C21st Left
C21st Left
The study claiming GM food is deadly was conducted by French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini who fed rats GM corn for two years. The study then claims (and showed with the use of a terrifying video showing creepy lab workers holding up cancer ridden white rats) that the GM food caused huge tumors and early death in 200 rats. As Lomborg reports , without questoning or really analyzing the study, France’s health, ecology, and agriculture ministers threatened to ban imports of Monsanto’s GM corn to the Europea
Now, a month later and after the job of scaring the wits out of people about GM food has been completed, real analysis is being done of the Seralini study and it looks like this latest study on GM foods is just another pile of scary pictures. Lomborg explains a number of problems with the study:
But Séralini’s research posed many problematic issues. For starters, the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats that he used is naturally prone to tumors. Studies of Sprague-Dawley rats show that 88-96% of those that serve as experimental controls develop tumors before they reach two years of age. But the public saw only pictures of tumorous rats that had consumed GM corn and Roundup. If the public had seen the similarly grotesque tumors that grow on untreated rats, officials most likely would not have acted so hast
C21st Left
C21st Left