GM maize, health and the Séralini affair: Smelling a rat

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GM maize, health and the Séralini affair






GENETICALLY modified maize causes cancer: that was the gist of one of the most controversial studies in recent memory, published in September 2012 by Food and Chemical Toxicology. Well, actually, it doesn’t. On November 28th the journal retracted it. This followed criticism that the rats used in the experiment were prone to cancer anyway; that the experimental protocol used could not distinguish tumours which might have been caused by GM food from those that were spontaneous (it had been set up to investigate a different question, and thus included too few animals); and that the authors offered no mechanism by which GM food could cause cancer. It would be too much to say that GM foods have thereby been proven safe. But no other study has found health risks in mammals from eating them.
The article was by Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, in France, and his colleagues. It described what happened to rats fed with NK603 maize, a variety made resistant to a herbicide called glyphosate by a ...