Professor Anthony Trewavas's letter regarding Prof GE Seralini's study, which found that a Monsanto GM maize and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide it is grown with caused serious health effects in rats, misrepresents the study as well as OECD guidelines on safety studies (Flawed study fails to prove harm, Letters, September 29).
Trewavas's claim that there are "many hundreds" of lifetime feeding experiments with GMOs is false. A search by the French food agency ANSES in the wake of the Seralini controversy uncovered just two comparable studies performed over the natural lifetime of the animal. One found health problems in the GM-fed animals and the other was only available in Japanese.
Trewavas writes that 75%-80% of the type of rats in Seralini's experiment develop tumours spontaneously. He fails to mention that, in Seralini's experiment, the rats that ate the GM maize and Roundup developed more tumours at an earlier stage of life, and that those tumours grew more aggressively than the control rats. It is these trends, not the total number of rats with tumours at the end of their life, that are important and worrying.
Contrary to Trewavas's implication, the OECD has never set guidelines for chronic toxicity studies on GM foods like Seralini's. But it has for chronic toxicity studies for chemicals - and stipulates analysis of the same number of animals that Seralini used. The OECD requires larger numbers of animals to be used in cancer studies for industry safety tests on chemicals to protect against "false negative" findings, where a toxic effect exists but is missed. Seralini did find toxic effects, so the number of animals used is not an issue.
Finally, Seralini's control group had the same number of animals as each treatment group. Each treatment group was compared separately to the control group, according to standard scientific practice and OECD guidelines. We address the misleading claims about the Seralini study made by Trewavas and other GM supporters in detail online at: gmoseralini.org.
Claire Robinson
Editor, GMOSeralini.org
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article