It is possible to show that the recent paper by Seralini et al on the effects of GM corn on the cancer rates in rats is quite simply nonsense. Doing so requires a modicum, but no more, of reasoning from known facts.
I would like, if I may, to thank one of the readers of this site, “memsomerville” for making the point originally in the comments to my earlier piece and for prompting me to go and ask the one necessary question.
A point that I keep bringing up, that nobody seems to connect with, is that every research animal in the US has been eating GMOs for well over a decade. These animals are closely monitored in animal colonies by trained professionals that include veterinarians and pathologists and biomedical researchers.
If there were problems in their food, that would be obvious. Not only would it be obvious, it would be shouted from the rooftops.
If you think there are horrible consequences for them eating GMOs, you’d also have to assume the last 10+ years of biomedical research was awry because of the food. And that’s absurd.
The question is, of course, “are lab animal foods made with GM corn?”
Virgin albino Sprague-Dawley rats at 5 weeks of age were obtained from Harlan
A very nice lady, a “Lab animal nutritionist”, was able to answer my question.
“We do not exclude GM materials from rodent diets”.
In more detail it was explained to me that the company has US based production and also a certain amount of contracted out European (or more specifically, European Union) production. There are also exports from the US into the EU.
At all locations the ingredients are locally sourced. No distinction is made between GM and non-GM sources by the company.
Which really rather poses a problem for the thesis being advanced in this paper: that GM corn produces these tumours in laboratory rats.
For in the US, if buying from the general stream, there is no way to avoid purchasing GM corn. Given the prevalence of the use of Monsanto‘s Roundup Ready strain the entire US supply can be considered to have some in it. And of course at least some of the purchases used to make the lab chow for rats in US labs will have been made from such corn.
In Europe the picture is a little hazier. There is not that much (although there is some) GM production in Europe as yet. There are also some imports of GM maize but by and large the continent is self-sufficient in the crop. So we can usefully assume that there could be some GM corn in the EU made lab chow. But also that there is less than in the US made.
So, let us go back to the original thesis of the paper. Roundup Ready maize causes tumours in lab rats in a manner than non-GM maize does not. That is the thesis and the central allegation of the paper. We get this result from a study of 200 rats with, let us be polite, an interesting attitude to statistical evidence.
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