Peer Review under the Spotlight

ISIS Press Release 20/05/08 SiS Commentary

What matters most is the lack of public scrutiny rather than the lack of peer review in times of corporate corruption of science Prof. Peter Saunders

You’ve probably come across the expression “peer-reviewed” a lot recently, especially in discussions on GM food, mobile phones, or organic farming. It’s almost always used as part of a sentence that begins “There is no peer-reviewed evidence for …” or “There is nothing about this in any peer- reviewed journal …”

What you’re meant to understand by that is: “there is no credible evidence for whatever it is, and you can safely ignore anything you’ve heard about it.” When the question is about safety, as it often is, it means the regulatory authorities are not going to look into it.

A lot of people take peer review very seriously, or at least they say they do. When Sir David King, then the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government, put forward a code of ethics for scientists, one of his chief examples of unethical behaviour, right up there with plagiarism, was “disseminating work before it has been peer reviewed”. You may remember Arpad Pusztai who spoke for 150 seconds in a television programme on unpublished results indicating that genetically modified (GM) potatoes were harmful to rats, because he saw it his duty to warn the public. He was subjected to fierce attacks from the scientific establishment (led by the Royal Society) that continue to the present day.

The scientific establishment’s double standard

The scientific establishment may claim to oppose disseminating results that have not been peer-reviewed, but there is a blatant double standard being applied, and all too often. Just recently, a UK government research funding agency, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) put out a press release that was not only highly misleading about farmers being upbeat about GM crops ("UK Farmers Upbeat about GM Crops" Debunked and Marketing Masquerading as Scientific Survey , SiS 38); but was also based on research that had not been peer-reviewed, according to the ESRC’s own web site.

Another recent example came from the top mainstream journal Nature Biotechnology. In an editorial, it criticised the Italian National Research Institution for Food and Nutrition (INRAN) for not publishing some results that were allegedly favourable to GM crops.

The director of the project in question, Giovanni Monasatra, wrote to the journal to put the story straight, and his letter was published along with a response from the editor, Andrew Marshall. In his letter, Monastra dealt with the points raised in the editorial and expressed his surprise that Marshall, far from criticising Salute, Agricolura, Ricerca (SAGRI) for organising a press conference to publicise data that were, according to Marshall, “too preliminary for peer-reviewed publication,” instead complained that the Italian media did not give it even more coverage than they did.

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