I would love to read that discussion if yall have it.
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
As I perused the answers to criticisms article I was disappointed to note that many of his criticisms recieved very brief one or two sentence answers which in effect pull the “you didn’t do this” “yes I did” tack I see children make all the time “nu-uh” “Yes huh”. I was hoping for much more substance in some ways.[/quote]
Off the cuff (an hopefully not to be too glib), this is/was my experience with higher-level science. I can’t count the number of ‘tastes great/less filling’ meetings I sat through. Also, I think a fair amount of this can be explained away by the fast and loose framework of food regulation (what exactly is organic again?).
Ultimately, it seems, he didn’t conform (very well) to the OECD guidelines for testing (not that Monsanto did either). I’m not sure as to the degree to which he consulted with anyone about the study design. It seems kinda poor to conduct the study and then find out it was poor especially since, in this country, there certainly is no shortage of regulatory guidance or expertise (for a price).
I don’t know the OECD protocols for these studies very well at all, but the study design is generally poor in many regards and, when numbers might overcome poor design, this study doesn’t have large numbers of animals. There are several clear biases that exist and are particularly relevant given the proposed (nature of the) conclusion. Some of it is, IMO, pretty clearly the author’s fault; dose-dependence of G/R is a huge assumption, so why assume non-linearity and spread rats out over more than two doses, esp. if you’re just going to dismiss dose-dependence out of hand anyway? If you consider the G group as non-representative of actual practice, why include it? Not at all of it is Seralini et als fault or doing, clinical statistical recommendations in this country are regularly updated as more and more sensitive indicators of disease are discovered (the FDA has taken forever to get on board with HbA1c testing and is still completely clueless wrt genetic testing). But there are some pretty simple things that other researchers would’ve (rightfully) just thrown more rats at and Seralini, for whatever reason, didn’t.
Agreed. I don’t sit or review for Food and Toxicology, but the novelty is meritorious of publication. The fact that the criticisms themselves were published, IMO, is pretty significant. Maybe Food and Toxicology is just trying to up it’s reader/authorship with some controversy, maybe they are catering to some regulatory entities’ need for more information and better standards. I must say, the EU/EFSA certainly doesn’t act like it’s really beholden to GMOs or Monsanto, and they were critical/dismissive of the study.