It Doesn't Matter Who Votes, It Matters Who Counts the Votes

The principle by which humanity is ruled. You should be aware.  It's ubiquitous.

The Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology has apparently decided to violate [scientific journal article retraction] procedures, announcing it is retracting a long-term study on the toxic effects of Monsanto Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)—GMO Maize it published a year ago.

[...]

‘Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize’ by Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team of researchers at France’s Caen University [...] was a highly important study as it was the first and, astonishingly, still the only long-term study under controlled conditions of possible effects of a diet of GMO Maize treated with Monsanto Roundup herbicide.

[...]

Séralini submitted his study results to the respected journal following a rigorous four-month review by scientific peers regarding methodology and such. Séralini’s group tested more than 200 rats of a diet of GMO corn over a period of a full two years at a cost of 3 million euro. The study was done in absolute secrecy to avoid industry pressure.

[...]

Séralini’s group studied the effect of a Monsanto GMO maize diet on the rats for much longer than Monsanto had done in their study submitted to the EU European Food Safety Authority [EFSA] for approval. The group conducted its study for the full two-year average lifetime instead of just 90 days in the Monsanto study. The long-term span proved critical.

  RT

As you might expect it often would. And you might be surprised at how many toxicological studies are performed by pharmaceutical, food, and agricultural companies that encompass only the short term. Not only is there a paucity of long-term effect studies, but also of studies that deal with the effect of combinations of chemicals.

Monsanto and the related GMO industry immediately went on a war footing to control the potentially fatal damage from the Séralini study. Suddenly, with worldwide attention to the new Séralini results, the EU Commission and its EFSA was under fire as never in their history.

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At the very minimum, the ‘precautionary principle’ in instances involving even the potential for grave damage to the human population would mandate that the EU Commission and its EFSA should order immediate further serious, independent long-term studies to prove or disprove the results of the Séralini tests. Refusal to re-examine its earlier decision to approve Monsanto GMO maize, no matter what flaws might or might not have been in the Séralini study, suggested EFSA was trying to cover for the GMO agrichemical lobby at the very least.

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Many members of the EFSA GMO review panel had documented ties to Monsanto and the GMO industry, a conflict of interest to put it mildly.

This is nothing new, and it is an obscenity that it is still the case. I am only assuming that it is still the case with the EPA in our country. A college professor once asked for a paper on the safety of agriculture chemicals, sending us to journals that carried the studies for our information. He did not consider that I might go beyond the studies to examine just where the funding for “independent” university research came from (surprise: chemical companies – and, in return, they own and get to choose which studies get published); nor that I would research the members of the EPA and find that the lion’s share of them had connections to (often sitting on the boards of) the chemical companies. (The professor, by the way, did not approve of my paper and gave me a low grade. High marks went to the students whose papers confirmed the safety of agrichemicals, which was every other student in the class.)

While the official EFSA statement seemed to take pressure off Monsanto, it clearly was not enough so long as the Elsevier journal study could circulate and be cited around the world.

Then, out of the blue, in May 2013, six months after the Séralini study release, Elsevier announced that it had created a new position, ‘Associate Editor for Biotechnology’. The person they hired to fill it was Richard E. Goodman, a former Monsanto employee who in addition was with the Monsanto pro-GMO lobby organization, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) which develops industry-friendly risk assessment methods for GM foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations.

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Then on November 24, 2013, six months after Goodman took control of GMO issues at the Journal, Dr. A. Wallace Hayes, the editor of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology reportedly decided to retract the study by the team of Professor Séralini.

The reasons for the extraordinary retraction a full year after publishing are in violation of the guidelines for retractions in scientific publishing set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member.

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Séralini’s paper meets none of these criteria [for retraction] and Hayes admits as much.

Apparently, this is not the first time Elsevier has put profits above principle:

In 2009, Elsevier invented an entire medical journal, complete with editorial board, in order to publish papers promoting the products of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck. Merck provided the papers, Elsevier published them, and doctors read them, unaware that the ‘Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine’ was simply a PR vehicle for the drug giant Merck.

If you have a copy of 'Food and Chemical Toxicology' with Séralini's article, hang on to it.  It will be a collector's item.  And your grandchildren can use it in their lawsuit if they aren't happy with their breast tumors.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.