The covert war to discredit Seralini's study
There's a simple way to definitively discredit Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini's controversial study that apears to show the potentially harmful effects of GMOs: pressurise the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) that published it to "retract" the study from its list of publications.
This is what many experts are fighting to achieve in what appears to be an orchestrated attack. It's a veritable public relations war with no holds barred.
The journal has received many letters from critics. It has published around twenty, and a response to the critics by the Séralini team is also available online.
Legitimate scientific debate, you might say. But behind the cohort of academic titles that are listed is a
hidden "biotech sphere" which brings together biotechnology researchers, regulatory policy experts and representatives of industry.
These biotechnology proponents denounce the "bad science" ("junk science") of the "militant researchers", who are routinely described as "activists linked to the environmental movement" and as "motivated by personal interests."
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The litany of conflicts of interest and pro-biotech positions of the fifty or so public critics of Seralini's study could continue for pages. We meet representatives of Indian organisations that promote the trade in biotechnology, others who want to end world hunger with a ration of GMOs, or pro-GMO communications specialists (David Tribe), and other lobbyists working between São Paulo, Washington and Brussels, the golden triangle of GMOs...
A closed world, dressed in the garb of science; the well-oiled marketing strategy of a GM seed industry that reaped 13 billion dollars in 2011 – all this stands to be disrupted by Seralini's study. It remains to be seen whether the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology can resist the weight of the lobby that is determined to bury Seralini's study.