Me too. As someone who doesn’t have much reason to read scientific studies, it’s not obvious to me what’s wrong with this one (it seems poorly written), or why it would make anyone angry. I have a few guesses, but my ignorance is such that it would be foolish to assume I can pick more holes in it than the authors or reviewers. I also suspect we’re supposed to have heard of this before.
You don’t really need to know anything except that the journal that originally published Seralini’s paper asked him to retract it, then retracted it themselves when he wouldn’t. The message is that the science is so flawed that merely publishing it made them look bad (or that they are abettors of the giant GMO conspiracy and Monsanto paid them off, wake up sheeple, if you prefer.)
The basic gist of it is that Seralini published a study in 2012 which he claimed showed clear kidney and liver damage to mice who consumed roundup-ready corn, as well as advanced tumor growth. In reality, it did no such thing - the paper had tiny sample sizes, Seralini did no statistical analysis, and when you actually look at the data the only statistically significant result is that male rats who drank straight RoundUp lived longer on average. In other words, the data was a complete wash, but Seralini still strung it along to try to conclude that GMO corn was harmful. It was pretty much universally panned… By scientists. By the time they got their hands on it, there had already been substantial buzz in the popular media due to Seralini holding the paper back from anyone who might give it a negative look. It was later retracted, but now he’s published the exact same study with the exact same data again… Just this time in a bottom-feeding pay-to-play journal. The multitude of severe issues involved remain entirely unaddressed. This paper had no business passing peer review the first time; this time it’s just… Ugh. Were the reviewers at Springer clinically dead or something when this came across their desk?!
Wait, RoundUp, the plant killer? Rats that drank it straight lived longer? 
Statistically. Though I’m guessing this wasn’t corrected for multiple testing. That is, when you have a big pile of data and start comparing this number to that number over and over again, then just due to chance, you’ll start seeing links that seem significant. Good statisticians correct for this effect.
Budget Player Cadet, will you please go away?
Have you finally recovered enough for your epic pitting that you are going to start posting pointless and annoying pit threads three times a week again?
Ok.
Who the fuck is Seralini? That’s the big problem. Its like coming into the middle of a conversation and everyone assuming you know what has been said. Take a little time and write a coherent OP if you want everyone on board. Use the cites to back up your claims. Don’t require us to do research.
Seriously. It’s summer, aren’t there a bunch of retarded underage girls fresh out of school for you to scam on?
Even just a less vauguebooking title might help. I know who Seralini is but a title like this might be more helpful:
**
Seralini, Would You Please Just Go Away? (Anit-GMO crackpot republishes shit paper)**
It’s not their fault. Nobody can resist Séralini.
Nobody doesn’t like him.
I know, right? Sounds crazy… But that’s what the research showed. Of course, this wasn’t exactly touted in the paper. Because if it was, people might realize what was actually going on - that with 20 samplings of each only 10 rats, and with rats that had such high base rates of disease and cancer to begin with, sooner or later you were going to find some result you could use to scare people with. Given the experimental design, there’s no way of knowing that the fact that some of the control group did marginally better wasn’t pure dumb luck. Meanwhile, there’s no dose-response, results are all over the map, and the paper is garbage. And that’s not even addressing ethical concerns, such as leaving rats alive until their bodymass was something like 25% tumor to get “shocking” photos (we didn’t get any photos from the control group… I wonder why? Probably because they looked exactly the same).
Sickening.
And, to certain others, excuse me for getting worked up at anti-science bullshit and perversion of the peer-review process. It’s one of those things I happen to really give a damn about. And you ought to as well. This shit matters.
Not only that, rats that drank Roundup-club soda cocktails on the rocks added 30 points to their I.Q. and had glossier fur.
Were ANY statistical comparisons even made? Were basic statistical results even presented (such as SEMs, etc.)? In my 15 second scan, I don’t think I saw a single ‘p’ value although I may have missed it/them.
If it is actually the case that NO statistical analyses were done, the article doesn’t even merit review, let alone publication.
Academic librarians everywhere, and everyone who knows anything about academic publishing and is not in the pay of the big, commercial price-gouging publishers, most fervently wish ignorant, prejudiced turds like you would just go away!.
Your issues with M. Seralini, whatever the merits of that case (not that I see many on your side - you just seem to want to silence research whose conclusions don’t fit your prejudices) certainly do not justify this gratuitous and ignorant slur on what is almost undoubtedly the only way that academic publishing can be both democratized and saved from the profiteers. There are issues and problems surrounding open access publishing models, but their resolution sure as hell will not be solved this sort of ignorant mud-slinging.
I think it’s a worthwhile pit, regardless of the source. The general anti-GMO sentiment is to actively campaign against food that would alleviate mass starvation in the third world. These tards have figurative blood on their hands, and a **lot **of it. I’d say they have empty stomachs on their hands, but that argument doesn’t carry much weight. wink.
Forsooth! Thou hast slain mine keyboardeth.
This deserves acknowledgement. Manly head-nod and grimace toward you, good sir.
Oh, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of how shitty open-access journals are. And it makes sense, too - when there’s no financial interest in keeping readers, you can publish whatever the hell you want without worrying about people saying “fuck this journal, it’s terrible, I’m not gonna read it any more” - after all, your income is from the people publishing, not your readers, and while some scientists will probably opt for a journal with a higher reader base, you can always find desperate hacks like Eric-Giles Seralini or Niels H. Harrit willing to pay to be able to claim “look ma, my paper was peer-reviewed!”. Does that mean all open-access journals suck? No. Just most of them, and they should be treated as unreliable until proven otherwise.
Are you shitting me? The Seralini paper was panned by all but a handful of biased crazies. It’s so transparently flawed, with so little ambiguity as to the nature of the errors that I do not believe you spent even 5 seconds researching it. Dude, you’re defending the GMO equivalent of the Wakefield vaccine paper or the Regnerus gay parenting paper. I want it out of the literature not because it doesn’t fit my prejudices but because it’s a deliberately dishonest piece of shit, of which the sole aim is to further a political agenda.
Yes, there are tons of problems! How 'bout you fix the fact that 99% of open-access journals are crap before criticizing me for taking the obviously rational stance that we should treat them as though 99% of them were crap? Look, it’s really simple. PLOS ONE is a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. It’s open-access. It’s also currently the only open-access journal I’d trust. If I found others who published work of similar consistent quality, then I would trust them too. I’d welcome you to recommend them to me but what you said about Seralini’s paper throws that out the window. But in a market saturated with shit like Bentham Publishers, my first reaction to something published in an open-access journal is going to be “Yeah, sorry, don’t know that journal, it’s open-access, not interested”. It’s like if solar panels had a high chance of exploding violently. It’s a wonderful technology with a lot of promise but I’m not about to bet that the one I have isn’t a turd.
I know, right? You’d think that your average journal would realize that that’s kind of fucking important! In fact, the paper contained absolutely no statistical analysis whatsoever. Which makes sense - you couldn’t hit decent p-values from the data anyways! :rolleyes:
I think the title “Anti-GMO crackpot republishes shit paper” would be best. I still wouldn’t give a shit but at least I’d know what I wasn’t giving a shit about.
I find it easier to not give a shit about anything.