Study:Tumors in Rats Fed Monsanto GM Corn

[Little Fish]

they invalidate any conclusions about the food if they give the test rats roundup in their drinking water.

The methodology, as well as the conclusion, of these tests are very flawed.

As is the very wording of this thread title. And people are going to die because of it.

THIS particular seed might do that. But it is not what all genetically modified foods do.

I have not had chance to look at all the details of the study and whether these rats were grouped and analysed seperately (i think they were but not sure) and I assume these groups were used to test synergistic effects. you might be thinking that the rats were overdosed on roundup, but the roundup was given in water at 0.1 parts per billion, that sounds pretty dilute to me probably less than what you'd get from eating the corn grown with roundup. your statement that people are "going to die" seems a little hysterical, I don't follow how people will die because of this study. it seems to me this study is easily and quickly reproducible, and hopefully other researchers will either confirm or falsify the study fairly quickly.

edit - from the original article - "rats fed on Monsanto's genetically modified corn or exposed to its top-selling weedkiller suffered tumours and multiple organ damage." - which is saying roundup or gmo causes cancer meaning either one on its own will cause cancer (in rats).

listen carefully to the first guy and pay attention to the guys intonation

"rats fed gmo OR roundup OR a combination of both"

Edited September 20, 2012 by Little Fish

[Little Fish]

here is the study

http://www.iatp.org/files/GMOtoxicityreport.pdf

[Little Fish]

Come on people, be CRITICAL and don't just accept what you believe supports your preconceived notions.

ok.

so the quote you used below. did you think critically about it?

"This strain of rat is very prone to mammary tumours particularly when food intake is not restricted"

the study used controls. from the study "all treated groups died 2–3 times more than controls, and more rapidly."

so your quote would seem to be Bothersome Stuff given that the controls would have been fed the same quantities of ordinary food and the controls did not get disease, so "strain of rat" would appear to be propaganda nonsense.

[SlippySlug]

When planted, does the seed variety NK603 pass on the roundup ready gene? I don't know, but I would assume not. Unless for some crazy reason people are buying NK603 seeds for direct consumption, they should be feeding the rats the end product.

Edited September 20, 2012 by SlippySlug

[Hippycrite]

Whatever happened to the good ol' days when you just threw a batch of random chemical compounds into the cement-mixer, formed it into froot-loops, and served it up to the kids!

[regeneratia]

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

[Little Fish]

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?

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/files/GMOtoxicityreport.pdf

Edited September 20, 2012 by Little Fish

[SlippySlug]

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.ratbehavior.org/TumorSpaying.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.gov/generating-models/rat-cancer-models

Edited September 21, 2012 by Simbi Laveau

[Simbi Laveau]

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/files/GMOtoxicityreport.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.org/site/c.qlI5IhNVJsE/b.7795683/k.EBB2/Genetic_Engineering.htm

Farmers perspective of GMOs

[bmk1245]

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.

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 September 21, 2012 by Imaginarynumber1

[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

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

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

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 September 21, 2012 by Render

[Imaginarynumber1]

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 September 21, 2012 by Imaginarynumber1

[Render]

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]

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]

"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]

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.

[Imaginarynumber1]

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.

These rats have a very high rate of developing tumors. The longer they are alive the greater the chance is of them developing, too. To use 10 as opposed to 10 or 12 groups of 10 for a control group is ridiculous. It's statistically insignificant. Their "results" mean nothing.

Edit: Personally, I could care less about GMO's. I don't really have a stance on the matter. This is just very bad science.

Here is some information abour tumor development in this type of rat:

Unspayed female rats are prone to developing mammary tumors, pituitary tumors and other estrogen-dependent tumors as they age. At the time of menopause (450-540 days) mammary tumor incidence increases sharply and pituitary tumors begin to appear. A second increase in mammary and pituitary tumors occurs around the end of the second year (from 600-800 days) (Durbin 1966).

Most of the tumor susceptibility research in unspayed rats has been done on different strains of laboratory rats. Strains and populations differ in how susceptible the females are to developing tumors. Susceptibility may vary widely.

Below are some studies that examine the percentages of female rats of a particular strain that develop mammary tumors. Where reported, the percentage of benign vs. cancerous mammary tumors is included below:

Sprague-Dawley rats:

• 47% of female Sprague-Dawley rats developed mammary tumors. 12% of these tumors were malignant (Solleveld et al. 1986).
  
• 49% of female Sprague-Dawley rats developed mammary tumors (24 our of 49), 8.2% developed mammary carcinomas (4 out of 49) (Hotchkiss 1995)
  
• 71% of female Sprague-Dawley rats developed mammary tumors, of which 18% were carcinomas (Durbin et al. 1966)
  
• 76% of female Sprague-Dawley rats, most of which were benign fibroadenomas (Kaspareitt and Rittinghausen 1999)
  

For pituitary tumors, different studies have found:

Sprague-Dawley

• 39% of female Sprague-Dawley rats develop pituitary tumors (Kaspareitt and Rittinghausen 1999)
  

66% of female Sprague-Dawley rats develop pituitary tumors (Hotchkiss 1995)http://www.ratbehavi...umorSpaying.htm

So after the rats go through menopause (450-540 days), the rates of tumors increase and the increase AGAIN after the end of the second year (600-800 days). Hmm... right before their study ends.....

They did not accumulate enough data to rule out the randomness of tumors in these rats.

Bad science.

Edited September 21, 2012 by Imaginarynumber1

[Little Fish]

Toxicity is quite different than allergic reactions and works by completely different methods.

it was an analogy, don't take it literally.

The point is that the rates of cancer and death were the same among the groups.

an animal which is genetically predisposed to a casual agent derived condition is likely to develop the condition independent of dose.

Not to mention the unmeasured amounts of food the rats were allowed to consume.

but this would also apply to the controls, so why didn't the controls develop illness at the higher rates as well?

It was the small size of the control that skewed the data towards the result they wanted.

the control groups were the same size as the tested groups. can you show why you think the control group was too small. the study seems to have been done within regulatory minimum guidelines, see table 1.

http://www.iatp.org/files/GMOtoxicityreport.pdf

These rats have a very high rate of developing tumors. The longer they are alive the greater the chance is of them developing, too. To use 10 as opposed to 10 or 12 groups of 10 for a control group is ridiculous

as i understand it, that is the same basis done for the previous studies.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691504000547

can you show any previous gmo studies done with substantially higher controls?

[Imaginarynumber1]

it was an analogy, don't take it literally.

It's a poor analogy. It's comparing two completely different things.

an animal which is genetically predisposed to a casual agent derived condition is likely to develop the condition independent of dose.

Which they did. These rats get tumors all the time. The more they eat the higher there rates of tumors. The longer they live the higher their rates of tumors.

but this would also apply to the controls, so why didn't the controls develop illness at the higher rates as well?

180 rats is a much larger group than 20 rats (the controls were 1 pair for each sex in the 10 groups of 20, giving you 20 control animals. It does not specify if this was in addition or part of the 200 divided into groups) Either way, the control group is 9 or 10 times smaller that the testing group. I would expect the larger group to have higher rates of tumors if they were just pets.

the control groups were the same size as the tested groups. can you show why you think the control group was too small. the study seems to have been done within regulatory minimum guidelines, see table 1.

http://www.iatp.org/...icityreport.pdf

The control was 1 pair of each sex in the 10 groups of 20 rats. Again, it does not specify if these controls were part of the 200 or in addition to the 200.

as i understand it, that is the same basis done for the previous studies.

http://www.sciencedi...278691504000547

can you show any previous gmo studies done with substantially higher controls?

I can't pull up the data for the control size for this study without paying for the article....... But they do say that they used 400 rats divided into 10 groups of 20, so I can only assume that there were 200 that were tested on and 200 used for control. Again, I do not know for sure since I cannot access the data.

With such low numbers in the control group with the new study, 20 control animals, the results are not in any way statistically significant enough to account for natural tumor development and not significant to draw any conclusions other than these rats get tumors.

Again, I don't really care about GMO's one way or another, so I'm not arguing if they are good or bad, just that this study is not indicative one way or the other.

Apologizes if any of my responses are muddled or I have massive typos. I've been up all night working on a research paper and have yet to sleep.

Edited September 21, 2012 by Imaginarynumber1

[bmk1245]

Holy crap... It went for 4 pages...

[Little Fish]

With such low numbers in the control group with the new study, 20 control animals, the results are not in any way statically significant enough to account for natural tumor development and not significant to draw any conclusions other than these rats get tumors.

"Further criticism centred on the size of the control groups. Anthony Trewavas, professor of cell biology at the University of Edinburgh, said the control group was inadequate to make any deduction, and were of no value without knowing the degree of variation in a control group of 90 or 180 rodents.

"These figures for normal appearance of tumours in these rodent lines are surely available and using a line which is very susceptible to tumours can easily bias any result," he warned. "To be frank, it looks like random variation to me in a rodent line likely to develop tumours anyway."

But Antoniou said the two-year experiment followed international OECD guidelines. The rodents in the experiment were divided into 10 groups of 20 animals, with nine of those groups exposed to Roundup or NK603. "Standard practice is for the control group to be matched in size to the experimental groups. The experimental groups were 20 animals and therefore the control group should be 20 animals.

"Trewavas's statement is not correct. From the 20-animal control, you can get a measure of tumour frequency in the control group. You don't need to look at hundreds of animals. If he believes this, then he should also agree that the studies done by others – including industry – are also invalid.

"The key thing is that there are big differences between the tumour frequencies in the control and the experimental groups. Claims that the results are just the result of random variation in a rat line that has a high frequency of tumours is not valid.

"The evidence for this is that the differences between the groups are much larger than the standard deviations of the two groups. In Seralini’s study, the differences are so large that it is not necessary to use a statistical test. It is obvious.

"This study used more rats in test groups, for a far longer duration than any previous investigation employed by industry to obtain approval for this and other GM crop products."

furthermore from the article

"Dr Michael Antoniou, a reader in molecular genetics and member of Criigen – the Committee of Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering – has vigorously refuted questions raised by fellow scientists about the robustness of the study..... "The key is that there were both quantitative and qualitative differences in the tumours arising in control and test groups. In the former they appeared much later and at most there was one tumour per animal, if at all.

"In the latter case, the tumours began to be detected much earlier (4 months in males; 7 months in females), grew much faster and many animals had two or even three tumours.

"Many animals in the test groups had to be euthanised for welfare legal reasons due to the massive size of the tumours; none of the control animals had to be euthanised but died in their own time. One should not ignore these biological facts.""

the other objections are also addressed in the article.

http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/51-2012/14216-scientists-hit-back-against-attacks-on-gm-cancer-trial