, who are the self-designated champions of science, reasoning and logic! GRAAAH
it just shows, yet again, how intellectually shallow and co-opted by the need to appeal to bourgeois sensibilities the "political left" is. the problem is that allowing the food supply to be managed by an oligopoly that includes strong intellectual property monopolies from GMO seed just exacerbates the damage done by the underlying oligopoly. but advocating strong government regulation (including real anti-trust teeth) of oligopolies ends up being a pretty lonely political position in todays "free market" driven discourse... oh the irony. the political left doesn't even believe that agriculture should be industrialized, much less a concern for science.
There are conversations we need to be having about the economic structures in which the molecular genetics revolution is used, but this crank can only ever be a distraction from them.
this is just concern trolling. scientists almost never have conversations about (much less systematic critiques of) the system that feeds them, buys them expensive machines and chemicals, and supplies them with cheap research labor.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:46 AM on December 2, 2013
it just shows, yet again, how intellectually shallow and co-opted by the need to appeal to bourgeois sensibilities the "political left" is. the problem is that allowing the food supply to be managed by an oligopoly that includes strong intellectual property monopolies from GMO seed just exacerbates the damage done by the underlying oligopoly. but advocating strong government regulation (including real anti-trust teeth) of oligopolies ends up being a pretty lonely political position in todays "free market" driven discourse... oh the irony. the political left doesn't even believe that agriculture should be industrialized, much less a concern for science.
There are conversations we need to be having about the economic structures in which the molecular genetics revolution is used, but this crank can only ever be a distraction from them.
this is just concern trolling. scientists almost never have conversations about (much less systematic critiques of) the system that feeds them, buys them expensive machines and chemicals, and supplies them with cheap research labor.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:46 AM on December 2, 2013
This article from Al-Jazeera reports on spikes in birth defects and cancers in Argentina's Roundup-Ready soy belt: Bad Seeds
I feel like its the equivalent of an Ad Hom - but I have to admit I usually immediately assume bullshit when a reporter can't differentiate between an Herbicide and a Pesticide.
posted by JPD at 6:49 AM on December 2, 2013
I feel like its the equivalent of an Ad Hom - but I have to admit I usually immediately assume bullshit when a reporter can't differentiate between an Herbicide and a Pesticide.
posted by JPD at 6:49 AM on December 2, 2013
are broken down into amino acids pretty instantaneously in mammalian guts.
I've been doing this song and dance routine for family, friends, and co-workers for a while. My biggest question now is whether this paper was the paper cited or just one of a couple floating around.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:56 AM on December 2, 2013
I've been doing this song and dance routine for family, friends, and co-workers for a while. My biggest question now is whether this paper was the paper cited or just one of a couple floating around.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:56 AM on December 2, 2013
further, the talk about cancer and health personalizes the discussion of agriculture: how using GMO seed is all about me and my precious feelings, rather than the collective good. (see bourgeois coopting thereof)
you get a political left which is very passionate about boutique farms that make them feel good and extremely vague about how you built a food supply system that is just and healthy for everyone.
GMO health scare stories just feed a system which benefits both financial demands and bourgeois desires.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:58 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
you get a political left which is very passionate about boutique farms that make them feel good and extremely vague about how you built a food supply system that is just and healthy for everyone.
GMO health scare stories just feed a system which benefits both financial demands and bourgeois desires.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:58 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
Huh, well a half dozen commenters here did the same thing, including our top science gun Blasdelb. So I'd have to say it is a bit unfair to dismiss the article I linked to on that score. Anyway pesticide is commonly used as a blanket term for all that stuff.
posted by BinGregory at 7:01 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by BinGregory at 7:01 AM on December 2, 2013
Sorry that comment was to JPD.
posted by BinGregory at 7:02 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by BinGregory at 7:02 AM on December 2, 2013
So I'd have to say it is a bit unfair to dismiss the article I linked to on that score.
no no, there are many other more fair reasons to dismiss it.
posted by JPD at 7:18 AM on December 2, 2013
no no, there are many other more fair reasons to dismiss it.
posted by JPD at 7:18 AM on December 2, 2013
That's why the pernicious fear about GMO crops is so immensely frustrating to me - anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
The kinds of people who are afraid of GM crops wouldn't make it through two sentences of your explanation, and their fears aren't really derived from a logical thought process, anyway, more of a knee-jerk opposition to something perceived as 'unnatural'. I doubt very many people who oppose it understand how food works, or the human digestive system, or the immune system, or cancer.
posted by empath at 7:21 AM on December 2, 2013
The kinds of people who are afraid of GM crops wouldn't make it through two sentences of your explanation, and their fears aren't really derived from a logical thought process, anyway, more of a knee-jerk opposition to something perceived as 'unnatural'. I doubt very many people who oppose it understand how food works, or the human digestive system, or the immune system, or cancer.
posted by empath at 7:21 AM on December 2, 2013
According to the study blasdelb linked to, there is a "suggested association of multiple myeloma incidence with glyphosate exposure" that the authors feel is strong enough that they state that "several aspects of our results argue against a chance association", and that it warrants further examination.
And while the cohort was large, and the # of cancer incidents in the followup period was small (their term), few of the tested were female, which precluded their "ability to assess the association between glyphosate exposure and cancer incidence among women, for both non-sex-specific cancers and sex-specific cancers (e.g., of the breast or ovary)".
(Quotes are from the link.) Is that an incorrect assessment?
posted by sutt at 7:24 AM on December 2, 2013
And while the cohort was large, and the # of cancer incidents in the followup period was small (their term), few of the tested were female, which precluded their "ability to assess the association between glyphosate exposure and cancer incidence among women, for both non-sex-specific cancers and sex-specific cancers (e.g., of the breast or ovary)".
(Quotes are from the link.) Is that an incorrect assessment?
posted by sutt at 7:24 AM on December 2, 2013
the problem is that allowing the food supply to be managed by an oligopoly that includes strong intellectual property monopolies from GMO seed just exacerbates the damage done by the underlying oligopoly. but advocating strong government regulation (including real anti-trust teeth) of oligopolies ends up being a pretty lonely political position in todays "free market" driven discourse
I think that this is 100% a valid concern, but not one that drives votes in the way that a good health-hysteria will.
posted by empath at 7:24 AM on December 2, 2013
I think that this is 100% a valid concern, but not one that drives votes in the way that a good health-hysteria will.
posted by empath at 7:24 AM on December 2, 2013
The Al Jazeera link really had nothing to go on in terms of epidemiology. It just asserted that there is an increase in birth defects and cancer in that part of Argentina. Does anyone have any more information about that?
The article talks about "Professor Andres Carrasco, who runs the Molecular Embryology Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires" who seems to have published one article about glyphosate, for which the abstract is here.
posted by OmieWise at 7:29 AM on December 2, 2013
The article talks about "Professor Andres Carrasco, who runs the Molecular Embryology Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires" who seems to have published one article about glyphosate, for which the abstract is here.
posted by OmieWise at 7:29 AM on December 2, 2013
> … companies have only ever sued farmers who intentionally plant crops they do not have licenses for
So having seed is now separate from having the right to grow it?
> Millions of people have died from anti-GMO groups scaring starving countries into turning down GMO crops.
Or was it more a matter of the US distributing domestic food surpluses which could not otherwise find a market, along with African concerns that planting GM corn would have closed the European market for their lucrative agricultural exports? (Yes, the bitter irony of exporting food from a country racked with famine, I know, I know …)
I know people are trying to put forward good rational arguments here, but "because science" is never pretty when faced with "because people". Ask me about it; I build wind farms …
posted by scruss at 7:33 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
So having seed is now separate from having the right to grow it?
> Millions of people have died from anti-GMO groups scaring starving countries into turning down GMO crops.
Or was it more a matter of the US distributing domestic food surpluses which could not otherwise find a market, along with African concerns that planting GM corn would have closed the European market for their lucrative agricultural exports? (Yes, the bitter irony of exporting food from a country racked with famine, I know, I know …)
I know people are trying to put forward good rational arguments here, but "because science" is never pretty when faced with "because people". Ask me about it; I build wind farms …
posted by scruss at 7:33 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
(also, I live in Ontario, aka Crazy Town Canada, where domestic use of most herbicides is banned, but the government encourages no-till [aka "All Spray"] farming. Just what we need: a strong fish toxin in our water.)
posted by scruss at 7:39 AM on December 2, 2013
posted by scruss at 7:39 AM on December 2, 2013
the problem is that allowing the food supply to be managed by an oligopoly that includes strong intellectual property monopolies from GMO seed just exacerbates the damage done by the underlying oligopoly. but advocating strong government regulation (including real anti-trust teeth) of oligopolies ends up being a pretty lonely political position in todays "free market" driven discourse
I think that this is 100% a valid concern, but not one that drives votes in the way that a good health-hysteria will.
my point is really that the politics of "good health" actually sustain the sort of GMO business models that activists claim to oppose. i mean, most on the "left" believe in small scale organic agriculture sold at "farmers markets" and CSAs (small-scale futures options): that the food supply should be determined by a free market of small capitalists and land-owners...
the funny thing about having a business model built on intellectual property is that the business is then explicitly tied to state enforcement of said property rights vs. all of the implicit controls one has over real property. hence, an IP driven business model has to include some form of insurance that politics won't get in the way of profits. for GMO seed, the end result isn't really any different than planting traditional hybrid seed (you buy new seed from AgCorp each year), but the politics ends up being very different because Monsanto has to rely on the courts (and laws) to prevent seed saving.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:44 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
(also, I live in Ontario, aka Crazy Town Canada, where domestic use of most herbicides is banned, but the government encourages no-till [aka "All Spray"] farming. Just what we need: a strong fish toxin in our water.)
like i said, it's not crazy. it's a political system designed to maintain the oligopoly that controls the food supply.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:50 AM on December 2, 2013
like i said, it's not crazy. it's a political system designed to maintain the oligopoly that controls the food supply.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:50 AM on December 2, 2013
hi Punkey,
surely these countries would be helped with any seed. it wouldn't have to be GMO seed, right? and it wouldn't have to be a monoculture approach? perhaps a variety of non-GMO seed would provide calories, without putting a country on the hook for infinite re-purchases of proprietary seed. i mean, if we really want to help out...
posted by j_curiouser at 7:59 AM on December 2, 2013
surely these countries would be helped with any seed. it wouldn't have to be GMO seed, right? and it wouldn't have to be a monoculture approach? perhaps a variety of non-GMO seed would provide calories, without putting a country on the hook for infinite re-purchases of proprietary seed. i mean, if we really want to help out...
posted by j_curiouser at 7:59 AM on December 2, 2013
surely these countries would be helped with any seed.
Uhhh... No? The whole point of GM crops is that they can thrive in conditions where normal plants fail.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:10 AM on December 2, 2013
Uhhh... No? The whole point of GM crops is that they can thrive in conditions where normal plants fail.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:10 AM on December 2, 2013
The kinds of people who are afraid of GM crops wouldn't make it through two sentences of your explanation, and their fears aren't really derived from a logical thought process, anyway, more of a knee-jerk opposition to something perceived as 'unnatural'.
And at least in the U.S. there's a particular unreasoning horror reserved for things that will be polluting our precious bodily fluids.
I'm still not sure how fluoride ever got in our water systems. Could you imagine trying to start that effort today?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:16 AM on December 2, 2013
And at least in the U.S. there's a particular unreasoning horror reserved for things that will be polluting our precious bodily fluids.
I'm still not sure how fluoride ever got in our water systems. Could you imagine trying to start that effort today?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:16 AM on December 2, 2013
MSDS sheet for the original formulation of Round-up. Surely we can move away from the endless posturing that characterizes this debate to real data.
Supringly, that MSDS isn't completely useless for non-mammals (most just say some variant of "ecological information has not been determined for this compound," even if there's a couple decades of papers on it.) Glyphosate has a very high LD50 for mamals and birds (that's good), but it's pretty bad for fish and some aquatic arthropods. An LC50 of 5 mg/L means sizable fishkills with even small amounts of release into streams or lakes.
There's reason to believe that Roundup is responsible for large kills of the freshwater amphibians, frogs and toads. Roundup strongly affects amphibian biodiversity and tadpole survival. Follow-on papers are suggestive that round-up might affect future evolution of frogs. Biodiversity loss and and preferential selection induced by Roundup use point to degredation and long-term alteration of how streams and lakes work. If glyphosphate is changing tadpole development, as it appears to be, the freshwater systems of our future are going to be different than they are now. A changing the frog part of the habitat can have knock-on effects for all the animals and plants that live in that area. Typically, this results in loss of wetlands, and die backs of other species too, like birds and mammals.
This is just an example. There are other stories to be told about roundup use as it affects other, primarily aquatic and/or shoreline species. Mammals and birds are cuddly and (sometimes) good human toxicity models, but the ugly, slimy things are the base of the food-web. Shifts in habitats and biodiversity are very important to wild species health and sustainability and, ultimately our own as well. These are some fo the reasons to be concerned about the increased use of glyphosphates. Direct toxicity is only part of the story.
posted by bonehead at 8:17 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
Supringly, that MSDS isn't completely useless for non-mammals (most just say some variant of "ecological information has not been determined for this compound," even if there's a couple decades of papers on it.) Glyphosate has a very high LD50 for mamals and birds (that's good), but it's pretty bad for fish and some aquatic arthropods. An LC50 of 5 mg/L means sizable fishkills with even small amounts of release into streams or lakes.
There's reason to believe that Roundup is responsible for large kills of the freshwater amphibians, frogs and toads. Roundup strongly affects amphibian biodiversity and tadpole survival. Follow-on papers are suggestive that round-up might affect future evolution of frogs. Biodiversity loss and and preferential selection induced by Roundup use point to degredation and long-term alteration of how streams and lakes work. If glyphosphate is changing tadpole development, as it appears to be, the freshwater systems of our future are going to be different than they are now. A changing the frog part of the habitat can have knock-on effects for all the animals and plants that live in that area. Typically, this results in loss of wetlands, and die backs of other species too, like birds and mammals.
This is just an example. There are other stories to be told about roundup use as it affects other, primarily aquatic and/or shoreline species. Mammals and birds are cuddly and (sometimes) good human toxicity models, but the ugly, slimy things are the base of the food-web. Shifts in habitats and biodiversity are very important to wild species health and sustainability and, ultimately our own as well. These are some fo the reasons to be concerned about the increased use of glyphosphates. Direct toxicity is only part of the story.
posted by bonehead at 8:17 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
"surely these countries would be helped with any seed. it wouldn't have to be GMO seed, right? and it wouldn't have to be a monoculture approach? perhaps a variety of non-GMO seed would provide calories, without putting a country on the hook for infinite re-purchases of proprietary seed. i mean, if we really want to help out..."
The problems pointed out in the article Punkey linked to aren't related to seed crops but crop products intended as food being fucked with. The US has engineered an intentional annual surplus as part of how our agricultural system is designed that both insures farmers and and the public against the problems of over and under supply and results in a lot of food that can't be sold on the open market. A lot of it just gets dumped in the ocean every year, but part of the whole plan has always involved that inherently extra food being able to serve as a global reservoir against famine. Over the last 50 years the largely invisible hand of USAID has both provided a buffer when it has been most desperately needed all around the world and demonstrated to terrible effects that food aid can have to developing economies as well as the level of desperation needed before it makes sense to consider. Europe's agricultural systems are built along fundamentally different lines that do not produce these surpluses, and don't really have the ability to respond to crises in this kind of immediate way without extensive warning. The end result of the majority of our staple crops being GMO is that the majority of our staple crop surpluses are GMO, and the logistics of even keeping them separated much less transporting only one variety independently of the other are seriously non-trivial for agencies that were wildly underfunded even before the sequester.
Regardless, for seed aid, which is a yet bigger can of worms that is only complicated by our general ignorance of the systems that feed us, anyone what talks about non-monoculture approaches to most staple crops is bullshitting you. Either they don't know what they're talking about or they don't care to, it doesn't matter, the end result is the same. Wheat, barley, rye, maize, rice, and potatoes are monocultures; that is how their ancestors grew in nature and that is how any farmer with a plot of land they think of as something more than a toy for bougie foodies will grow them. There are also models for GMO seed aid that do not involve a hook of any kind, such as the economic model the International Rice Research Institute uses for each of the hundreds of strains of Golden Rice that they have created out of locally used varieties so that the seed is both reusable and locally breed-able such that farmers can continue to maintain the Golden trait themselves with conventional breeding techniques. Such that local farmers can combat Vitamin A deficiency and blindness themselves without any further need for westerners in Land Rovers.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:45 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
The problems pointed out in the article Punkey linked to aren't related to seed crops but crop products intended as food being fucked with. The US has engineered an intentional annual surplus as part of how our agricultural system is designed that both insures farmers and and the public against the problems of over and under supply and results in a lot of food that can't be sold on the open market. A lot of it just gets dumped in the ocean every year, but part of the whole plan has always involved that inherently extra food being able to serve as a global reservoir against famine. Over the last 50 years the largely invisible hand of USAID has both provided a buffer when it has been most desperately needed all around the world and demonstrated to terrible effects that food aid can have to developing economies as well as the level of desperation needed before it makes sense to consider. Europe's agricultural systems are built along fundamentally different lines that do not produce these surpluses, and don't really have the ability to respond to crises in this kind of immediate way without extensive warning. The end result of the majority of our staple crops being GMO is that the majority of our staple crop surpluses are GMO, and the logistics of even keeping them separated much less transporting only one variety independently of the other are seriously non-trivial for agencies that were wildly underfunded even before the sequester.
Regardless, for seed aid, which is a yet bigger can of worms that is only complicated by our general ignorance of the systems that feed us, anyone what talks about non-monoculture approaches to most staple crops is bullshitting you. Either they don't know what they're talking about or they don't care to, it doesn't matter, the end result is the same. Wheat, barley, rye, maize, rice, and potatoes are monocultures; that is how their ancestors grew in nature and that is how any farmer with a plot of land they think of as something more than a toy for bougie foodies will grow them. There are also models for GMO seed aid that do not involve a hook of any kind, such as the economic model the International Rice Research Institute uses for each of the hundreds of strains of Golden Rice that they have created out of locally used varieties so that the seed is both reusable and locally breed-able such that farmers can continue to maintain the Golden trait themselves with conventional breeding techniques. Such that local farmers can combat Vitamin A deficiency and blindness themselves without any further need for westerners in Land Rovers.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:45 AM on December 2, 2013 [3 favorites]
Direct toxicity is only part of the story.
But isn't that the part being discussed here in this post about this paper claiming that there is evidence of direct toxicity?
posted by OmieWise at 8:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
But isn't that the part being discussed here in this post about this paper claiming that there is evidence of direct toxicity?
posted by OmieWise at 8:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
Indeed, however there have been many comments above about how increased use of Roundup would not lead to signifcant effects. That may well be true for direct human contact (IDK, not a human toxicologist). However, as links in my previous comment imply, there's good reason to believe that use of more Roundup could be bad for the marginal and wild areas around the farms where it is used. There are real concerns about increased glyphosate use, particularly for stream and river health, which are only recently becoming understood.
Anyway, ulitmately environmental degredation is a human health issue, but it takes a while to happen.
posted by bonehead at 9:10 AM on December 2, 2013
Anyway, ulitmately environmental degredation is a human health issue, but it takes a while to happen.
posted by bonehead at 9:10 AM on December 2, 2013
More interesting to me than rehashing whether this was or wasn't a good study (or re-arguing the same old arguments about GE crops) is the questions about the retraction itself. As crappy as I think this study was, the given explanation from the journal for retraction is a bit absurd. In short, they retracted it because the study design was poor and the results inconclusive. Any bets on how many other papers could be credibly criticized similarly? How many are published in FCT itself? In other words, despite thinking the paper should never have been accepted, it was and the stated reasons for retracting are not very good. Or at least not very consistent - many other papers should be retracted if that is the standard. Retraction Watch had a discussion about PLoS editorial calling for a surprising retraction standard (similar but not the same as the one being used by FCT). Neither standard seem to be the current norm for journals which tend to only retract either at the insistence of the original authors or if there is clear fraud or plagiarism.
All that said, I think it's clear there is more behind this retraction and we'll probably not learn what. Sadly, the activist anti-GMO folks won't consider this retraction fair and will use it as an example of how the truth is bring stifled by industry pressuring scientists.
posted by R343L at 9:56 AM on December 2, 2013
All that said, I think it's clear there is more behind this retraction and we'll probably not learn what. Sadly, the activist anti-GMO folks won't consider this retraction fair and will use it as an example of how the truth is bring stifled by industry pressuring scientists.
posted by R343L at 9:56 AM on December 2, 2013
I am not a lawyer, but I am a journal editor, and though I love the work I also worry about these kinds of situations a lot. (Cf. Sokal.) I do think that caution is warranted when dealing with lawsuits, especially when the cause of action is likely to be libel outside of the US, where the 1st Amendment does not protect you. Saying as little as possible in that circumstance is the best defense, because you won't be liable for the retraction, you'll be liable for the public justification you give.
This story seems enough to me: a piece of research claims to find a result, but on more careful statistical analysis, it is shown by detractors that it doesn't. There needn't be fraud to justify retraction, there can be an "honest error" according to COPE standards. Supporters of Seralini have claimed there was no honest error in the raw data, which is supported by the Editor's investigation. But there was an "honest error" in the data analysis. So the Editor retracts the article on the basis of that error: the "honest error" is in publishing inconclusive results and claiming that they are conclusive. The other possibility facing the Editor is to issue a correction: but here a correction would utterly eliminate the article; it is not correcting peripheral issues, but the heart, the substance of the research. Without that finding, the article isn't worth publishing under contemporary scientific research norms.
Notably, Seralini has sued for libel before: he was awarded 1 euro in damages, plus legal fees. So a small amount of real damage can be quite expensive if the legal fees mount. In the US we call this a SLAPP suit and judge it harshly, but I suppose norms (like laws) differ.
Being an editor means depending on the judgments of others: few of us are broadly enough informed to judge all the research that we consider for publication, and none of us have time to read and review it all with the kind of care that the Seralini study has now received. And yet it also means that I would pay those damages, as my journal cannot afford to do so. So the risks are distributed among all the authors and reviewers, but the responsibility is all mine.
I was new to this research before I posted this, so I've had to do some background investigation. One thing that's clear from the French report as well as some of the more trenchant journalistic analysis is that focusing on any one thing would be a problem in the retraction because there are so many problems with the study and the lab that produced it.
1. There's the study's length: it's unnecessarily long, extending the suffering of the lab animals.
2. There's the group size: it guarantees that randomness will trump any putative results because at this size variations will always fall within natural variation. (This is the statistical power problem you'll see mentioned: it makes any variations between control groups and test groups indistinguishable from base rate variations.)
3. There's the embargo procedures: it was designed to prevent refutation rather than allow journalists to write informed pieces, that's the opposite of what embargo is for.
4. There's the book and movie that were released near-simultaneously and offered a lurid account of what has now been shown to be indistinguishable from random chance.
5. There's the data reporting, which frequently fails to appropriately caveat or draw attention to disconfirming information.
6. There's the rats, selected specifically for tumors, and then the totally unnecessary photographs of those tumors that the rats were bred to grow!
7. There's the descriptions that depart from standardized nomenclature and make it impossible for other experts to understand the results for replication.
8. There's the fact that the study was designed without a working hypothesis, just looking to see what might go wrong. (Sometimes called the sharpshooter's fallacy.)
9. There's the history of one-sided studies from this lab that have been repeatedly refuted.
10. There's the litigious nature of the researchers, which makes publishing, debating, and retracting their work a legal minefield.
In all this, to question the Editor's motives because he did not mention all the factors seems strange. The Editor doesn't dwell on any of these issues or fully disclose his concerns, because of the last one is hanging there.
Monsanto may well be a terrible company. They certainly have a profit motive to refute the study. But many of the people who have called for the study's retraction don't have anything to do with Monsanto. It may just be the case that the system has, very slowly, worked to remove a badly done study from the scientific record: in that sense, it's a success for peer review and a recognition that peer review is not finished with those anonymous reader reports that I must constantly solicit.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:28 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
This story seems enough to me: a piece of research claims to find a result, but on more careful statistical analysis, it is shown by detractors that it doesn't. There needn't be fraud to justify retraction, there can be an "honest error" according to COPE standards. Supporters of Seralini have claimed there was no honest error in the raw data, which is supported by the Editor's investigation. But there was an "honest error" in the data analysis. So the Editor retracts the article on the basis of that error: the "honest error" is in publishing inconclusive results and claiming that they are conclusive. The other possibility facing the Editor is to issue a correction: but here a correction would utterly eliminate the article; it is not correcting peripheral issues, but the heart, the substance of the research. Without that finding, the article isn't worth publishing under contemporary scientific research norms.
Notably, Seralini has sued for libel before: he was awarded 1 euro in damages, plus legal fees. So a small amount of real damage can be quite expensive if the legal fees mount. In the US we call this a SLAPP suit and judge it harshly, but I suppose norms (like laws) differ.
Being an editor means depending on the judgments of others: few of us are broadly enough informed to judge all the research that we consider for publication, and none of us have time to read and review it all with the kind of care that the Seralini study has now received. And yet it also means that I would pay those damages, as my journal cannot afford to do so. So the risks are distributed among all the authors and reviewers, but the responsibility is all mine.
I was new to this research before I posted this, so I've had to do some background investigation. One thing that's clear from the French report as well as some of the more trenchant journalistic analysis is that focusing on any one thing would be a problem in the retraction because there are so many problems with the study and the lab that produced it.
1. There's the study's length: it's unnecessarily long, extending the suffering of the lab animals.
2. There's the group size: it guarantees that randomness will trump any putative results because at this size variations will always fall within natural variation. (This is the statistical power problem you'll see mentioned: it makes any variations between control groups and test groups indistinguishable from base rate variations.)
3. There's the embargo procedures: it was designed to prevent refutation rather than allow journalists to write informed pieces, that's the opposite of what embargo is for.
4. There's the book and movie that were released near-simultaneously and offered a lurid account of what has now been shown to be indistinguishable from random chance.
5. There's the data reporting, which frequently fails to appropriately caveat or draw attention to disconfirming information.
6. There's the rats, selected specifically for tumors, and then the totally unnecessary photographs of those tumors that the rats were bred to grow!
7. There's the descriptions that depart from standardized nomenclature and make it impossible for other experts to understand the results for replication.
8. There's the fact that the study was designed without a working hypothesis, just looking to see what might go wrong. (Sometimes called the sharpshooter's fallacy.)
9. There's the history of one-sided studies from this lab that have been repeatedly refuted.
10. There's the litigious nature of the researchers, which makes publishing, debating, and retracting their work a legal minefield.
In all this, to question the Editor's motives because he did not mention all the factors seems strange. The Editor doesn't dwell on any of these issues or fully disclose his concerns, because of the last one is hanging there.
Monsanto may well be a terrible company. They certainly have a profit motive to refute the study. But many of the people who have called for the study's retraction don't have anything to do with Monsanto. It may just be the case that the system has, very slowly, worked to remove a badly done study from the scientific record: in that sense, it's a success for peer review and a recognition that peer review is not finished with those anonymous reader reports that I must constantly solicit.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:28 AM on December 2, 2013 [4 favorites]
Direct toxicity is only part of the story.
But isn't that the part being discussed here in this post about this paper claiming that there is evidence of direct toxicity?
Yeah, but EEEEEEEVIIIILS.
Sadly, the activist anti-GMO folks won't consider this retraction fair and will use it as an example of how the truth is bring stifled by industry pressuring scientists.
That is a given under all circumstances.
posted by Artw at 10:32 AM on December 2, 2013
But isn't that the part being discussed here in this post about this paper claiming that there is evidence of direct toxicity?
Yeah, but EEEEEEEVIIIILS.
Sadly, the activist anti-GMO folks won't consider this retraction fair and will use it as an example of how the truth is bring stifled by industry pressuring scientists.
That is a given under all circumstances.
posted by Artw at 10:32 AM on December 2, 2013
Monsanto and other companies have only ever sued farmers who intentionally plant crops they do not have licenses for and then prove it by buying concentrations of pesticide from Monsanto for their fields that would kill their crops if they hadn't used seed they didn't have license to. Monsanto would have no idea, and would have no reason to give a damn, if a farmer had their seeds and didn't use what they're for.
The patent for glyphosate expired in 2000. Many manufacturers make glyphosate, so this explanation makes no sense (obviously, any reasonably smart farmer who wanted to grow un-licensed Roundup Ready crops would buy their glyphosate from someone other than Monsanto). The fact that you don't know this basic fact kind of makes your very definitive claims here suspect.
posted by ssg at 10:34 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
The patent for glyphosate expired in 2000. Many manufacturers make glyphosate, so this explanation makes no sense (obviously, any reasonably smart farmer who wanted to grow un-licensed Roundup Ready crops would buy their glyphosate from someone other than Monsanto). The fact that you don't know this basic fact kind of makes your very definitive claims here suspect.
posted by ssg at 10:34 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
"The patent for glyphosate expired in 2000. Many manufacturers make glyphosate, so this explanation makes no sense (obviously, any reasonably smart farmer who wanted to grow un-licensed Roundup Ready crops would buy their glyphosate from someone other than Monsanto). The fact that you don't know this basic fact kind of makes your very definitive claims here suspect."
You've just handily explained why the 144 lawsuits that have taken place so far are heavily skewed towards the 90s when this was more of a thing. There are surely more than a few smart lucky farmers betting the farm and getting away with it, but there is also a reason why all of the dumb farmers who run afoul of forensic accounting in a market dominated by a few simple monopolies always take the deal offered by Monsanto and never take the chance they could with Greenpeace. The Monsanto ninjas everyone imagines to be sneaking around farms would make for volatile and exciting trials that farmers could win from even if they lost.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:15 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
You've just handily explained why the 144 lawsuits that have taken place so far are heavily skewed towards the 90s when this was more of a thing. There are surely more than a few smart lucky farmers betting the farm and getting away with it, but there is also a reason why all of the dumb farmers who run afoul of forensic accounting in a market dominated by a few simple monopolies always take the deal offered by Monsanto and never take the chance they could with Greenpeace. The Monsanto ninjas everyone imagines to be sneaking around farms would make for volatile and exciting trials that farmers could win from even if they lost.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:15 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
anotherpanacaea: I don't disagree with any of that and ... yet ... A major criticism of academic publishing is that when journals DO retract, the reasons are often vague or inconsistent (as a recent example, Retraction Watch catalogued the many absurd euphemisms journals have used for plagiarism). It seems problematic to people trusting the process of science if a controversial paper is retracted in a way that doesn't appear open. Obviously the lawsuit threat is real so I don't really expect better but it makes for a good example of how the system could be improved.
posted by R343L at 11:15 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by R343L at 11:15 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
Farmers trying to cheat Monsanto need to buy Monsanto's chemicals to do it
I don't think that's true; glyphosate (the active ingredient in Round-Up) is manufactured by many different firms.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 11:16 AM on December 2, 2013
I don't think that's true; glyphosate (the active ingredient in Round-Up) is manufactured by many different firms.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 11:16 AM on December 2, 2013
>> I know that all of this is rather dense and complicated, but I assure you that any third or fourth
>> year biology student should be able to understand all of this. That's why the pernicious fear about
>> GMO crops is so immensely frustrating to me - anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology
>> at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
>
> Anyone need another data point for the hypothesis that the current state of education in America is fully intentional?
It got that way because of a plot by anti-GMO greenies? What? I mean wut?
posted by jfuller at 11:40 AM on December 2, 2013
>> year biology student should be able to understand all of this. That's why the pernicious fear about
>> GMO crops is so immensely frustrating to me - anyone with any sort of solid grounding in biology
>> at all should know immediately that these claims have zero grounding in reality.
>
> Anyone need another data point for the hypothesis that the current state of education in America is fully intentional?
It got that way because of a plot by anti-GMO greenies? What? I mean wut?
posted by jfuller at 11:40 AM on December 2, 2013
It's fairly interesting to read through Metafilter's previous discussion of Séralini's media manipulation when the article initially came out, knowing that the paper is now forcibly retracted.
posted by Llama-Lime at 11:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Llama-Lime at 11:49 AM on December 2, 2013 [2 favorites]
I don't believe for a minute that the withdrawn paper drew credible conclusions nor that the studies underlying it were well designed or even appropriate for the questions at hand. Nor do I believe that Monsanto's corn is a carcinogen in any vertebrate.
That said, there are plenty of crappy articles published every year, often with much more pernicious findings than this one. This one was targeted by a very profitable and well heeled company to get it retracted. This goes far beyond the usual scientific publication paradigm, wherein you get a paper published and I get to send a letter critiquing it or publish my own, better study to test what you are saying in your paper. This is bullying behavior by a powerful corporation protecting its profits. Nothing more or less. Were this a crappy paper on, for example, a wonderful new treatment for arthritic knees that led to widespread use of an ineffective therapy, there would be no outcry or retraction. It would have to be killing people (e.g., Celebrex) to create that kind of backlash, and even then no retraction would be imminent.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:52 AM on December 2, 2013
That said, there are plenty of crappy articles published every year, often with much more pernicious findings than this one. This one was targeted by a very profitable and well heeled company to get it retracted. This goes far beyond the usual scientific publication paradigm, wherein you get a paper published and I get to send a letter critiquing it or publish my own, better study to test what you are saying in your paper. This is bullying behavior by a powerful corporation protecting its profits. Nothing more or less. Were this a crappy paper on, for example, a wonderful new treatment for arthritic knees that led to widespread use of an ineffective therapy, there would be no outcry or retraction. It would have to be killing people (e.g., Celebrex) to create that kind of backlash, and even then no retraction would be imminent.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:52 AM on December 2, 2013
Mental Wimp: Were this a crappy paper on, for example, a wonderful new treatment for arthritic knees that led to widespread use of an ineffective therapy, there would be no outcry or retraction. It would have to be killing people (e.g., Celebrex) to create that kind of backlash, and even then no retraction would be imminent.
It seems much more like that's the problem, not that this bad paper is being retracted. Bad research (particularly intentionally-bad-to-the-point-of-being-fraudulent research) should be outed. All it does is poison the discourse and mess up the field, and waste valuable research dollars.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:59 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
It seems much more like that's the problem, not that this bad paper is being retracted. Bad research (particularly intentionally-bad-to-the-point-of-being-fraudulent research) should be outed. All it does is poison the discourse and mess up the field, and waste valuable research dollars.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:59 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
I agree with Mitrovarr: when there's money and politics on the line, scientists have a habit of getting things right. The attention forces them to do what they should do every time, for every paper.
And I think that's swell, that when things really, really matter, we do it better: the more pressure, the more controversy, the better the result. Sure the policies are all still screwed up, but the community of inquiry keeps pushing and poking and prodding until the right answer (or the right lack of an answer) emerges for anyone who cares to look. (That policy-makers don't always care to look isn't our fault!)
Nassim Taleb coined a term for this sort of thing, systems that get stronger under stress: antifragile. It really kind of captures what I love about research. (And also about Metafilter!)
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:14 PM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
And I think that's swell, that when things really, really matter, we do it better: the more pressure, the more controversy, the better the result. Sure the policies are all still screwed up, but the community of inquiry keeps pushing and poking and prodding until the right answer (or the right lack of an answer) emerges for anyone who cares to look. (That policy-makers don't always care to look isn't our fault!)
Nassim Taleb coined a term for this sort of thing, systems that get stronger under stress: antifragile. It really kind of captures what I love about research. (And also about Metafilter!)
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:14 PM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
"A lot of it just gets dumped in the ocean every year, but part of the whole plan has always involved that inherently extra food being able to serve as a global reservoir against famine."
Do you have a cite for the dumping? I've looked around and seen it described as "plausible with no direct proof."
"Wheat, barley, rye, maize, rice, and potatoes are monocultures; that is how their ancestors grew in nature"
Maize cultivation was famously not a monoculture.
posted by klangklangston at 2:13 PM on December 2, 2013
Do you have a cite for the dumping? I've looked around and seen it described as "plausible with no direct proof."
"Wheat, barley, rye, maize, rice, and potatoes are monocultures; that is how their ancestors grew in nature"
Maize cultivation was famously not a monoculture.
posted by klangklangston at 2:13 PM on December 2, 2013
GMO != Monsanto.
Just want to point that out.
If we wanted, we could fund an organization to create "open source" GMO crops free from the patenting and drawbacks of commercially-created GMOs that people tend to fixate on in these debates. It's tiring to see the "but, but, Monsanto!" arguments pop out when discussing the safety of GMO crops.
Just because you disapprove of Monsanto's business practices, doesn't mean GMO crops are evil.
posted by autobahn at 2:38 PM on December 2, 2013
Just want to point that out.
If we wanted, we could fund an organization to create "open source" GMO crops free from the patenting and drawbacks of commercially-created GMOs that people tend to fixate on in these debates. It's tiring to see the "but, but, Monsanto!" arguments pop out when discussing the safety of GMO crops.
Just because you disapprove of Monsanto's business practices, doesn't mean GMO crops are evil.
posted by autobahn at 2:38 PM on December 2, 2013
GMO also is not always pesticide/herbicide resistance, while we're there.
posted by maryr at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2013
posted by maryr at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2013
All it does is poison the discourse and mess up the field, and waste valuable research dollars.
Whole-heartedly agree. The scientific and especially medical literature could be reduced by 90% simply by refusing to publish crappy, useless research.
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:06 PM on December 2, 2013
Whole-heartedly agree. The scientific and especially medical literature could be reduced by 90% simply by refusing to publish crappy, useless research.
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:06 PM on December 2, 2013
I would also like to address one misunderstanding in the critique of the paper. In carcinogenesis animal research, highly susceptible animals, i.e., animals bred or engineered to get the disease of interest, are almost always used so that smaller sample sizes will answer the question. If 1/20,000 animals are susceptible, the experiment is infeasible due to the cost. If 25% get it, then you can do a reasonable-sized study. This strategy begs the question of whether the inference is generalizable to animals and humans that are not highly susceptible, of course.
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:10 PM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:10 PM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]
GMO health scare stories just feed a system which benefits both financial demands and bourgeois desires.
The least "bourgeois" option is to... support Monsanto and other owners of the means of production, and give them more control over said means of production?
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 5:39 PM on December 2, 2013
In carcinogenesis animal research, highly susceptible animals, i.e., animals bred or engineered to get the disease of interest, are almost always used so that smaller sample sizes will answer the question.
I'm not sure what misunderstanding you're talking about here. This wasn't a cancer study, it was a toxicity study. It "became" a cancer study when the rats developed tumors (which they did because of the strain selection), and I put quotation marks around "became" because it was portrayed that way by the researchers (with lurid photographs and video) even though the tumors developed in keeping with natural variance in their breed, not because the results met the standards for a cancer study using this type of rat.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:11 AM on December 3, 2013
I'm not sure what misunderstanding you're talking about here. This wasn't a cancer study, it was a toxicity study. It "became" a cancer study when the rats developed tumors (which they did because of the strain selection), and I put quotation marks around "became" because it was portrayed that way by the researchers (with lurid photographs and video) even though the tumors developed in keeping with natural variance in their breed, not because the results met the standards for a cancer study using this type of rat.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:11 AM on December 3, 2013
I'm not sure what misunderstanding you're talking about here.
The misunderstanding that animals with naturally high tumor rates are an invalid way of studying carcinogenesis, one mode of toxicity. The difference in untreated and treated animals is the measurement of interest, not the overall rate of tumors in the animals.
posted by Mental Wimp at 8:14 AM on December 3, 2013
The misunderstanding that animals with naturally high tumor rates are an invalid way of studying carcinogenesis, one mode of toxicity. The difference in untreated and treated animals is the measurement of interest, not the overall rate of tumors in the animals.
posted by Mental Wimp at 8:14 AM on December 3, 2013
As you can see from the paper, and was commented on in the French report: "No statistical tests were carried out to compare frequency of tumours between rat groups." Nor did Seralini consider the statistical power of his experiment with regard to tumor variations. When the French carried out those tests, they showed that there was no statistically significant effect between untreated and treated animals, and that if Seralini had wanted to run the carcinogenesis study they would have needed thousands of rats, with more than a hundred per group, rather than two hundred rats with ten per group.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:00 AM on December 3, 2013
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:00 AM on December 3, 2013
As you can see from the paper, and was commented on in the French report: "No statistical tests were carried out to compare frequency of tumours between rat groups."
I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not defending the paper, which reports on some really, really badly done research that was badly and barely analyzed. And I certainly do not believe that the GMO corn causes cancer. And yes, failure to do a statistical analysis of the differences is a valid criticism.
However, this one ("One issue is that, while the experiments ran for two years, far longer than most rat studies of food safety, the chosen rat breed commonly develops tumors after two years."- from the 4th link) is not. This was repeated by some commenters in this thread.
And really, this is not the worst study I've seen published. I've had a worse paper published over my objection as the statistical editor because the editor-in-chief liked the cut of the author's jib or something. When the consequences became clear and I was challenged by the new editor for letting it get into print, I pulled a copy of my review and shoved it in his face. He shame-facedly and sheepishly apologized, then cursed the displaced editor. (Peer-review works well in theory, but the shoddiness of some implementations appalls me.)
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:22 AM on December 3, 2013
I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not defending the paper, which reports on some really, really badly done research that was badly and barely analyzed. And I certainly do not believe that the GMO corn causes cancer. And yes, failure to do a statistical analysis of the differences is a valid criticism.
However, this one ("One issue is that, while the experiments ran for two years, far longer than most rat studies of food safety, the chosen rat breed commonly develops tumors after two years."- from the 4th link) is not. This was repeated by some commenters in this thread.
And really, this is not the worst study I've seen published. I've had a worse paper published over my objection as the statistical editor because the editor-in-chief liked the cut of the author's jib or something. When the consequences became clear and I was challenged by the new editor for letting it get into print, I pulled a copy of my review and shoved it in his face. He shame-facedly and sheepishly apologized, then cursed the displaced editor. (Peer-review works well in theory, but the shoddiness of some implementations appalls me.)
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:22 AM on December 3, 2013
Hrm. You are making a lot of sense, but I'm not really seeing the misunderstanding. You can certainly do a carcinogenesis study with this breed of rat, that's what they're for. There's nothing inherently wrong with using this rat for a toxicity study with much smaller group sizes, either, but clearly you can't then report on tumors, right? And you especially can't report on tumors using the kind of comparative charts in the study without mentioning the natural variance or even the fact that the rats are bred for tumor growth?
I guess what I'm saying is that "the chosen rat breed commonly develops tumors after two years" seems like a reasonable criticism, if it's a criticism of the researchers publicizing their results with pictures like this.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:51 AM on December 3, 2013
I guess what I'm saying is that "the chosen rat breed commonly develops tumors after two years" seems like a reasonable criticism, if it's a criticism of the researchers publicizing their results with pictures like this.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:51 AM on December 3, 2013
Regulatory epidemiologist here, chiming in on my lunch break (in advance, I'd like to say that I understand that an online forum is a terrible place to talk about most things seriously, but when my field comes in to view I feel very compelled to speak):
The fear of long term impacts of GMOs, not only (but including) the consequences of massive environmental release of the synthetics many of these GMOs are intended to survive, is deeply rational and does not deserve the rote accusation that a freshman biology student should understand why the practices involved are so apparently safe as to merit no further scrutiny or precaution.
My work for the better part of the last decade has involved quite a lot of the problems we're faced with by those many, many thousands of synthetic chemicals in commerce that have been used in mixtures and for unauthorized purposes for a very long time. Massive regulatory testing schemes have been struggling to come up with basic, relevant toxicological data on them for decades, and that question of relevance is a big one. Consequences are not always anticipated by even the brightest minds. Hindsight (in the form of a lot of epidemiology) is wearily understanding of this. The front end problem of assessing the possible unintended consequences has spawned massive testing regimes (like EPA's EDSP, and the REACH regulation in the EU). These regimes use flawed and debated methods, and even in the best circumstances the decision-making that follows the generation or collection of data from these and other methods is up for debate, as any real toxicologist will confirm.
The study in question is flawed horribly, and about that there is no question. Concern about the full ecological impacts of a GMO approach to agriculture is not the flaw, and serious research continues on the matter as it must, no matter how strongly adherents in the debate have chosen sides. We still won't have massive scale data to work with for years, in the way that massive scale synthetics were in use for years (even decades) before real causal links were identified. Those shouting that this isn't the case are as damaging as those yearning for a kind of caution the commercialization of chemistry and genetics can't provide (the cat's out of the bag, as they say). The difference, though, is that those shouting for early caution can be shouted down now, when there isn't a lot of human-relevant data piled up for public review. But, again, hindsight is out there on the horizon, and it will not look like this picture of an absence of possibly grave or widespread unintended consequences that the science trained among us tend to insist.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:48 PM on December 3, 2013 [8 favorites]
The fear of long term impacts of GMOs, not only (but including) the consequences of massive environmental release of the synthetics many of these GMOs are intended to survive, is deeply rational and does not deserve the rote accusation that a freshman biology student should understand why the practices involved are so apparently safe as to merit no further scrutiny or precaution.
My work for the better part of the last decade has involved quite a lot of the problems we're faced with by those many, many thousands of synthetic chemicals in commerce that have been used in mixtures and for unauthorized purposes for a very long time. Massive regulatory testing schemes have been struggling to come up with basic, relevant toxicological data on them for decades, and that question of relevance is a big one. Consequences are not always anticipated by even the brightest minds. Hindsight (in the form of a lot of epidemiology) is wearily understanding of this. The front end problem of assessing the possible unintended consequences has spawned massive testing regimes (like EPA's EDSP, and the REACH regulation in the EU). These regimes use flawed and debated methods, and even in the best circumstances the decision-making that follows the generation or collection of data from these and other methods is up for debate, as any real toxicologist will confirm.
The study in question is flawed horribly, and about that there is no question. Concern about the full ecological impacts of a GMO approach to agriculture is not the flaw, and serious research continues on the matter as it must, no matter how strongly adherents in the debate have chosen sides. We still won't have massive scale data to work with for years, in the way that massive scale synthetics were in use for years (even decades) before real causal links were identified. Those shouting that this isn't the case are as damaging as those yearning for a kind of caution the commercialization of chemistry and genetics can't provide (the cat's out of the bag, as they say). The difference, though, is that those shouting for early caution can be shouted down now, when there isn't a lot of human-relevant data piled up for public review. But, again, hindsight is out there on the horizon, and it will not look like this picture of an absence of possibly grave or widespread unintended consequences that the science trained among us tend to insist.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:48 PM on December 3, 2013 [8 favorites]
Regulatory epidemiologist here, chiming in on my lunch break
Unfortunate that the best post had to come at the end of this thread's lifetime. Thank you, though, for it.
posted by sutt at 7:47 AM on December 8, 2013 [1 favorite]
Unfortunate that the best post had to come at the end of this thread's lifetime. Thank you, though, for it.
posted by sutt at 7:47 AM on December 8, 2013 [1 favorite]
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