Biotech Manipulation of Genes and Science

But on Wednesday, Californians—along with the rest of the world—heard a very dif­fer­ent mes­sage: A two-year study, led by Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen in France and pub­lished in a pres­ti­gious peer-reviewed jour­nal, found that a widely grown GMO corn vari­ety raised the rate of can­cer and increased the risk of kid­ney and liver prob­lems in rats.

The new find­ing fit per­fectly with the “Yes on 37″ plat­form. The cam­paign has warned that the indus­try pro­claim­ing GMOs won’t harm human health is the same one that once said DDT and Agent Orange were per­fectly safe. But crit­i­cisms of the new study quickly emerged, sug­gest­ing insuf­fi­cient sam­ple sizes, a breed of rats prone to tumor growth, and a lead researcher who was seem­ingly already con­vinced of the dan­gers of GMOs. The study authors are now attempt­ing to refute these and other points.

“This study has some sig­nif­i­cant flaws and needs to be exam­ined by an inde­pen­dent panel before we decide if there’s valid­ity in their find­ings,” Kleinman told The Huffington Post, adding that he hadn’t changed his mind on the absence of a can­cer link. “This is par­tic­u­larly true since there’s a very large body of stud­ies on this topic over a long period of time and this new one is totally incon­sis­tent with what they show and with what’s been observed over the past 10-plus years of use of the product.”

Dr. Kleinman con­sults for General Mills and presents webi­nars on children’s health for Coca-Cola, both major fun­ders of the fight against Proposition 37—along with Monsanto, DuPont and others.

“They’re flood­ing the state with a 32 mil­lion dol­lar adver­tise­ment cam­paign of decep­tion,” said Stacy Malkan, media direc­tor of Yes on 37, which has col­lected con­tri­bu­tions total­ing a frac­tion of that amount.

So, what does this leave the pub­lic to believe? Where does the sci­ence stand on the safety of GMOs?

It’s not easy to say. And that’s exactly the prob­lem, accord­ing to experts. There have been a hand­ful of stud­ies that have hinted at human health con­cerns, includ­ing aller­gies. And there have been stud­ies, even a recent review of stud­ies eval­u­at­ing five dif­fer­ent genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops, sug­gest­ing there are no con­cerns. But over­all, few stud­ies have looked at the range of poten­tial effects that the intro­duc­tion of for­eign genes may have on a food’s safety.

“Industry says these are the most care­fully tested foods ever,” said Charles Benbrook of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University. “But there have been no stud­ies on pre­na­tal effects, on birth defects, on the long-term impact of expo­sure dur­ing fetal development.”

Many GMO crit­ics point to what they see as undue indus­try influ­ence over what gets stud­ied and pub­lished, as well as a reg­u­la­tory sys­tem that they say bends to industry’s wishes. In gen­eral, a 90-day ani­mal study is all they need to win approval of a new genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crop. But in Seralini’s study, rats only started devel­op­ing tumors after four months.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.