Report: Monsanto corn linked to organ damage

Change.org reports, "The first-ever public study of the health effects of genetically modified corn shows that three patented crops developed and owned by agriculture giant Monsanto cause liver, kidney and heart damage in mammals. The FDA has approved all three varieties for sale and consumption in the U.S. and all three are in our food supply right now." Source for those claims: this study published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences.

• [The Life Of Bryan]

  I would like to assume that there were one or more ever so slightly more rigorous tests conducted in between the Twenty MIce Phase and the Whole Fucking World Phase. Or am I just being overly idealistic again?

• [Camp Freddie]

  I don’t know the precise background for the original Monsanto data, but please bear in mind that increasing the sample size is probably not something Monsanto would be allowed to do.

  These are animal studies, so you can’t just do whatever you want.

  I know that in the EU (especially the UK), applications for pesticide authorisation are denied if you use more than the minimum possible number of animals. You can’t just use twice as many mice because you want a more powerful statistical result.

  Again, I don’t know the background and GMO registration is different to pesticide registration. It seems highly likely that Monsanto would have discussed their study design with the regulators before doing it (or else, their study was a standard protocol, as recommended in some official guideline). You just don’t do that sort of expensive study without knowing that it meets regulatory requirements – even if you are Monsanto.

  Disclaimer: I do not work for Monsanto. I have worked on non-GMO glyphosate projects for other (competitor) companies.

• [MonsantoCo]

  In the current paper (de Vendomois et al., 2009) that is cited above, as with the prior publication (Seralini et al, 2007), Seralini and his colleagues use non-traditional statistical methods to reassess toxicology data from studies conducted with MON 863, MON 810 and NK603 corn varieties, and reach unsubstantiated conclusions.

  The French High Counsel on Biotechnology (HCB) has considered both the de Vendomois (2009) and Seralini (2007) papers and has found that these papers make no useful contribution to the safety assessment.

  Statistical fluctuations occur commonly in any large study with many endpoints, and statistical significance alone does not determine when an observation can be translated into evidence of risk. Making this determination requires consideration of:
  • dose-related trends (higher dose should produce greater effect)
  • reproducibility
  • relationship to other findings such as abnormal organ appearance on pathology examinations
  • the magnitude of the differences and the relationship of the findings to the normal range of values
  • occurrence of a particular finding in both sexes (adjusting for known gender related differences in some tests)

  When considered using proper statistical analysis in conjunction with these other criteria, the toxicology studies cited fail to demonstrate any adverse effects of these products.

  A more complete discussion of the issues related to this publication, as well as references to pertinent publications, see is available on the Monsanto website: Monsanto Response: de Vendomois et al. 2009

  Thank you,

  Dan Goldstein
  Director, Medical Sciences and Outreach

  • [Cowicide]

    Dan, does the Monsanto website have an area that shows its proper statistical analysis methodologies? And what do you think of Death Metal Rooster and reports that he got ahold of some Monsanto chicken feed?

• [dudeinhammock]

  Whatever the methodological limitations of the study currently under discussion (some excellent points have been raised by previous commenters in this respect), if the critique of the sample sizes, insufficient duration of studies, and consistently-found residues of known toxins are true, then this is a crime against humanity. Discussions of impact factor, semantics (mycophage), and who’s rebutting whom entirely miss the point. The public has the right to expect a thorough examination of products that may kill us. If those central accusations are true (and nobody here has rebutted them), Monsanto has made a power-play for which the public will suffer greatly.

• [martian_bob]

  Certainly an interesting read, but I find some of the statistical analysis dubious. If, as the authors claim, the Monsanto data is itself poor, how can their re-analysis be good? Garbage in, garbage out.

  I do heartily agree with something in their conclusion; a 2-year, multigenerational animal feeding study by an independent lab would certainly be a good idea.

• [deckard68]

  The paper may be bunk, but, “It seems unlikely that …humans are likely to consume that much of a single thing anytime in the near future.”

  Actually, it is difficult to avoid corn meal. It is not as ever-present as HFCS, but it is in a lot.

• [robulus]

  Thanks for sourcing the claim Xeni. Its a big conclusion and needs to be viewed in context, the comments here seem appropriately balanced to me.

• [Anonymous]

  If you get the chance, get a copy of “The World According to Monsanto”. They are one of the scariest companies out there.

• [Anonymous]

  The point is that natural corn is not dangerous and you are arguing whether GMO is or is not dangerous. Sorta like arguing whether i should drink water or gatorade – they both quench my thirst but one contains a highly processed corn syrup…hmmm i wonder if that comes with risk…yes it does.

  Commenter above wondering if rats or people consume 11 to 33 percent of diet from corn. In the USA its easily that high or higher.

• [Anonymous]

  Scare story alert!

  The study design looks dubious at best. First, the doses of GM feed are massive: 11 and 33 percent of these rats’ diets were (GM or control) corn. It seems unlikely that (a) rats eat that much grain in the wild, and (b) humans are likely to consume that much of a single thing anytime in the near future. Secondly, the control groups were really poor: the non-GM grains were not equivalent to the GM ones in nutritional content, etc.

  I do suspect that GM grains, especially ones made to produce toxins like Roundup, are a Pandora’s Box of trouble. However, we need good science to make that suspicion a belief worth discussing, and this study is *crap* science.

  • [Anonymous]

    “Roundup Ready” plants do not produce Roundup. Roundup is an herbicide which would normally kill the plant. Roundup Ready plants have a transgenic EPSPS synthase gene (from a bacteria) which makes them immune to Roundup herbicide. Roundup works by blocking the action of important enzymes in plants. The bacterial version of this enzyme is not blocked by glyphosate.

    The idea is to make the plants you want to grow immune so that you can use spray Roundup (which is an amazingly eco-friendly herbicide) to kill weeds without killing your corn.

    I’ll also point out as a professional academic biologist at a major university, I have never heard of this journal before.

  • [Anonymous]

    Watch the documentary King Corn. Corn is in everything nowadays, in one form or another. High Fructose Corn Syrup, Cattle Feed, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

• [ddk]

  The study itself is a hoot to read. Couched in scientific language, half the text basically rips Monsanto/Covance for having a ridiculously small sample size (10 rats in one of the most important groups), too short of an observation period (the study ended after only 90 days), insufficient testing for affects (cancer, etc), and lousy statistical analysis.

  They re-run the statistical analysis to show that there does appear to be toxic affects, but basically state that the studies were so flawed as to have 44-70% chances of completely missing various additional short-term affects, and that it was too short to show any long-term affects.

  Last lines:
  “All three GM maize varieties contain a distinctly different pesticide residue associated with their particular GM event (glyphosate and AMPA in NK 603, modified Cry1Ab in MON 810, modified Cry3Bb1 in MON 863). These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown. Furthermore, any side effect linked to the GM event will be unique in each case as the site of transgene insertion and the spectrum of genome wide mutations will differ between the three modified maize types. In conclusion, our data presented here strongly recommend that additional long-term (up to 2 years) animal feeding studies be performed in at least three species, preferably also multi-generational, to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods. Our analysis highlights that the kidneys and liver as particularly important on which to focus such research as there was a clear negative impact on the function of these organs in rats consuming GM maize varieties for just 90 days.”

• [DCBoland]

  The study cited seems dubious at best.

  According to NZ’s FSA, it repeats debunked claims made in a previous publication. They even have an evaluation of the original claims, which they describe as ‘scientifically flawed’.

• [GordoTheGeek]

  The paper is here:

  “A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health”

  http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm

• [Anonymous]

  Who gives a fuck who funds the studies when there’s no meaningful oversight by any government and we can’t do long-term studies to determine the effects of genetically modifying nature for the sake of our needs? We are simultaneously the most clever and most stupid of all the life-forms on this planet. If we end up with organ damage, we deserve it for doing such stupid things in the first place. Hey guise! Instead of changing our ways, why not try an end-run around DNA? I wish we could have a peaceful revolution that put Monsanto and Dow and all the others into a box they couldn’t get out of, nor pollute the rest of us from within.

• [Jonathan Badger]

  Yes, Monsanto is “evil”, and I know many would like to believe anything bad about then, but some questions need to be asked. Namely, why is such an important sounding result being published in an obscure journal? I know “International Journal of Biological Sciences” sounds impressive, but it has an impact factor (amusingly even advertised on their website!) of 3.24. Is that bad? Well, many institutions say that publications in journals of impact less than 5.0 are not counted in tenure decisions.

  So why would anyone publish in such a journal? Presumably, because they submitted it to better journals like “Science” or “Nature”, got rejected, and then worked their way down to the third-tier venues… Hey, I’ve done similar things myself, but for findings far less “sexy”. Finding such an important-sounding finding in such a place should ring alarm bells in terms of methodology. It will be interesting to see what followup studies (if any) say.

  • [Anonymous]

    Requiring an impact factor of 5 doesn’t seem very fair for that – I’ve seen interesting papers in journals with an impact factor of 3 or even 1, simply because the subject material was very specialized.

    Of course biological sciences are pretty broad, and this seems like a curiously minor journal for this sort of result, it’s just a little worrying as a general standard. By the way, even factor 1 journals sometimes note it, though probably more as disclosure than advertisement.

    • [Wiingy]

      +1 for mentioning that Impact Factor is not the be-all end-all. Oftentimes you can do good research on a specific field that’s just not that interesting to the general scientific community but important within your niche, and these specialty publications (with a low IF stemming from low readership) might be the best place to publish. That having been said, this paper is crap, and so is the journal – ISI doesn’t recognize it as legitimate and doesn’t even bother to give in an IF.

      Using rodent models to analyze diet in humans is mostly bunk. Rodents did not evolve to eat the food that we evolved to eat, and our bodies responses (as well as the responses of the differing microflora) will be affected by this history. If this were a case-control study with human data then I might be at least slightly more convinced… sample sizes of more than 10 (rats are not that expensive…) are generally also the way to go with this type of study. Yay for junk science!

    • [Jonathan Badger]

      Of course there is good work being published in low impact journals. I’ve published work in bacterial classification in journals with an impact factor less than 2, for example. But that’s because my results weren’t that generally interesting — only a few people really care about the classification of Hyphomonas. But finding a truly newsworthy conclusion in an obscure journal is as fishy as finding “genuine diamond necklaces” for $19.95.

      • [Anonymous]

        (Same as anon #18)
        I wasn’t trying to say this case wasn’t fishy, just that the idea of tying something like tenure to high impact journals was concerning. By coincidence, the journal you linked to was one of the examples I had in mind.

        By the way, I think your results are interesting. They decided RNA trees by themselves are error-prone for eukaryotes a while ago, and I’ve been wondering why they’re still so trusted for bacteria. But that’s just me. :)

      • [Antinous / Moderator]

        But finding a truly newsworthy conclusion in an obscure journal is as fishy as finding “genuine diamond necklaces” for $19.95.

        Obscure blogs regularly cover news that big media won’t touch, because big media is in the pocket of big business and the government. Why does that principle not apply to well-known journals and Monsanto?

        • [Jonathan Badger]

          That isn’t how scientific journals work, Antonius. They aren’t supported by advertising dollars like magazines or newspapers. A prestigious journal is one with a high impact factor. In other words, a journal that has a high number of studies that influence future studies. An study that convincingly shows that GM corn is unhealthy would be *fought* over by journals.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          They aren’t supported by advertising dollars like magazines or newspapers.

          Business is business and ethics are always for sale. If ‘neutral’ entities like governments and religious organizations are influenced by business interests, why would a journal whose very existence is dependent on funded studies get a free pass on ethics? That’s seems very naive.

        • [Jonathan Badger]

          Even if you assume everybody is corrupt there isn’t a reasonable incentive for a journal to “sell its ethics” by rejecting a worthy paper unfairly. The mass media needs to protect its relationship with its advertisers and to the government and so has an incentive to suppress affairs embarrassing to either. Not so for a journal. If anything, you could argue that there’s the opposite incentive — to accept a paper that’s “too good to be true” such as the Korean stem cell fraud a few years ago, or the doctored superconductivity research of Jan Schon.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          there’s the opposite incentive — to accept a paper that’s “too good to be true” such as the Korean stem cell fraud a few years ago, or the doctored superconductivity research of Jan Schon.

          Were either of those directly condemnatory of a major new product line of a mega-corporation?

        • [theredballoon]

          Nope, they sure weren’t. But most journals ARE less influenced by mega-corporations as Jonathan Badger noted. Instead of pressuring the journal not to publish results, mega-corporations generally pressure the researcher directly (especially when they control the researcher’s funding, which is often the case in pharmaceutical research for example), resulting in the so-called “file drawer” phenomenon or worse. There are plenty of examples of this (i.e. big pharma squashing bad results).

          You could argue that this research being published in a crap journal is the result of Monsanto pressure… but I think it’s more likely because the research just isn’t that good.

        • [Anonymous]

          Regardless of whether the Big Business Conspirators are trying to bury this paper because it is so “damning,” no one who has taken an intro statistics class (eg “learn to use Excel”) would believe the strong conclusions of the study based on the data. That’s why the big journals rejected it, it’s junk.

          Of course, Microsoft is a Big Business, too… Maybe it’s a conspiracy after all!!

• [davedorr9]

  This is an interesting article. They got data from Monsanto through court appeals and combined it after the fact to do a sort of synthesis of evidence. Their methods are not randomized, but are sort of a hodge-podge of how they got the data, how Monsanto failed to analyze it they way they thought it should be done, and how they tried to address it.

  What is probably most interesting is that everything they found is sex-dependent and almost none of it is dose dependent. This is really odd, and, while I am no apologist for the apparently Machiavellian tactics that Monsanto and others use, I can’t seem to find the smoking gun. If the 33% rats don’t show a significant increase but the 11% rats do, what does it mean? Not good science is what it means.

  I think what it does say is that you basically need to make all of this data public, as they do. But you also need to take this in context, as your quoted website does not. The context is still pretty muddy to me.

• [Anonymous]

  The study is pretty smart. You can’t rip their data without ripping Monsanto’s data – which was sufficient for the government. The root is that government is the entity that sets the standards for testing, so all requests for Change ™ should be sent to the White House post haste. The study does make a good case that more research is required for these corn lines.

• [Anonymous]

  That is a thoroughly unconvincing paper. Their data is all over the place. Its bad even for mouse data which is inherently noisy. There is a reason this is in the journal it is in (i.e. not a good one).

  There should definitely be research to examine modified strains of corn and other foods. It is possible that there will be deleterious effects that can be shown. This paper does not show anything of that nature. The fact that Greenpeace gave them the funds to start the research doesn’t help their credibility either.

• [ellishumphres]

  I don’t know (and don’t care) how reliable the journal (or the study) is, but after watching Food, Inc., I hope the precarious tower Monsanto has built comes tumbling down on their faces and they weep as their empire burns.

  I can only hope that if indeed this is true, that “open source” crops can once again rule the countryside, and real farmers can even remember how to grow anything that doesn’t require a EULA.

  • [Lester]

    Evils of Monsanto aside — both real and imagined — this paper is an attack on GM food, in general.

    From the abstract:
    “We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.”

    But they don’t have much in the way in data to back up that “In addition…” bit. They can’t be excluded, but they can’t be proven either.

    I’ve found that most objections to GM crops are ideological, not science-based. And this could be my knee-jerk defense of GM crops, but it is certainly cause for some skepticism.

    • [Ito Kagehisa]

      Mycophage, you are wrong about the residue issue. The whole point of “Roundup Ready [tm]” crops is that you douse the field with Roundup both before and during the raising of the crop. I have seen it done. It’s suppose to save money and labor by eliminating the need to weed or till between rows.

      Glyophosate herbicides are said to be safe and it is said that they are rapidly neutralized by rainwater. My observation of what happened when the county saturated a largish area of streambank four years ago indicates this is incorrect. It took more than two years before anything whatsoever grew on that spot. I saw the workers spraying and they were using Roundup labeled sprayers.

      • [kc0bbq]

        “Glyophosate herbicides are said to be safe and it is said that they are rapidly neutralized by rainwater. My observation of what happened when the county saturated a largish area of streambank four years ago indicates this is incorrect. It took more than two years before anything whatsoever grew on that spot. I saw the workers spraying and they were using Roundup labeled sprayers.”

        RoundUp doesn’t stay around. It just doesn’t. It kills what only it touches, and only on actively growing plants. Even then it has to get in through the leaves or be injected into the live part of the plant. It has no pre-emergent properties, whatsoever. The fact that the sprayers had roundup labels on them is meaningless. You only have to have actual labels (not decals or anything) available for inspection.

        If it was two years before any growth happened it was a different chemical, probably a soil sterilant, and it was done to remove invasive species or something. When we sprayed rodent control areas around food distribution buildings we used sterilants because it killed everything (slowly) within a few feet of where you sprayed and kept anything from growing for a long time. The stuff killed fair sized trees. Sometimes RoundUp would be used to get a quick kill before other chemicals could take effect.

        • [Ito Kagehisa]

          RoundUp doesn’t stay around. It just doesn’t. It kills what only it touches, and only on actively growing plants. Even then it has to get in through the leaves or be injected into the live part of the plant. It has no pre-emergent properties, whatsoever. The fact that the sprayers had roundup labels on them is meaningless. You only have to have actual labels (not decals or anything) available for inspection.

          I made my statement the way I did because I had no other data – to the best of my knowledge Roundup was used, but I tried to make it clear that I was basing this on observation of the sprayer labels. The workers could have dumped out the Roundup and reloaded with something else, or mixed in additional agents, I admit. The spray pattern was consistent with the way most agencies use Roundup – they saturated the leaves.

          If it was two years before any growth happened it was a different chemical, probably a soil sterilant, and it was done to remove invasive species or something. When we sprayed rodent control areas around food distribution buildings we used sterilants because it killed everything (slowly) within a few feet of where you sprayed and kept anything from growing for a long time. The stuff killed fair sized trees. Sometimes RoundUp would be used to get a quick kill before other chemicals could take effect.

          That sounds consistent with what I saw; they probably poured “soil sterilant” right into the roundup sprayers. Whatever they sprayed, they sprayed it on the bank of a stream that provides drinking water for the city of Newark, Delaware. They killed everything including small trees right down to the roots. Nothing grew there, not even porcelain berry, russian olive, or japanese stilt grass, until two years later. It was just raw mud until then. They sprayed so that they could have an off-road parking area for their trucks near a manhole cover; it didn’t work very well, though, because they created an unparkeable mud pit instead. Technology always makes its way into the hands of cretins.

    • [zikzak]

      But they don’t have much in the way in data to back up that “In addition…” bit. They can’t be excluded, but they can’t be proven either.

      Uh, yeah. That’s why they said “can’t be excluded” instead of “can be proven”. One would hope that a study comparing GM corn to non-GM corn would unambiguously demonstrate zero differences in metabolic impact. This study didn’t do that. While there’s not enough data to make any more specific conclusions, the fact that it’s inconclusive at all is significant.

• [Lester]

  A quick read leads me to believe that this study seems to be a rebuttal of sorts of the Duoll et. al. paper, which was a critique of a previous paper by the authors of this one. We’ve found a flamewar people.

  Also, from this paper:
  “Greenpeace contributed to the start of the investigations by funding first statistical analyses in 2006, the results were then processed further and evaluated independently by the authors.”

  Just sayin…

• [wackyvorlon]

  I’m not very happy with the methodology of the study. First: the test is on rats. Humans are not rats, an effect measured in rodents will not necessarily show up in humans. Secondly, the n is very small. A better, more thorough study might find something, but I’m not holding my breath.

• [usfoodpolicy]

  Like several of the previous commenters, I read the study with interest, but had some questions and doubts.

  It seemed to me the authors hadn’t quite decided whether their thesis was “Monsanto used studies with insufficient sample size” or “A correct analysis of Monsanto data is sufficiently powerful to show that the GMO technology is a food safety hazard.”

  A strength of the paper is the use of Monsanto data, which should be widely available for scrutiny by the scientific community. A weakness is the difficulty of identifying which particular empirical results in the tables support the claims of a food safety hazard.

  I posted a challenge to readers, asking them to identify a specific result or small group of results in the tables, which seemed to show a food safety hazard. Then, we could read that particular result together to see if it justified the authors’ conclusions in the strongly worded introduction.

• [Anonymous]

  Monsanto does not have the full analysis of the statistical data on the website. These are submitted to regulatory agencies and are proprietary information (since- for better or worse- the law is that if we publish it anyone can use our multi-million dollar data package to support a competing product).

  The statistical analysis method used (ANOVA) by Monsanto is the recognized approach and is superior in terms of power. Application of a single comparison power calculation is not appropriate for this design, and the sample size is considered appropriate by international guidelines.

  Safety summaries for all of our products are available on Monsanto.com. This is not raw data or the formal report- but it will allow you to see the types of studies and data routinely provided to the regulatory agencies for GM products. The safety assessment of these products is based in part on the long history of safe use of both Bt proteins (in pesticides used in organic farming for 40+ years, no adverse effects in humans known) and EPSPS (the target for Glyphosate), which is an enzymatic activity present in all plants and fungi (absent in animals- the major reason for the low toxicity of glyphosate in mammalian species).

  I did locate DeathMetal Chicken video- quite funny. Now as to the cock and bull story (sorry…)that this is due to Monsanto chicken feed (ignoring for the moment that we do not sell chicken feed per-se)- we do conduct feeding studies on broiler chickens to assure performance and nutritional adequacy of the our GM products. To the best of my knowledge, this has never resulted in DMCS (DeathMetal Chicken Syndrome)!!

  Evolve with food?? Not really- most people eat food our cave-man ancestors never ate at all- agriculture is a pretty new technology and many plants have limited geographical distribution. Like your Italian tomato sauces? Well, that’s a new world plant… NOT part of the Roman diet. Man has DEFINITELY “evolved” food- teosinte made into corn by human selection being the most obvious example. Food has not likely evolved man- simply to variable as we have wandered from place to place in my opinion.

  Agree glyphosate itself would not devegetate for 2 years- but there are extended control versions with longer duration of activity- could have been another agent alone or in combination, but do keep in mind that glyphosate is systemic and kills the root- so re-growth can be delayed depending on rate of invasion of plants from the surrounding area.

  • [theredballoon]

    Actually, using a standard ANOVA without testing (and then figuring out a better way to deal with) heteroscedascity and non-normality of data is just piss-poor statistics (which, unfortunately, the vast majority of research which is published continues to do). So I’m not buying the “these researchers used flawed stats” argument that Monsanto is promoting. The authors actually used better and more robust stats than ANOVA. Take an advanced graduate level stats course before you insist on using standard ANOVA for any and all data. ANOVA (and many other commonly used stats including Student t-tests, etc.) are highly responsive (this is bad) to non-normal distribution and heteroscadisctic data; thus conclusions based on these ANOVAs can wildly inflate Type 1 error rates leading to erroneous (or incorrect) conclusions.

    That all being said, I’m only evaluating the specific stats argument put forth by Monsanto and anonymous coward #40, which is, frankly, just plain fucking wrong.

    Jonathan Badger: my guess/take why they published in some crap bio magazine is because they didn’t do any interesting, original research; they re-analyzed an existing dataset (and a crappy one at that) using better stats, which isn’t usually enough to get something published in a top-tier journal. This isn’t to say you can’t get excellent, top quality, good research out of existing datasets, but if you want to publish it top-tier (or even 2nd or 3rd tier or something researchers actually read), you damn well better have a unique idea you are examining. On the other hand Int J Biol Sci is indexed by pubmed, so a proper literature search would find it, meaning it might actually be read by researchers.

    As an aside, anyone interesting in robust stats (or reading a much better explanation of why ANOVA sucks if your data violates the assumptions) etc. see pretty much any textbook by Rand Wilcox (or his website- yes I know it’s ugly and can be incomprehensible sometimes). As my area of research is psychology, the review below is an excellent overview of this area and what tests you should use instead. Now if only R was that easy.

    Erceg-Hurn, D. M., & Mirosevich, V. M. (2008). Modern Robust Statistical Methods: An Easy Way to Maximize the Accuracy and Power of Your Research. American Psychologist, 63(7), 591-601.

    As a random aside: my spell check kept suggesting I chance erroneous (which I spelled erroneus) to erogenous. An erogenous conclusion is so much better than an erroneous conclusion.

    • [theredballoon]

      Woops, I take back part of my comment- although the researchers acknowledged and adjusted for non-normality and heteroscedascity, they chose a stupid alternate test when there are much better ones out there. Still better than a standard ANOVA though.

• [Anonymous]

  Animal models can be difficult to extrapolate from. I once heard that 1/3 of chemicals tested as toxic to rats don’t cause problems for mice and visa versa. Could have been an exageration, but still true to some degree. Imagine if we tested chocolate on dogs. So take toxicity and safety claims with a grain of salt.

• [namnezia]

  Despite the flaws of this study, I think the authors should be commended for attempting to analyze the limited data offered them by Monsanto. What would really solve this is if Monsanto would provide samples of their GM corn strains and wildtype strains for better designed, controlled studies to whomever requests them. Then they can be tested independently. It would also be to their advantage; if one of their strains does produce liver/kidney damage, then they can figure out why and then resdesign it so that it doesn’t. It would also help their image. Somehow though, I don’t think they would agree to this…

• [mycophage]

  The definitely is some bullshit in the intro of the paper – e.g. “One corn (NK 603) has been genetically engineered to tolerate the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation.”

  FALSE. They’re wrong on the science here. The enzyme that allows the plant to tolerate the herbicide is chemically unrelated to the herbicide itself; it’s misleading to say that that plants carrying the resistance gene “contains residues [whatever that would mean] of this formulation”. So from the outset, it seems clear that the authors have an agenda, and they’re willing to bend the facts to fit their prejudices. Not a promising start.

  I’m also curious to know whether the biological endpoints in these rats are legitimate markers for clinically significant organ damage – I’m not a rodent vet so I’m simply unsure. Yes, elevated creatinine levels can be a marker for kidney damage, but is the degree of elevation here an indication that kidney damage has taken place? (i.e., statistical significance is not the same as clinical significance). Perhaps someone with more experience in looking at this sort of data could weigh in?

  To extend Jonathan Badger’s point (comment #4) – yes indeed, this journal is a pretty minor one. Note that the impact factor they cite is “unofficial” – this is a big red flag to those in the know; it means that the entity that computes impact factor isn’t bothering to compute an IF for this journal. Another red flag is the way that the journal home page touts “high visibility of articles in Google” as one reason to publish there. That’s not how academic publishers talk. My impression is that this is a pay-to-play journal for trashy papers that can’t get accepted anywhere else.

  • [Anonymous]

    The authors are glib when they say there are “residues,” but it is true- NK603 that is treated with glyphosate will have residue of that compound. Viz:

    http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/_srcfiles/A416_FAR.pdf

    “The results of the herbicide analysis show that the glyphosate residue in the test grain was 0.09 ppm, slightly above the analytical detection limit of 0.05 ppm. The parent and reference
    lines were not assayed for glyphosate.”

    These are exceedingly low levels, but the abstract is correct in stating that glyphosate residue may be found on NK603 corn.

• [bklynchris]

  Ok, other than the, “we did not evolve with this food” argument. Anybody remember the first time they ate a vine ripened organic heirloom tomato? I know I do.

  Also, you guys obviously toiling away in post doc or tenure track research grinds…do you honestly think that your stomach is just this vat of acid reducing everything down into metabolis-able pieces and what’s left over just gets flushed out?

  By comparison, science makes justice looks seem like she has x-ray vision. (aside-God, these cheerios are delicious).

• [guston]

  For a mindblowing 2008 french-produced documentary on Monsanto, and how it has always been ‘helped’ by the government, see this page with full-length video embedded.

  The documentary features a certain George Bush Senior handling a needle, performing publicity-stunt-biotech at Monsanto’s lab.

• [Anonymous]

  Interesting. Offhand, it looks as though the paper is suggesting that the toxic effect comes not from the inherent make-up of the GM corn, but from GM crops having different pesticide residue profiles than conventional crops. Or maybe they’re only suggesting that for Round-Up resistant corn. That would make some sense. Round-Up resistant corn culture often takes advantage of the resistance to use lots of Round-Up to kill the weeds, making it possible to use low-till farming methods. The increased use could lead to increased residue on the resistant corn. If what that part of the paper is saying is that eating Round-Up is bad for you, I guess I wouldn’t be shocked.

  The other GM corn was modified to produce Bt, a very class of very narrow-spectrum insecticides discovered as the natural product of certain bacteria. Bt-producing crops should get lower insecticide use. I didn’t catch in my skim of the paper any proposed reason for the toxic effect of the Bt corn. Bt’s been around forever, so I’m sure any toxicity in rats is well established. However bad the pesticide approval process is, I can’t imagine that if Bt has established toxicity in rats and the Bt gene has measurable expression in the corn itself–the seed part–Bt corn could be approved for human food use.

  But, again, I think that they may be suggesting that the effect comes from a different residue profile, not something expressed in the GMO.

• [Anonymous]

  It doesn’t matter the corporation’s name, the mindset is always the same: control the information. Always in the service of a short term beeline quest for efficient profits. The only challenge for a group like Monsanto is to somehow convince the right people at the right time, that is, biologists and other salt of the earth types like farmers. Mono culture is never a good thing, just ask the Neanderthals. Please ask yourself what do the cattle, pork, and poultry that we eat actually get fed?

  • [Ito Kagehisa]

    It doesn’t matter the corporation’s name, the mindset is always the same: control the information.

    A false and useless observation. Some organizations are better than others.