64 replies to this topic

[regeneratia]

WOW, thanks for this post. This is the first I have seen this.

[Little Fish]

SlippySlug, on 20 September 2012 - 09:58 PM, said:

When planted, does the seed variety NK603 pass on the roundup ready gene? I don't know, but I would assume not.

yes, do you assume each seed is individually genetic engineered?

Quote

Unless for some crazy reason people are buying NK603 seeds for direct consumption, they should be feeding the rats the end product.

the rats were not fed seeds, they were fed corn cultivated from NK603 gmo seeds.

For the hard of fact finding, from the first line of the study "The health effects of a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup..."
http://www.iatp.org/...icityreport.pdf

Edited by Little Fish, 20 September 2012 - 10:56 PM.

[SlippySlug]

Little Fish, on 20 September 2012 - 10:54 PM, said:

yes, do you assume each seed is individually genetic engineered?

the rats were not fed seeds, they were fed corn cultivated from NK603 gmo seeds.

I knew modified crops couldn't pass on their traits, and there are plenty of plants that produce offspring different from themselves, but thanks to your pretentious little remark, I did some reading about terminator genes.  Thanks.
Also, from the orginal article I didn't see where it said the rats were fed corn cultivated from gmo seeds.  Oh yeah, and corn is seeds.

[Simbi Laveau]

http://www.ratbehavi...umorSpaying.htm

Normal rats develop tumors ,as they age,if they are not spayed.
This is over years .

Rat allegedly bred for this study,are the ones ALL cancer studies use.
So ,they used the rats commonly used,to see if cancer will develop,under certain circumstances .

That makes it mainstream,not using some special rat,to skew the findings .

http://emice.nci.nih...t-cancer-models

Edited by Simbi Laveau, 21 September 2012 - 02:51 AM.

[Simbi Laveau]

Little Fish, on 20 September 2012 - 10:54 PM, said:

yes, do you assume each seed is individually genetic engineered?

the rats were not fed seeds, they were fed corn cultivated from NK603 gmo seeds.

For the hard of fact finding, from the first line of the study "The health effects of a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup..."
http://www.iatp.org/...icityreport.pdf

The fact,that all of this even has to be argued,sh ows just how bad,ALL of this stuff is for consumption.
Keep in mind,corn fed to cows and chickens,is also gmo ,so the animal protein we ate,is also modified .Not to mention the antibiotics and steroids the animals also receive.
In other countries ,neotame,is in cattle feed .Neotame is the new form of aspartame .
It's used to FATTEN the cows up .

[Simbi Laveau]

http://www.farmaid.o...Engineering.htm

Farmers perspective of GMOs

[bmk1245]

jugoso, on 20 September 2012 - 06:12 PM, said:

Safe for me means that they won´t cause irreversible damage to an individual or the environment. Yes I care what type of apples I eat.....I like Granny Smith because they are sour.

And what would happen if you would be fed by apples only? And only drinks you'd have would be sodium malate flavoured in high dosages? At certain point you'd be dead.

[Imaginarynumber1]

This "study" was poor science. Nothing more. It added no valuable data and the results are not trustworthy.

Quote

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.

"The central issue in this study has to do with random effects, and it turns out these rats are not all that well suited to an investigation of this length of time," Tribe said. "Just because they are getting tumors doesn't mean that the food is causing it or that the herbicide is causing it. It could be that the difference between groups is just a result of random events leading to tumors."

Séralini has been criticized in the past for lack of scientific merit in previous research that also came out against GM crops. In 2007, the European Food Safety Authority offered a sharply worded response to one of Séralini's earlier studies.

"The statistical analysis made by the authors of the paper did not take into account certain important statistical considerations," the EFSA wrote. "The assumptions underlying the statistical methodology employed by the authors led to misleading results."
http://news.discover...udy-120920.html

Edited by Imaginarynumber1, 21 September 2012 - 08:02 AM.

[Render]

Interesting to see some are willing to go crazy over Monsanto publishing results from tests, immediately claiming they are false. But when a doubtful study against GMO's is presented they fall right into the bogus claims. Dismissing all the scepticism that should arise.


So lets clear it all up right here, right now, shall we?

Study on Monsanto GM corn concerns draws skepticism

Quote

Experts not involved in the study were skeptical, with one accusing the French scientists of going on a "statistical fishing trip" and others describing its methods as well below standard.

http://www.reuters.c...E88J0MS20120920


Scientist won't allow EU agency to check GM findings

Quote

The French scientist who linked Monsanto genetically-modified corn to cancer in rats on Thursday refused to let the EU's food safety watchdog, EFSA, verify his results

Read more at: http://phys.org/news...ncy-gm.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news...ncy-gm.html#jCp



Monsanto's GM Corn And Cancer In Rats: Real Scientists Deeply Unimpressed. Politics Not Science Perhaps?

Séralini just happens to be publishing an anti-GMO book at this time....how convenient.

http://www.forbes.co...cience-perhaps/


a bit more explanatory:

Expert reaction to GM maize causing tumours in rats

Quote

Dr Wendy Harwood, senior scientist, John Innes Centre, said:

"The full data set has not been made available, but the findings do not contradict previous findings that genetic modification itself is a neutral technology, with no inherent health or environmental risks.

"We have to ask whether a diet with this level of maize is normal for rats. Another control with an alternative diet should have been included.

"Ten rats per group is a small number. For example, is the death of three out of ten controls compared to five out of ten males in the treated group statistically significant?

"The data from the control group fed non-GM maize is not included in the main figures making it very difficult to interpret the results.

"Without access to the full data, we can only say that these results cannot be interpreted as showing that GM technology itself is dangerous. However they do indicate possible concerns over long-term exposure to Roundup that require further study."

Further comments from other scientists:

"Other issues that have come up:

• ‘All data cannot be shown in one report and the most relevant are described here’ – this is a quote from the paper.
• Small sample size
• Maize was minimum 11% of the diet – not balanced
• No non-maize control?
• No results given for non-gm maize
• For nearly 20 years, billions of animals in the EU have been fed soy products produced from genetically modified soybean, mainly from Latin America. No problems have been reported by the hundreds of thousands of farmers, officials, vets and so on.
• The same journal publishes a paper showing no adverse health effects in rats of consuming gm maize (though this is a shorter 90-day study)
• Statistical significance vs relative frequencies.
• We also have to ask why the rats were kept alive for so long – for humane reasons this study would not have been given approval in the UK.
• In Fig.2, I assume the bars with a zero is for the non-maize control. Those bars don’t looks significantly different from the bars indicating 11, 22, and 33% of GM maize in the diet? Have the authors done stats on their data?"


Prof Anthony Trewavas, Professor of Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, said:

"The control group is inadequate to make any deduction. Only 10 rodents so far as I can see and some of these develop tumours. Until you know the degree of variation in 90 or 180 (divided into groups of ten) control rodents these results are of no value.

http://www.scienceme...ats_tumours.htm



and it just goes on and on:

http://michaelgrayer...get-very-uppity
http://www.newscient...-crops-and-c...

And about the rats being used:
86% of the male rats, and 72% of the female rats of this species are known to spontanuously get cancer.



so i hope everyone can now stop with being so gullible and immediately jump on a obscure study thinking they were proven right
critical thinking ppl, it's kinda important when you wanna prove a point.

Edited by Render, 21 September 2012 - 08:07 AM.

[Imaginarynumber1]

Render, on 21 September 2012 - 08:04 AM, said:

so i hope everyone can now stop with being so gullible and immediately jump on a obscure study thinking they were proven right
critical thinking ppl, it's kinda important when you wanna prove a point.

Good luck with some of the people here. I swear, critical thinking and the scientific method get thrown out of the window sometimes around here.

Edited by Imaginarynumber1, 21 September 2012 - 08:07 AM.

[Render]

Imaginarynumber1, on 21 September 2012 - 08:07 AM, said:

Good luck with some of the people here. I swear, critical thinking and the scientific method get thrown out of the window sometimes around here.

I hear ya!
It surely does.
Really exhausting sometimes.

[Little Fish]

SlippySlug, on 21 September 2012 - 12:44 AM, said:

I knew modified crops couldn't pass on their traits, and there are plenty of plants that produce offspring different from themselves, but thanks to your pretentious little remark, I did some reading about terminator genes.  Thanks.
Also, from the orginal article I didn't see where it said the rats were fed corn cultivated from gmo seeds.  Oh yeah, and corn is seeds.

apologies, my frustration is cumulative, you aren't the cause.

[Little Fish]

i see a lot of protest about the strain of rat used.
are you all aware that it is the same strain used in other studies used to promote safety of gmo. the main difference in this study (which followed the same protocols as the gmo promoted studies as far as i can tell - read the actual paper for the details) is that the study was carried out for the full life term of the rats, not just 13 weeks as in the case for the existing safety studies such as hammond et al 2004.

the other main protest seems to be the sample size of the groups, again this is not dissimilar to the existing safety studies, so for those that want to dismiss this study based on sample size, you HAVE to dismiss the existing studies as well.

[Little Fish]

Imaginarynumber1, on 21 September 2012 - 07:57 AM, said:

"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."

I would say this is false.
an animal which is genetically predisposed to a casual agent derived condition is likely to develop the condition independent of dose. think of peanut allergy - does it matter whether you eat a single peanut or a bag of peanuts. the "humane" argument is pathetic, i would question the motivation of an article that included that stupid comment.

[Imaginarynumber1]

Little Fish, on 21 September 2012 - 09:43 AM, said:

I would say this is false.
an animal which is genetically predisposed to a casual agent derived condition is likely to develop the condition independent of dose. think of peanut allergy - does it matter whether you eat a single peanut or a bag of peanuts. the "humane" argument is pathetic, i would question the motivation of an article that included that stupid comment.

I has nothing to do with being "humane". Toxicity is quite different than allergic reactions and works by completely different methods.
The point is that the rates of cancer and death were the same among the groups. It was the small size of the control that skewed the data towards the result they wanted. Not to mention the unmeasured amounts of food the rats were allowed to consume.
This is a great example of bad science.