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In the field of biotechnology, something happened that has surprised and shocked the scientific community –  an event with potentially dangerous consequences. Blatant corporate influence, reeking of conflict of interest, has succeeded in squashing a scientific study that exposed the dangers of GMOs. Science has not been under attack to such an extent since Galileo was arrested for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. And there is something we can and should do about it.In late 2012, French scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini published the results of a two-year study on GMOs. His results showed that rats that were fed Monsanto’s Roundup-ready corn (“NK603”) developed tumors and exhibited damages to kidney and liver. The study was peer-reviewed and published in a reputable journal called Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT).

Few months later, the journal created a new position for an Associate Editor, specially for a Richard Goodman who had spent seven years at, you guessed it, Monsanto! Goodman’s job at Monsanto was to study toxicity of GMOs and, of course, he never found any health risks associated with GMOs. Now, with Goodman’s “able guidance,” FCT suddenly realized that the Seralini paper should never have been published in the first place and it retracted the paper. It’s as if the paper never existed; as if the rats never developed tumors.

This is déjà vu all over again. This is exactly how Monsanto got aspartame, rBGH and GMOs approved in the early 1990s. When the scientists at the FDA had rejected aspartame twice and had serious concerns about GMOs, Monsanto used their political influence to create a special position at the FDA, just for their lawyer/lobbyist Michael Taylor. Once Taylor got his foot inside the FDA, suddenly everything that came out of Monsanto’s labs got promptly approved.

Of course, none of this matters to the mainstream media who see no evil and hear no evil. Unless Monsanto comes out and puts out an ad saying, “Yes, we corrupted, bribed and coerced people,” the corporate media will regurgitate Monsanto’s public relations playbook.

As for the journal, the reasons they gave for the retraction of Seralini’s study are that:

1) The type of rats that were used (“Sprague-Dawley” or “SD”) are more prone to tumors

2) Not enough rats – 100 male and 100 female rats – were used in the study, and hence the results were “inconclusive.”

First of all, if these mattered so much, how come the journal accepted and published the paper? How come the study was peer reviewed by many other scientists and approved?