Scientist Who Discovers GMOs Cause Tumors Wins Lawsuit to Protect His Reputation

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Was French professor Gilles-Eric Séralini right when he said that, in scientific experiments, feeding rats with GMO foods caused them serious health problems, including tumors?

The answer to this question began to be widely discussed immediately after the first publication of his research.

Now the name of Professor Séralini has appeared in the news again - this time in connection with his big victory in court following the results of a libel trial, which was the second victory of the scientist and his team in court in a month.

On November 25, a Supreme Court in Paris indicted former chairman of the French Biomolecular Research Commission, Marc Fallows, with "falsification of documents" and "use of falsification." However, no details were released.

But according to Séralini's website, Fallows used or copied the scientist's signature without his consent in an attempt to prove that Séralini's research team got the wrong results in their research on Monsanto's GMO products, including genetically modified corn.

Fallows' verdict is expected to be announced in June 2016.

This was the second legal victory of the professor's team after winning in court on November 6 in a libel suit against the French magazine Marianne, which published an article in which Séralini's research was called "scientific fraud."

Few people are aware that the initial findings of Séralini's GMO research were hidden from the scientific community as a result of serious PR attacks from Monsanto and the entire biotech industry, which even included a new full-time position at Food and Toxicology magazine - Associate Editor of biotechnology.

The vacancy was immediately filled by a former Monsanto employee who helped persuade the editorial board to remove the study's findings from publication.

Now, two years later, the facts are: Séralini's study has been republished in another scientific journal, Environmental Science Europe; they won two important lawsuits against those who tried to destroy their reputation; A recent review letter even argues that Séralini's research team may have even been right in reporting tumors in laboratory rats fed GMO foods.

Séralini's research

In September 2012, the major international scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology published a study by a team of scientists led by Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini from the University of Caen in France. For 4 months prior to publication, a competent group of scientific luminaries reviewed Séralini's study for methodology and found it printable.

This is by no means an amateur project. Scientists from Caen obtained carefully documented results of an experiment on a group of 200 rats over a two-year life cycle. One group of rats (control group) received non-GMO food, the other was fed only GMO.

Crucially, after a lengthy but ultimately successful legal battle to get Monsanto to publish the details of its own study on the safety of GM corn, NK603, Séralini and his colleagues have replicated the very same company study that was published in Food and Chemical Toxicology in 2004. year and was used by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to positively evaluate the NK603 in 2009.

Séralini's group based their experiment on the same protocol as the Monsanto study, but significantly more often tested more parameters. In addition, the rats were observed and studied for much longer - their entire full two-year average lifespan, instead of 90 days, as in the Monsanto study. The long-term observation factor was found to be important. The first tumors appeared only between the 4th and 7th months of the experiment. In an earlier 90-day corporate study of the same Monsanto NK603 GM maize, signs of toxicity were noted but rejected by both the industry and EFSA as "biologically insignificant." It turned out that in fact they are very biologically significant.

Séralini's study was conducted with the largest number of rats ever attempted in a standard GMO dietary study. They also experimented with “for the first time 3 feed menus (not two as in the usual 90-day protocols): only Roundup-resistant GMO corn NK603, GM corn treated with Roundup and only Roundup at very low environmentally significant doses, starting below the range of levels permitted by regulatory authorities in drinking water and in GM feed."

These results were of great concern. Conclusions of Séralini's study at the first stage of the study: “Among the treated groups, all females died 2-3 times more than control ones, and faster. This difference was visible in 3 groups of males fed on GMOs … Females got sick after consuming Roundup and GMOs with large breast tumors almost always more often than in the control group; the pituitary gland was the second most affected organ; sexual hormonal balance changed. Among the studied males, liver congestion and necrosis were 2.5-5.5 times higher [than in the control group]. This pathology was confirmed by optical and transmission electron Marked and severe renal nephropathy was also generally 1.3–2.3 large. The males showed 4 times larger palpable tumors than the control group … ".

"Four times" means that the tumors are four hundred percent larger in the GMO-consuming rats than in the control group. Because rats are mammals, their systems must respond to chemicals, or in this case Roundup-resistant GM grain, in the same way a human body would.

Further, Seralini's group reports: “By the beginning of the 24th month, tumors were found in 50-80% of females in all experimental groups, with a maximum of 3 tumors per animal, while in the control group - only 30%. Groups receiving Roundup, showed the highest incidence rates: 80% of animals affected by a maximum of 3 tumors per female in each group."

In the first 90 days, these alarming results were not yet evident. Until now, this is the length of time that the majority of all tests by Monsanto and the agrochemical industry have taken, which clearly demonstrates the importance of long-term experimentation and why the industry has shunned longer-term research.

Séralini and his collaborators continued to document their alarming results: “We observed a pronounced induction of breast tumors only on R (Roundup), the main pesticide, even at a very low dose. R has been shown to destroy aromatase, which synthesizes estrogens (Richard et al.., 2005), as well as damaging estrogen and androgen receptors in cells (Gasnier et al., 2009). In addition, R appears to be a sexual endocrine disruptor in vivo also in males (Romano et al., 2010). Sex steroids are also altered in experimental rats. These hormone-dependent phenomena are confirmed by expanded pituitary dysfunction in experimental females."

Roundup herbicide is required to be used on Monsanto GM seeds under the terms of the license agreement with Monsanto. In fact, the seeds are genetically "altered" only to resist the weed-killing effect of that same Monsanto Roundup, the world's best-selling weed killer.

In other words, as noted in other scientific studies by Professor Séralini, “GM plants have been modified to contain pesticides either through herbicide tolerance or by producing insecticides or both, and can therefore be considered“pesticide plants”.

Further, “Roundup-resistant crops have been modified to become insensitive to glyphosate. This chemical is a powerful herbicide. It has been used for many years to kill weeds … GM plants treated with glyphosate-containing herbicides like Roundup … may even accumulate Roundup residues throughout their life … Glyphosate and its main metabolite AMPA (with its own toxicity) have been found regularly in GMOs. Thus, these residues are absorbed by people consuming most GM plants (since about 80% of these plants are Roundup resistant).”

Suspiciously enough, Monsanto has repeatedly refused requests from the scientific community to publish the exact composition of Roundup's chemicals other than glyphosate. They claimed it was a “trade secret.” Independent scientific studies have indicated, however, that the combination of glyphosate with Monsanto's “secret” chemical additives creates a highly toxic cocktail that has been shown to be toxic to human embryonic cells even at doses much lower than those used in agriculture.

Most worrisome in the context of Séralini's first long-term independent experiment on the effects of a GMO diet on rats, it came about twenty years after US President George W. Bush gave the green light to commercializing GMOs without giving government oversight. over safety checks before releasing products. Bush did so immediately after meeting behind closed doors with senior officials from the Monsanto Corporation, the world's largest GMO concern.

The American president then decided to allow GMO seeds in the United States without any single independent prior government safety test for animal or human consumption. This is called the Doctrine of Essential Equivalence. The EU Commission, like monkeys, dutifully copied the American Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence: “don't hear about bad effects, don't see bad effects … don't hear evil, see no evil.”

Séralini's research has become the scientific equivalent of a thermonuclear explosion. It exposed the fact that the EU's "scientific" control of GMOs was just a process of uncritical acceptance of test results given to it by the GMO companies themselves. As much as the irresponsible bureaucrats of the EU Commission were interested in the issue of GMOs, so the "fox" Monsanto could really "guard the chicken coop."

With international attention to Séralini's new findings, the EU Commission and its EFSA were suddenly caught in the crosshairs of spotlights like never before in their history, and the way they responded was worthy of a bad copy of an Agatha Christie detective novel. The only pity is that this is not a romance, but a real conspiracy, which apparently involved some form of collusion between Monsanto and the agrochemical cartels on the one hand, and the EU Commissioners, EFSA GMO Commissioners, helpful mainstream media and several governments - EU members, including Spain and Holland, on the other.