Today, on Twitter, I learned something new and interesting from environmental reporter Paul Voosen. Over the years, I've run into reports (like this one from the Union of Concerned Scientists) showing that genetically modified crops — i.e. Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, which is really the stuff we're talking about most of the time in these situations — don't increase intrinsic yields of those crops. But I've also seen decent-looking data that seemed to suggest exactly the opposite. So what gives?

Turns out, this is largely an issue of terminology.

"Intrinsic yield" means something very specific, and something different from what most of us think when we hear the word "yield". Because of this, both those sets of data that I've seen can be right, at the same time. The UCS is correct that GMOs plants don't seem to produce higher intrinsic yields — that is, there aren't more kernels per cob. But the data that shows GMO plants can produce more than conventionally bred plants is also correct, because that's looking at a bigger picture of "yield" — one that takes into account the fact that it's easier to protect those plants against pests. Fewer pests = fewer lost plants = a higher bushel-per-acre yield. Even if the plants, themselves, aren't yielding more.

Jon Foley, a scientist who is also the director of The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment agreed with this distinction between "yield" and "intrinsic yield". He also told me that the overall yield data on GM crops isn't as simple as "yes, it produces higher yields" or "no, it doesn't". For instance, he pointed to a paper published this February in Nature Biotechnology which shows that GM corn sometimes out-produces conventionally bred corn and sometimes under-produces in comparison. The key is in the environmental context. The years where GM corn was producing similar or lower yields than conventionally bred corn were average years, when it came to factors like the weather, disease, and pests. It was in bad years that you can see a significant, positive, difference for GM corn. When the situation was bad, GM corn had greater yields.

I'm not really posting this information because of the GM thing — although I suspect that will get more people to pay attention. What I think is most interesting about this is that it handily illustrates something I've seen in a lot of different conflicts based around science. When you're getting conflicting information, one of the best ways to start figuring out who is right is to look at the language and the semantics. Often, everybody's right. They're just right in different ways. Unless you look closely, you won't see the difference.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

A worthy and overlooked story in the NYT by Elizabeth Rosenthal about a new economic riptide hitting Central America, a result of America's changing corn policy. The US is now using 40% of our own corn crop to produce biofuel, and tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which now imports about half of its corn.

"Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel."

Read the rest, and check out Richard Perry's photo slideshow.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/is-increased-biofuel-demand-ma.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/authors-of-study-linking-gm-co.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/authors-of-study-linking-gm-co.html#comments Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:06:08 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=182509

Earlier today, I posted on the recent paper that claims to have found a link between eating genetically modified corn and the growth of tumors in rats. Short version: The research sucked. It's a terribly done study and it demonstrates …

Earlier today, I posted on the recent paper that claims to have found a link between eating genetically modified corn and the growth of tumors in rats. Short version: The research sucked. It's a terribly done study and it demonstrates why "peer reviewed" does not always mean "accurate".

But now, this story is getting worse. Turns out, the authors of the study (and their financial sponsor, The Sustainable Food Trust) manipulated the media to ensure that the first news stories published about the study would not be critical of its methods or results.

First, some background. When a journal is about to publish a study that they think will be big news, they usually offer the full study to reporters under an embargo system. The reporter gets to read the study, do their reporting, and write a story ... but they can't publish that story until a specific day at a specific time. If you're a daily or an online publication, there's a lot of pressure to have your story ready to go the moment the embargo lifts. Otherwise, you'll look like you weren't on the ball. There's a lot of problems with this system, but it's very common.

What's not common: Forcing journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements promising to not show the study they're reporting on to any independent researchers or outside experts. If you're trying to make sure your publication runs a story on the study right when the embargo lifts, but you can't show the study to any third-party experts before the embargo lifts, then the story you run is going to (inevitably) contain only information the authors of the study want you to talk about. It ceases being journalism and becomes PR.

This is what the authors of the GM corn/rat tumor study did.

At Embargo Watch (an excellent blog that discusses issues with the embargo system as a whole) Ivan Oransky explains that we know this happened because the reporters forced to sign the agreement talked about it in their stories:

As the AFP noted in their original story, since updated:

Breaking with a long tradition in scientific journalism, the authors allowed a selected group of reporters to have access to the paper, provided they signed confidentiality agreements that prevented them from consulting other experts about the research before publication.

My Reuters colleagues described the embargo agreement in a similar way:

In an unusual move, the research group did not allow reporters to seek outside comment on their paper before its publication in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology and presentation at a news conference in London.

So did the BBC:

In a move regarded as unusual by the media, the French research group refused to provide copies of the journal paper to reporters in advance of its publication, unless they signed non-disclosure agreements. The NDAs would have prevented the journalists from approaching third-party researchers for comment.

To their credit, the reporters at the three outlets I cite above went back and refiled their stories with comment from scientists unrelated to the study, and from Monsanto, once the embargo lifted. But the Sustainable Food Trust knew damn well reporters would be under pressure to file something the moment the embargo lifted — especially since this was an embargo likely to be broken, as it was — and that their hands would be tied as far as outside comment.

The authors of that study, and The Sustainable Food Trust, deliberately tried to make sure that the first stories you read about their study didn't tell you how bad the study was.

Guys, that's messed up.

And, again, just as with Emily Sohn's story at Discover, neither the authors of the study nor The Sustainable Food Trust replied to Ivan Oransky's request for an interview.

Read the rest of the story at Embargo Watch

In lighter news, I have decided to begin referring to this scandal as "Corn Maze".

Image: corn maze, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from andy_emcee's photostream

]]>

Yesterday, in an aside to a post criticizing an astroturf political campaign in California, Mark mentioned a new study that supposedly found GM corn causes tumors in rats. As Mark said in an update to that post, this study is severely flawed, but I wanted to follow-up on that with some discussion about why it's flawed.

After all, the study was peer-reviewed, right? Doesn't that mean we can trust it?

Here's the thing. Peer review is not perfect. It's not a panacea. It's simply the basic level of due diligence. By submitting work for peer review, a scientist has allowed people outside her own team to critique her work. And the journal might require some changes to the paper based on the critique — anything from edits for clarity to requesting that the scientist perform another experiment in a different way. If a paper hasn't gone through peer review, you should be more skeptical of it. Avoiding peer review means that the researcher decided to show the public her results before allowing those results to be critiqued by independent experts.

But, at the same time, just because something has gone through peer review doesn't mean it's been certified to be accurate. It just means that roughly three other experts have looked at the paper before publication. There's still a lot of room for things to go wrong. Peer review is like the bouncer at the door. The bouncer doesn't guarantee that every person in the bar would be a good person for you to date. Even if a paper gets through, you still have to think about it critically and evaluate it on its own merits. This recent paper on GM corn and rat tumors is an excellent example of that ...

Over at Discovery News, Emily Sohn has a great breakdown of everything that's wrong with the GM corn and rat tumors study. And there's a lot that's wrong with it. In fact, the laboratory that did this research — a French team led by Gilles-Eric Séralini — has been heavily criticized for the poor quality of their research into GM food on multiple occasions.

It's not Monsanto spokespeople doing the criticizing, either, Sohn writes.

One immediate problem, Newell-McGloughlin said, is that the line of rodents used in the study, known as Sprague-Dawley rats, are frequently used in cancer research because a large majority of them naturally develop tumors at a high rate, regardless of what they eat or how they're raised. What's more, the rats were allowed to eat an unlimited amount of food, which increases their chances of developing tumors. And two is a very old age for these rats, which could account for the large rate of cancer seen across all groups, including the controls.

The small size of the control group also raised red flags. Even experienced scientists in the field had trouble interpreting data in the study, as seen in comments collected by the UK's Science Media Center, but it appears that the study included just 10 or 20 control animals. That means there were at least nine times more test animals than control animals. If anything, studies of this kind usually include two or three times more controls than experimental animals.

The results don't make a lot of sense, either. No matter how much of either herbicide-laden or genetically modified maize the rats ate in proportion to their other food, rates of cancer and premature death remained the same. However, to be meaningful, toxicology studies like this should show a dose-dependent response, which means that if something is toxic, more of it should be more toxic.

Looking at the data, it appears that the study authors never tested their results to see if the numbers they turned up could have occurred by random chance, said David Tribe, a microbiologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. And given the small numbers of animals used in the study, that's a real possibility.

Notably, the authors of the paper never responded to Sohn's request for an interview.

• Read Emily Sohn's report on the problems with the GM corn and rat tumors study at Discovery News

• Read the full study online

• Read an earlier BoingBoing post explaining how peer review works, and some of the flaws in the system. (Be sure to check out the extensive comments, which include further context from scientists.)

This lovely ear of glass gem corn is featured at Seeds Trust. They will begin selling seeds for it in August.

The story of glass gem corn. Seedsman Greg Schoen got the seed from Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee man, now in his 80's, in Oklahoma. He was Greg's "corn-teacher". Greg was in the process of moving last year and wanted someone else to store and protect some of his seeds. He left samples of several corn varieties, including glass gem. I grew out a small handful this past summer just to see. The rest, as they say is history. I got so excited, I posted a picture on Facebook. We have never seen anything like this. Unfortunately, we did not grow out enough to sell. Look for a small amount for sale starting in August 2011.

Glass gem corm (Via TYWKIWDBI)

We grow a lot of corn in the United States, much of which never sees the inside of a human stomach. In fact, in 2010, something like a quarter of all the corn grown in this country went to ethanol production. That's a massive amount of corn grown for gas tanks. And it's a problem.

The process of growing corn is tremendously energy intensive, and it has some far-reaching drawbacks that threaten the future of vital farmlands in the Midwest. Corn crops provide steady, reliable income for farmers. But the risks likely outweigh those benefits, at least at the quantities in which we now grow corn.

In the spring of 2009, I experienced some of those risks first hand. At Smithsonian.com, you can read a excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out, my book about the future of energy. The excerpt is about Madelia, Minnesota, a small town where local farming advocates are trying to promote a more sustainable cropping system, and a better way to grow biofuels—one that provides incentives for farmers to grow less corn, not more.

In the course of reporting that story, I ran into a dust storm—a phenomenon that is related to the way corn grows and what we have to do to the soil to keep producing massive corn crops year after year.

The wind had started the day full of bluster, and it was positively furious by the afternoon, while the open, empty fields that flanked the highway offered nothing to slow the wind down. This alone wouldn’t have been a big problem. I grew up in Kansas, and I know how to steer a car through a windstorm. The issue was what I could see ahead of me—or, rather, what I couldn’t see. Out of nowhere, a gray cloud rose up to hover over the highway, swallowing semi-trucks and digesting them into sets of disembodied tail lights. I had barely enough time to realize I wasn’t looking at fog before I plunged into the thick of it.

The sun disappeared. Gravel pinged against the car windows. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t artificially lit. In a panic, I turned on my headlamps just as I drove out the other side of the gritty haze, back into a normal, windy spring day. The “cloud” was made of dirt, and a mile or so up the road, another gray ribbon of it stretched across the horizon. I went through three or four of these dust clouds before I reached the exit for Madelia.

Even in town, the dust was not easily vanquished. I parked my car downtown, beneath the prow of a movie theater awning, and stepped out into air so texturized you could almost gnaw on it. Flecks of dust stuck in my sun block. When I opened my mouth, grit came in.

I had traveled to Madelia to meet with Linda Meschke, the woman who had become the driving force behind the Madelia Model, and I’d left my house dressed for the occasion, wearing the tidy business-casual wear of a young reporter. Those dust clouds knocked me down a peg. By the time I’d walked two blocks through downtown Madelia, my skin was turning pink, and my hair was a winded red whirl glued into place under a layer of grime. Meschke didn’t seem to mind my sorry state. Instead, she just nodded slowly and said, “It’s a little windy out here today.”

At that point, I still didn’t quite understand what I had seen. Dust clouds such as this, I knew, were related to soil erosion, but it wasn’t until I talked to Meschke that I was able to connect the dots between the dust in my hair and the goals of the Madelia Model.

Read the full excerpt at Smithsonian.com.

Read my book, Before the Lights Go Out, to learn more about efforts to localize energy generation.