Re:Oh God, not the bourbon. (Score 1)

So "The System Worked", uhh, how?

1. If you RTFA you'd see that Greenpeace lawyers had to go to great lengths and fight a mess of court battles to get at the data that shows this problem.

As many of the more scientifically inclined folks have already mentioned, I don't think the data in the paper actually demonstrates that there is a 'problem'. They mention some reasonable criticisms of the original analysis (most notably testing too few rats for too short a period of time), but then go on a data mining expedition with some very sophisticated statistical methods. They look for correlations between 80 or 90 different parameters and the type of diet the rats ate. The best they can come up with are a few correlations that are only present in certain subgroups (i.e. some only occur in male rats, some only occur in female rats, some only occur in the low dose group of male rats, some only occur in the high dose group of female rats). Unless I completely misread the paper, they found NOTHING that was statistically different for the combined group of ALL rats that were fed genetically engineered corn as compared to the controls. Their reported results have all the hallmarks of statistical noise rather than a real effect. Even if they repeat the experiment and find exactly the same correlations in one sex of rats, but not the other, are male rats or female rats more like human beings?

Here are some telling quotes:

"Clearly, the statistically significant effects observed here for all three GM maize varieties investigated are signs of toxicity rather than proofs of toxicity".

"An identical effect in both sexes would have been exceptional, like with strong or acute toxicity. This is obviously not the case here."

"Overall, no kidney parameters in male animals are disrupted in the MON 810 feeding group, even though sensitivity to toxics appears in general to be greater in this sex [37, 38]." (they use this last bit to support the fact that findings in the other bt corn variety are real and then follow up with some creative handwaiving about why the two varieties of bt corn would yield such different results).

Why are companies reluctant to give out their raw data? Part of the reason is that anyone with some good statistics software can go on a subgroup data mining expedition and find all sorts of dire looking correlations that are actually statistical noise and then claim that it indicates 'organ damage'.

The only proposed mechanism for their observed 'signs of toxicity' that I find plausible is the higher amount of pesticides observed in the roundup-ready corn. But this would be an issue with the pesticides sprayed on the crops- not the genetically engineered corn itself. The human digestive system does a fantastic job of digesting any and all proteins made of L-amino acids so other than an allergic reaction I'm not sure how the EPSP synthase protein introduced into the first strain of corn or the bt proteins introduced into the second and third strain could cause issues in humans. They also propose a 'novel unintended toxic effect caused by the inherent mutagenic effect of the GM technology', but I thought that these sort of genetically engineered traits are isolated away from any unlinked traits by conventional breeding. The crazier the mechanism you have to propose to explain your findings, the less likely they are real. Gotta love Occam's razor.