Fake news has reached Nature - our turn

[Mega [Andreas Stuermer]]

Guys this is horrible. Fake news and stories have become very cool recently, Brexit and Trump proved the trend. Anti-vax and anti-GMO groups have been doing it before it was cool.

http://non-gmoreport.com/articles/scientists-ground-breaking-research-uncovers-new-risks-gmos-glyphosate/

This articles links to two Nature studies

Roundup – liver toxicity: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39328 (Open Access)

NK603 GM corn analysis: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep37855 (Open access)

Seralini involved of course. 

Now the high quality? peer reviewed? journal Nature?!?! 

If we as scientists don't mount a response against such things, we deserve science being thought as being unreal. 

I haven't had time at the moment to critically read everything. 

Comments I 've heard: 

"Crops used in the analsis were grown on different fields, so differences may be nothing more than that. The size and magnitude of the effect was also pretty small, and a number of analyses usually used in these types of expression screens are missing."

" The group [....] appears to be hiding the raw data, which is suspicious, to say the least."

"Here he comes out and says "critics said we had to compare the GMO corn with many other non-GMO varieties to see the range of “natural variation.” But comparing with more varieties has the effect of hiding the differences—the exact opposite of what we were trying to do. Our aim was to analyze to see any effect of the GM transformation process, so the only scientifically valid comparator is the nearest possible isogenic non-GMO counterpart. When you do that, you find differences."

That tells me that even he knows that any differences are minor and well within natural corn variation. He just managed to show some slightly different protein expression profiles from the closest ancestor because the modified corn was metabolizing an extra product. Honestly I could show different expression profiles by shining a blue light on the plants for an hour. *shrug* [...]" (figured out by Brian Kirkpatrick) 

My preliminary, and still very superficial thoughts. 

Glyphosate interferes with the shikimate pathway and probably tells lots of riboswitches that there is enough Shikimate in the cell, even if there is not. That the glycolysis and other enzymes will try to compensate seems pretty natural. 

Small molecules - same as above 

Radiation breeding produces way more off-target gene disruption than genetic engineering https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/12/03/gmos-vs-mutagenesis-vs-conventional-breeding-which-wins/ 

The purpose of peer-review is to create literature that you can read just the abstract, and can reasonably assume that that information will be right to some degree. Try this in a freaking newspaper, if you just read the headlines!!! Then you read their conclusion and are quite sure that the story is true - other smart people have critically reviewed (or should have - I read horrible stories of lazy peer-reviewers!). Of course it is good pracvtice to look a their methods and see if they used appropriate methods - but the average Joe doesn't doe that and peer-revied (in theory) makes that less a problem. 

Peer-review *should* be the guarantee that not some random journalist made the story up that sells good but claims that flying immigrant elephants are poisoning our wells with their laser eyes. 

[Brian Kirkpatrick]

Holy hell, Seralini is still allowed to publish?  I'd have thought his name on a paper would be automatic grounds for rejection.  

[Mega [Andreas Stuermer]]

Shall we try to publish a paper, showing that since 1990 organic food sales exploded, and so did autism. Ergo organic food causes autism - the correlation is pretty self-evident