Peer Reviewed Trial Finds "Safe" Levels Of GM Maize and Roundup Can Cause Tumors
heraldonline.com
heraldonline.com
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Misleading title is misleading.
What the article's describing is not a study that's looking for toxicity in GM food. It's a study that's looking for toxicity in Roundup, delivered in both drinking water and on food.
The food does happen to be a Roundup-resistant variety of maize. But there weren't any study groups for non-GM maize with similar levels of the agent, nor do there seem to have been any study groups for resistant maize grown without Roundup. So the effects of the agent and the maize that's been engineered to resist it have not been isolated from each other, meaning that the study doesn't actually provide any data to address the question of whether "GM Maize Can Cause Tumors."
However, there were groups that were given Roundup in the water but no GM maize. Which is suggestive - it suggests that this study was never designed to study whether "GM maize can cause tumors." It was testing Roundup, and the maize was only being included in the study because Roundup-resistant maize is obviously a good way for Roundup to enter a person's diet.
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/104uen/study_finds_...
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/104v50/recent_com...
As a few bloggers noticed, I guess publishing multiple sensationalist books about the dangers of genetically modified crops (with wonderful titles like "Genetically incorrect") is not a conflict of interest:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3D...
A conflict of interest isn't simply doing more than one activity in a field, it's setting yourself up as someone who is only judging on the merits when you have a financial interest in the judgement going a particular way. He could have just as easily written 50 books on how GM food is wonderful, and then published studies on how GM food is wonderful. If he was on Monsanto's payroll, that's where the conflict would happen.
He isn't simply "doing more than one activity in a field", he is, as you say, "setting yourself up as someone who is only judging on the merits when you have a financial interest in the judgement going a particular way".
BTW, conflicts of interest are not always monetary. At least in most fields, emotional (and other kinds) conflicts of interest are also prohibited. Even ignoring him making money off his books, i'm not sure how you can say that, given his very passionate, subjective, argument in favor of one particular point of view in his books, he doesn't have an emotional conflict of interest in seeing his point of view succeed. The idea that he can just "turn it on and off" so that when he's doing "science time" he's magically objective, and when he's doing "book time", he's not, would require a bit of straining to believe.
This is why, for example, in the legal field, judges are required to avoid the appearance of bias, not just bias.
Since PRNewswire/Sustainable Food Trust didn't seem to employ a critical eye to examine the conclusions of the study.
edit Further criticism of the design of the experiment and the statistics: http://understandinguncertainty.org/rats-and-gm
'The researchers hypothesize that the reason why NK603 GM maize, NK603 sprayed with Roundup, and Roundup on its own, all produced very similar negative health outcomes, is that both the GM maize and the weedkiller Roundup "may cause hormonal disturbances in the same biochemical and physiological pathway."'
I guess any of these