Seralini's Paper Republished, Scientists Remain Skeptical

The retracted paper linking GM maize to rats' tumor development published in 2012 has been republished by Environmental Science Europe, an open-access journal. The paper, authored by Gilles-Eric Seralini and colleagues, was slightly revised, particularly in the way the data were analyzed.

The original article was published in Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in 2012, and was retracted in 2013 after post-publication review, which found that "the data were inconclusive, and therefore the conclusions described in the article were unreliable."

The republication of the article gives critics no reason to change their mind about the issue, according to Richard Goodman, a food-allergy researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and biotechnology editor at FCT. The lab rats used in the study were Sprague Dawley rats, which are known to become prone to diseases when reaching 18 months of age. This makes the study of Seralini "uninterpretable". "If you look closely at Séralini's data, giving glyphosate and the GMO protected one group of rats compared to those having a single treatment. The study was — and, I believe, remains — flawed."

University of Cambridge statistician, David Spiegelhalter, also said that the study did not use appropriate sample sizes. "The article still does not appear to have had proper statistical refereeing, and the methods and reporting are obscure. The claimed effects show no dose-response, and so the conclusions rest entirely on a comparison with ten control rats of each sex. This is inadequate," he explains.

Read the original article at http://www.nature.com/news/paper-claiming-gm-link-with-tumours-republished-1.15463.