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A few tiny rats have become the centre of a hot discussion in the global scientific community about the safety of genetically modified corn.
It all started when a group of French scientists published a study last month in the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal that suggested that rats fed with GMOs die earlier and suffer from cancer more often than the others.
This triggered vociferous protests and opposition from pro-GM groups and scientists. This row, in fact, spilled over to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) here. While the pro-GM camp is distributing a document to disprove the claims of the French study, the team that conducted the study strongly defended the outcome of their study.
The study titled Long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and A Roundup-tolerant GM maize found tumors in rats fed with GM corn. Roundup is a seed technology that gives the crop genetic strength to withstand herbicide used to kill weeds.
“The new research took the form of a two-year feeding trial on 200 rats monitored for outcomes against more than 100 parameters. The results, which are of serious concern, included increased and more rapid mortality, coupled with hormonal non-linear and sex-related effects. Females developed significant and numerous mammary tumours, pituitary and kidney problems. Males died mostly from severe hepatorenal chronic deficiencies,” the French research team that conducted the two-year study, said.
The pro-GM Adriana Brondani, who is Executive Director of the Brazilian Council for Biotechnology Information, felt that besides technical errors, there is evidence of an ideological bias in the conclusions of the study. “Some of the scientists involved in the research have a clear history of militancy against GM products,” she said.
The pro-GMO document quoted Tom Sanders, who is the Head of Nutrition Research at Kings College in London. It argued that the strain of mice used by the French team is prone to developing tumors by aging, especially when given unlimited food or maize contaminated by a common fungus that causes hormonal imbalance.
Robin Mesnage, who is part of the research team, told Business Line that they had previously evidenced signs of toxicity in the liver and kidneys of rats fed GMO in Monsanto experiments. “We have decided to repeat the experiment, and to go forward with a longer test with additional measurements. We were surprised by tumorigenic effects from the fourth month, which led us to go up to the whole life of the rats (two years),” he said.
“We used rats in the research, and they are talking about mice,” he said, wondering whether the opposite camp had ever read the article in full.
ABLE-AG response
Meanwhile, the Association of Biotech-Led Enterprises has said everyone involved in agri biotech, including academia and industry, are “deeply perturbed by the fallacious ideas being propagated by such studies.”
Quoting the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), it said that an initial review (of the research) found that the design, reporting and analysis of the study, as outlined in the paper, are inadequate.
>kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in
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