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The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) wants to withdraw the article by Professor Seralini on rats fed GM maize NK603, which was published in September 2012. The researcher counters: why not retract the article by Monsanto in 2004 on the same subject?

ARM WRESTLING. He has mustered his scientific and political supporters   A symbol. Surrounded notably by Paul Deheuvels, statistician of the Academy of Sciences and Corinne Lepage, Member of the European Parliament on November 28, at a press conference in Brussels, Professor Gilles Eric Séralini of the University Caen will defend his sensational article on GMOs, released last year, which is now threatened with retraction.

He suggested that rats fed over a lifetime with GM maize NK603, tolerant to the herbicide Roundup and manufactured by the US company Monsanto, developed more tumors and diseases  The media coverage of the paper in September 2012 had caused turmoil amongst the public and politicians, a debate in the scientific community and a critical questioning of the safety evaluation procedures for genetically modified plants currently in force.

No fraud or manipulation of data

Some days ago, the editor of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (Elsevier Group) which originally published the article, requested Professor Seralini to kindly retract it, that is to say to withdraw it himself.

The reason? “The results are inconclusive and therefore do not reach the threshold needed for publication” and “there is a legitimate reason for concern about both the number of animals tested in each group and the particular strain of rat selected,” he explains in a letter to the researcher at the University of Caen which Science and the Future has seen.

“MERIT”. The editor of FCT admits that “the problem of the low number of animals had been identified during the initial peer-review process” but it was finally decided to publish it because the work “still had merit despite its limitations”. It seems that the editorial policy of the magazine has changed (see here).

Praising the “goodwill and openness” of Gilles Eric Séralini, who provided the raw data to meet the criticisms raised by the article, the editor emphasises that finally, after having carefully and extensively studied it, the reviewers have detected “no fraud or manipulation of data”.