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MonsantoAdvocate t1_ixu1pll wrote

Reply to comment by beebeereebozo in Glyphosate associated with lower birth weights by Jealous-Pop-8997

>This is activist research.

That's to be expected, it's from the same group of people that conducted this atrocity.

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beebeereebozo t1_ixviubm wrote

I've been reading papers like this ever since the original Seralini report, and it has become easy to spot activist research. But then, researchers like that don't care, they are just running headline mills, nothing more.

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eng050599 t1_ixw6itw wrote

It's been fascinating and depressing to see how easily charlatans like Seralini, and even worse, the dimwitted duo of Seneff and Samsel, can manipulate the general public, and non-scientists as a whole.

In the case of Seneff, pretty well everyone I've ever interacted with in relation to her papers doesn't realize that all she's been doing for over a decade is data-mining to dream up hypotheses...that she never bothers to test experimentally.

Quite literally, she stops at the first step in the scientific method.

There has been one hilarious thing involving team Seralini, and Seneff was that, while Seneff hasn't bothered to test any of her hypotheses, a group of researchers, including both Antoniou and Mesnage, did test her glyphosate can substitute for glycine hypothesis (Antoniou et al., 2019 Doi:10.1186/s13104-019-4534-3).

To the surprise of no one, the hypothesis was debunked.

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perfmode80 t1_ixxo08i wrote

I see Robin Mesnage as a common author between this and the retracted Seralini paper. What's the story behind him?

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beebeereebozo t1_ixy8lw7 wrote

Interest in ag chem goes back to his university days, which were not all that long ago. Was a major contributor to Team Seralini, including retracted work, which should be disqualifying in itself. Read his papers as lead author while with Seralini, pretty sad work. He is currently a consultant profiting from litigation against Bayer and also, since this past April, he is Lead Data Scientist at Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic, a spa that promotes dubious claims for detox benefits of intermittent fasting first developed by Otto Buchinger 100 years ago. Germans certainly do seem to have an affinity for quackery.

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fasthpst t1_ixy731r wrote

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/robin-mesnage

I would love to see what people come up with regarding his reputation.

That single Seralini paper was retracted due to industry pressure. Read the journal's retraction notice and comments to see they never even alleged 'fraud'. Unfortunately, those who would rather support outdated industry findings than follow current science become fixated on shooting the messenger. Seralini has authored dozens of papers since none of which have been 'retracted'

Fact is that the OP paper is just the latest in an unending stream of research articles produced by independent researchers since Glyphosate went off-patent whi h shows negative outcomes from Glyphosate exposure. Did you notice that nearly every single woman in the study had glyphosate in their urine.

It is now near impossible to avoid exposure and yet we are still looking at decades old rat studies for deciding allowable exposure

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eng050599 t1_ixy8r6o wrote

...even the IARC rejected the Seralini paper, and for the exact same reasons why it was retracted in the first place.

From the IARC Monograph:

The Working Group concluded that this study conducted on a glyphosate-based formu-lation was inadequate for evaluation because the number of animals per group was small, the histopathological description of tumours was poor, and incidences of tumours for individual animals were not provided.

As for Mesnage and Antoniou, the main issue with them is that:

a) They haven't conducted any OECD compliant study, and instead make use of weaker, correlative studies.

b) They explicitly go against the recommendations relating to large scale 'omics analyses in toxicology.

One of the results of the whole Seralini lumpy rat study, was the EU commissioning 3 different studies (GRACE, G-TwYST, and GMO90+) to determine if there was any validity to the conclusions of Seralini et al., (2012).

The GRACE project specifically examined the effectiveness of molecular fishing studies conducted on transcriptome and proteome-level analyses.

The results were not surprising, as they found that the level of Type I errors was too high for them to be used directly to conclude even correlative effects. The reason for this is that these studies typically involve far more pairwise comparisons than even our best ability to correct for multiple comparisons can handle...a problem that we in the research community deal with frequently.

Studies of this type should only be used to identify prospective targets for further examination using specific testable hypotheses.

To the surprise of none, neither Antoniou, nor Mesnage have performed such follow up work in relation to their transcriptome screenings.

Yet again, you seem to be a bit lacking when it comes to knowledge relating to these topics.

Fortunately, I do not suffer from such an handicap.

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perfmode80 t1_iy1ln2x wrote

Can you explain why the Seralini paper only showed photos of deformed rats for the experimental group but not the control group?

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eng050599 t1_iy65o8i wrote

For the same reason why he required all the reporters who attended the press conference prior to the publication of the study that they could not discuss any of the results with other scientists.

He wanted to create a splash, yet almost certainly knew that the study would be eviscerated once it was published.

...seriously, there's no way aside from utter incompetence that anyone could submit a paper that bad and not know what the fallout would be.

Unfortunately, it worked, and those lumpy rats get brought up over, and over, and over again.

The scientific community isn't overly affected by this, but that's also why we see so many of the anti-biotech types targeting the public directly, as opposed to trying to convince their peers of the validity of their work.

Just look at Seneff and Samsel.

They've don nothing but present hypotheses as fact for over a decade now, and are viewed as unhinged by even the Seralini crew, but we still see her speaking about her papers as if they were experimentally validated, when there's next to no chance her audience will be able to tell differently.

...it's kinda sad when the evil industrial ag complex has better ethics when it comes to accurately representing research than supposedly independent scientists.

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