Update: Keith Kloor has just told me on Twitter that he has also been critical of the term “denier” as he discusses on this post.- which certainly shows he is aware of the issues I am raising here; however, he does indeed use the term “denialism” in the post on Seralini, without any indication of what he is actually referring to, and thus seems to fall into exactly the same traps.

The anti-science tendencies and frequently evidence-free stance of the Green movement finds a recent major example with the publication last week of Seralini’s GE-corn/roundup-fed rat trial, complete with garish photos of rats puffed up with tumors, which is being used to create wide-spread fear and panic about the safety of eating genetically engineered food.

John Vidal in the Guardian provides an egregious example of defending the indefensible, for example defending Seralini for winning his libel case against Fellous, president of the French Association of Plant Biotechnology, who suggested Seralini might be biased by his funding sources; but then casually throws in his own equivalent slur – of guilt by association- with the comment that UC Davis “has close links to Monsanto and other GM companies” while providing no evidence whatsoever that this would in any way, or has in any way influenced the impartiality or compromised the integrity of the the biotech scientists working there.

(For the response of a public scientist to charges of “shill for Monsanto” read Kevin Folta’s superb piece here.)

There has been a vigorous response from scientists and bloggers condemning the study as hopelessly flawed. There were not enough subjects in the control groups. Not all the data was published (and there is, rather unusually, a petition of scientists calling for the release of same); there appears to be no statistical significance to the data we do have showing any meaningful difference between the groups, with some of the controls having a higher incidence of tumors than the test groups; and mysteriously, there appears to be no distinction between high-and low-dose groups of either the corn or Roundup, which the rats were also tested for (an appears to have the same effects), defying the basic premise of toxicology that it is all in the dose. The Sprague-Dawley rats used are well-known to be prone to developing cancer anyway after the (very long period for a rat) of 2 years.

In my opinion, the methods, stats and reporting of results are all well below the standard I would expect in a rigorous study – to be honest I am surprised it was accepted for publication.

opined Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding Of Risk, University of Cambridge.

More damning still, the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge note:

I am grateful for the authors for publishing this paper, as it provides a fine case study for teaching a statistics class about poor design, analysis and reporting. I shall start using it immediately.

There is another even more startling point here as well, raised by @mem-somerville and taken up by Worstall which is that all lab-rats in the US have been eating some RR GE-corn for over a decade because that is just what the feed happens to be, with no noticeable effects or difference with European lab-rats where GE corn is not grown.

Apart from these flaws and the condemnation of so many scientists, it is obvious that the Seralini study is a put-up job to discredit GE crops and manipulate the political process.Seralini heads CRIIGEN which is an anti-GE activist group, he has a history of controversial studies producing results that have not been replicated and fly in the face of hundreds of other GE safety studies; and one of the co-authors of the report and president of CRIIGEN , Dr Joël Spiroux de Vendomoisis, is a homeopath. (more…)