Aside from your reasoned exception to his perhaps unreasonable criticism of open-access journals, he may not have *personally *made much of a case against the specific research in question, but the Forbes link he provided does, which means that it is at least based on more than any prejudices he may or may not have in favor of GMOs.
[sub](Please, nobody notice the run-on sentences I’ve been perpetrating in this thread…)[/sub] Hey, what’s that over there?!
And yet Seralini’s paper is back. In a bottom-of-the-barrel publication, no less. Vanity journals will stick around just about as long as denialists want to give their bullshit a veneer of respectability - so, basically, forever. You know a bunch of good open-access journals? Great! It just so happens that most of the ones I know are utter shit, and that the business model is part of the problem. Open-access journals have a massive image problem because there’s a great many of them that act as vanity publishers for utter crap, and many people look at that and say “I don’t like those odds of it being bullshit”. Care to recommend some good ones?
:rolleyes: Prejudice in favor of GMOs? Yes, I have a prejudice in favor of GMOs. Same prejudice as with vaccines, chemotherapy, and reckognitions of anthropogenic climate change! The science is there, the science is overwhelmingly one-sided, and thus I am naturally predisposed towards following the scientific consensus! This isn’t rocket science. And yes, the Seralini paper is rubbish, and the fact that a Springer journal picked it up means that Springer publishing apparently has fuck-all for standards. +1 publisher of open-access journals I can group in with Bentham.
Fuck that paper! The important issue is how do I get started in the lucrative field of pay as you go science journals? It would seem that all I need is a website to publish them on and a disclaimer that anything on the site is likely to not be true so nobody can blame me.
dropzone, dropzone, dropzone: you’re thinking too small. The best Vanity publications spam academics, offer to review their seventh tier papers, publish them online (surprise, surprise), then send on a $3000 bill, that they had never previously mentioned.
I agree with njtt though. Vanity publications pre-date the internet. The issue here is peer-review/non- peer review and not open access/not open access. The journal biz model is worse than the old music industry biz model.
From the Economist May 4, 2013: [INDENT] A week before that, a bill which would require free access to government-financed research after six months had begun to wend its way through Congress. The European Union is moving in the same direction. So are charities. And SCOAP3, a consortium of particle-physics laboratories, libraries and funding agencies, is pressing all 12 of the field’s leading journals to make the 7,000 articles they publish each year free to read. For scientific publishers, it seems, the party may soon be over.
It has, they would have to admit, been a good bash. The current enterprise—selling the results of other people’s work, submitted free of charge and vetted for nothing by third parties in a process called peer review, has been immensely profitable. Elsevier, a Dutch firm that is the world’s biggest journal publisher, had a margin last year of 38% on revenues of £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion). Springer, a German firm that is the second-biggest journal publisher, made 36% on sales of €875m ($1.1 billion) in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available).
…In the past year Elsevier has more than doubled the number of open-access journals it publishes, to 39. [/INDENT] Free-for-all (sub req)
That said, abusers of the scientific process deserve pittings.
I don’t think the scientific consensus is as characterized. I think GMOs should be regulated and I’m guessing most scientists believe the same. Sure, I agree there’s crackpottery. But the Cornell University researcher who noticed that high doses of pollen from Bt-corn plants were toxic to Monarch butterfly larvae wasn’t a wack-a-doodle. Further work established that the initial fears were overblown. But the environmental and toxicological effects of GMOs deserve to be studied, ditto for pesticides and herbicides.
This link captures my take: the technology shows great promise, propagandists need to be called out, but biotech should nonetheless be regulated in some fashion. http://www.environmentalreview.org/archives/vol10/straussAbstract.html
I’m not sure your point? GMO’s already are regulated.
By contrast with Seralini’s garbage, I do know of (and have met, once) a guy who’s purported to find that Roundup is somewhat toxic to frogs, Rick Relyea of Pittsburgh. Unlike Seralini, he’s been published in some pretty good journals, is invited to talks at high ranked universities, and while his papers on Roundup & frogs are of course controversial, no one accuses him of scientific malpractice that I know of. Even Monsanto doesn’t claim his data is garbage, they just claim he used levels of Roundup that are higher than the recommended dosage (he agrees, but says these residue levels are sometimes realistic for aquatic environments).
Significantly, Relyea doesn’t claim its the active ingredient in Roundup that causes the problems (he thinks it’s a surfactant), and he doesn’t claim it’s toxic for all frogs, just the few that he studied. And he states right up front that he doesn’t have a broader anti-GMO or anti-pesticide agenda.
So no, its not the case that the scientific community self-censors anything critical of GMO crops.
Yes they are. And they should be. Possibly less strenuously in the US or perhaps differently than they are now. But they should be regulated. Nobody has explicitly argued otherwise in this thread, but it’s useful to keep in mind given the prevalence of glibertarianism on the internet.
Helpful anecdote, btw.
He didn’t notice this. He deliberately constructed a situation where caterpillars were exposed to orders of magnitude more pollen than they could ever encounter in the real world.
This wasn’t noticed, it was engineered.
No, he was a partisan hack, which is far worse.
Understate much?
First off, they are studied. Intensively. GMOS are the most comprehensively studied tech on the planet. More so than medications.
Secondly, are you seriously arguing that the environmental and toxicological effects of vaccines, chemotherapy causes of anthropogenic climate change don’t deserve to be studied?
Because unless that isn’t what you are arguing, you are simply agreeing with Budget Player Cadet’s point. An anti-GMO stance is indistinguishable to an anti-vax or anti-chemotherapy stance.
It is regulated. It is very, very heavily regulated. Just as vaccines and chemotherapy agents are heavily regulated.
GMOs are regulated out of all proportion to their actual risk.
Roundup isn’t a GMO product. It’s an industrial herbicide produced by good old-fashioned chemistry. The ‘Roundup-Ready’ GMOs are standard crops that have been genetically altered to be resistant to being killed by Roundup, so only the weeds die if you spray your corn-field.
Anyone else read this as “Bitcoin plants”?
Yes, obviously. But the point of using Roundup-ready gmo’s is so that you can use glyphosate for purposes of weed control, so if the Relyea studies etc., convinced people to stop using Roundup, then that would hurt the future of Roundup-ready varieties as well. (Or not- as he himself conceded it probably wasn’t glyphosate that was doing the damage, so maybe they might reformulate the product).
You are confusing ignorance with perfidiousness. My entire knowledge of the subject basically comes from 2 articles I originally read over a decade ago: abstracts are here:
http://www.environmentalreview.org/archives/vol10/straussAbstract.html
http://www.environmentalreview.org/archives/vol09/FelsotAbstract.html
My language was adapted directly from the interview. I will bring my limited information to the table: you are welcome (if you wish) to bring citations reflecting your more extensive knowledge. (No BS here: Blake knows bio: I don’t.)
That’s the first I’ve heard of that. But something smells a little off to me. Toxicologists routinely expose rodents to high doses of tested materials: that’s the basis of the LD-50 test. It provides a baseline. Depending upon framing, it doesn’t sound like a bad first cut on the problem.
The second link presents a 2002 interview with toxicologist Allan Felsot of Washington State University: he has organized symposia for the American Chemical Society on the ecological effects of transgenic crops. As he relates it John Losey published a one page paper in Nature where it looks like he took a salt shaker and poured pollen from Bt-corn on to a leaf and allowed a Monarch to feed on it. The scientists observed results and published them. In a leading peer reviewed journal. This doesn’t sound like the OP so far. What about framing? Allan Felsot:[INDENT] I talked to John [Losely, of Cornell] at a symposium after his article came out and he said they had made this observation and it’s a hypothesis and we need to test it. And at that time he showed some data that suggested that out in the field it’s probably not going to be a problem. He said some greenhouse studies that he had done suggest that the Monarch larvae actually didn’t like being around that much pollen. The Monarch butterfly itself wouldn’t even lay eggs where there was that much pollen, and also it preferred to be underneath the leaf rather than on top, so there were a lot of factors to sort out. Nevertheless, it’s an hypothesis that demands testing. [/INDENT] That doesn’t sound like bad faith to me on the part of the Cornell researcher who published in Nature. It sounds like a first cut on the problem. Sort of like the LD-50.
I presented my evidence. You can present yours.
I think a better example would be a anti-nuclear stance. With bt, you are potentially messing with the gene pool, potentially introducing invasive hybrids into the environment. Now in practice those fears have turned out to be overblown. But there is a small risk of a big threat, which deserves to be regulated and managed.
My concern is that solid researchers who point out a problem with one particular Bt crop risk being put in the same box with irresponsible anti-GMO commentators. That doesn’t happen with pesticides: people understand that you can permit one and ban another. As argued by Steven Strauss of the Department of Forest Science at Oregon State, " It’s not as simple as all GMOs are bad, or all GMOs are good. We have a regulatory system and a social deliberation process for helping us decide what we want to use and we’re going to learn by doing."
Now Blake: recall that I’m discussing this from a US context, where anti-GMOism is much weaker than in Europe and I’m guessing Australia. In Europe they’ve gone too far in an anti-GMO direction. In the US, crackpottery tends to extol free markets.
The correct word in this context would be “nonexistent”.
This has not happened with solid researchers who raise good questions. It does happen to researchers who trumpet alarms on the basis of substandard science. Seralini is, sadly, not the only scientist who’s been guilty of this. An earlier example was Arpad Pusztai, who conducted defective experiments on rats fed transgenic potatoes, announced his findings by press conference in advance of publication and made appearances attacking GM crops in general (note the similarity to Seralini, who stage-managed the announcement of his rat findings, getting journalists to agree to report the story without being able to first check the findings with other scientists).
I certainly agree that good regulation is important, and that GM crops need to be carefully reviewed to minimize any chance of a health or environmental problem cropping up later. Such analysis (currently conducted) stands in contrast to the lack of any review of “conventionally” hybridized crops, in which larger arrays of genes are affected (sometimes by radiation) and rare health problems have sometimes cropped up.
I also share some concerns about overuse of herbicides used on GM crops modified to be resistant to them, though fears about this have been overblown too (for instance, bad agricultural management contributed to development of herbicide resistance long before GM crops were ever introduced).
Don’t sell U.S anti-GMO crackpottery short. It has largely been focused so far on demands for labeling of GM foods (as noted, the increased voluntary labeling of non-GMO foods makes one wonder why GM labeling is necessary). But the crankery is having an effect on public perceptions both here and abroad (i.e. in Third World nations which could substantially benefit from introduction of GM crops like golden rice, but also in the U.S. where future sale of coffee and citrus genetically modified to resist serious pests could be thwarted by anti-GMO hysteria).
Apart from the embarrassing performances of a handful of anti-GMO scientists, there is irresponsibility and fraudulent behavior linked to prominent anti-GMO activists. One of the most glaring examples is “Eco-Goddess” Vandana Shiva, who spread the false story that Indian farmer suicides were due to introduction of GM crops and who has falsely proclaimed that she is a “quantum physicist” (she actually received the equivalent of a B.S. degree in physics) and whose record of scientific publications was grossly inflated.
John Losely, of Cornell might be an example of a solid researcher who asked a good question during the 1990s, albeit with preliminary data which was framed as such. I haven’t even googled for info on the guy though.
To be clear, I heartily endorse the pitting of clowns. Those who announce results to the media prior to peer review are probably clowns, unless there’s really really a good reason to do so. Which I’m not aware of ever happening. FTR, I’m also properly appalled by Jackmannii’s examples.