Retracted Junk Science Study Claiming Biotech Corn Causes Cancer In Rats Republished Without Peer Review

In 2012, anti-biotech activist Gilles-Eric
Seralini managed to get his
seriously flawed study in which he claimed that feeding rats
biotech corn caused them to develop tumors. Naturally, the anti-GMO
claque
hailed it. The study was severely criticized by researchers
representing leading toxicological science organizations. As
Nature
reported:

Last week, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma,
Italy, and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in
Berlin both issued initial assessments slamming the paper, bluntly
asserting that its conclusions are not supported by the data
presented. “The design, reporting and analysis of the study, as
outlined in the paper, are inadequate,” says the EFSA in a press
release, adding that the paper is “of insufficient scientific
quality to be considered as valid for risk assessment”.

In light of those criticisms, the editor of the journal in which
it was published chose to retract it last fall. The retraction most
likely affected the sales of Seralini’s book and associated
documentary, both entitled,
Tous Cobayes (All Guinea Pigs). Seralini has managed
to find another less rigorous journal in which to republish his
flawed study, Environmental Sciences Europe.

The anti-biotechies are treating the republication as an
activist triumph over corporate suppression of science. It is,
instead, a very sad commentary on how the producers of flawed
science can search around to find some obscure journal or other in
which to publish their junk findings. The progressive news/activist
website Alternet features an article from The
Ecologist that
claims:

A highly controversial paper by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini and
colleagues has been republished after a stringent peer review
process.

Similarly Mother Earth News
reports:

The republication restores the study to the peer-reviewed
literature so that it can be consulted and built upon by other
scientists.

Stringent peer-review? False. The study was not, in fact,
peer-reviewed by Environmental Sciences Europe. So why
would folks assert that it was? Largely because of the press
materials released by Seralini himself making that claim.
Nature
reports what actually happened:

Environmental Sciences Europe (ESEU) decided to re-publish the
paper to give the scientific community guaranteed long-term access
to the data in the retracted paper, editor-in-chief Henner Hollert
told Nature. “We were Springer Publishing’s first open access
journal on the environment, and are a platform for discussion on
science and regulation at a European and regional level.” ESEU
conducted no scientific peer review, he adds, “because this had
already been conducted by Food and Chemical Toxicology, and had
concluded there had been no fraud nor misrepresentation.” The role
of the three reviewers hired by ESEU was to check that there had
been no change in the scientific content of the paper, Hollert
adds.

One of the proprietors of the
Retraction Watch website summarized the sorry
situation well in response to a CBS News query:

“This whole episode has taken us farther away from knowing the
truth,” Ivan Oransky, a founder and editor of
retractionwatch.com, told CBS News.

“The ratio of politics to science when it comes to discussions
of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] is so high that I think it
often ceases to be useful,” said Oransky, a journalist with a
medical degree who is also vice president and global editorial
director of MedPage
Today.

He also said:

“This is a good example of what happens when people with
hardened beliefs manipulate a system for the result they want,”
Oransky told CBS News. “Science should be about following the
evidence, appropriately changing your mind if the evidence warrants
it. But in this case people seem to reject the evidence that
doesn’t suit their needs.”

With regard to rejecting evidence that doesn’t suit activist
needs, see my article, “A
Tale of Two Scientific Consensuses.”