Source – ragingbullshit.com
– There is a very positive news story coming out of Paris, a city with more than her share of bad news lately. It’s a major legal victory for the voices of science and reason against the GMO Monsanto-led cabal. Its implications will be felt worldwide. If our world ever gets the will to rid the 21st Century Black Death plague masquerading under the name of Genetic Manipulation of Organisms or GMO, it will owe a huge debt of gratitude to the courageous work of Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini and his extraordry team of dedicated scientists at CRIIGEN, the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering, in France.
(By F. William Engdahl and cross-posted from New Eastern Outlook)
In a world where industry’s corruption of scientists has almost become ordinary, the existence of a non-industry-funded team of scientists dedicated to producing research and independent information on genetic engineering and its impacts in biology, environment, agriculture, food, medicine, and public health, including the short, medium and long-term effects on human health and on the health of the entire living ecosystem, is, so far as I am aware, unique. Few are aware of their tireless and largely thankless work.
For this reason it’s doubly good news that the Paris High Court has just announced a verdict in favor of Seralini in a libel trial. On 6 November 2015, the High Court of Paris indicted Professor Marc Fellous, former chairman of the French Biomolecular Engineering Commission, for “forgery” and “the use of forgery,” in a libel trial he lost to Prof Séralini. The penalty will be decided sometime in 2016.
The French Biomolecular Engineering Commission (CGB in French) was created within the Ministry of Agriculture and is well-known for its advocacy of GMO. The body is responsible for approving as safe a number of GMO plant varieties in France.
Fellous himself is no small fish. A fellow at the renowned Pasteur Institute, he is President of the Association Française des Biotechnologies Végétales, and he is responsible for assessment of risks of GMO at the French Ministry of Agriculture, as well as Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Paris. The case was brought by Seralini in January 2011.
According to a source close to the case, Fellous had used or copied the signature of a scientist without his agreement in order to argue that Séralini and his co-researchers were wrong in their re-assessment of Monsanto studies.
The Séralini re-assessment reported finding signs of toxicity in the raw data from Monsanto’s own rat feeding studies with GMO maize, Monsanto’s MON 863.
Another egregious wrong
The same Seralini team of scientists were in the middle of one of the most egregious of recent cases of professional misconduct involving his publication of an explosively damning rat study, one examining the effects over a full two year life span. Astonishing to believe, it was the first-ever long-term rat study documenting the effects of a GMO diet in the entire twenty years’ history of commercial GMO. The results were bone-chilling.
In September 2012 Food and Chemical Toxicology, in those days a respected scientific trade journal, released a study by the team of scientists at France’s Caen University led by Gilles-Eric Seralini. The results of the study sent shockwaves around the world.
Seralini’s group had just completed the world’s first feeding study of the effect on more than 200 rats of a diet of GMO corn over a period of a full two years at a cost of €3 million. The study found alarming instances of cancer tumors, severe organ damage and premature death in rats fed GMO corn treated with Monsanto Roundup with Glyphosate. It was Monsanto NK603 Roundup Ready corn. The patented term Roundup Ready meant the GMO corn was “ready” to resist one of the most toxic weed-killers in the world, Monsanto’s Roundup with a cocktail of highly toxic glyphosate and other trade secret chemicals.
The Seralini study was published after a four-month peer-review process by scientifically qualified colleagues and two years of research in absolute secrecy to avoid industry pressure. Within hours of the public release of the Seralini study, a coordinated global media campaign to discredit the conclusions was launched. No facts were presented, merely typical allegations that the study was “unscientific,” or that the wrong rats were used.
World media coverage forced the corrupt pro-GMO EU Commission to cover its tracks. The official EU food safety advisory body of “independent” experts, EFSA, denounced the Seralini study even before making an independent comparable long-term study to verify or refute it. Unknown to most EU citizens was the fact that the EFSA scientific board members had been exposed by investigative organizations for direct and indirect ties to the same GMO industry it was responsible to monitor, including Monsanto front organizations.
In January, 2014, well over one year from initial publication, the Journal Food and Chemical Toxicology took an unprecedented step of officially retracting the Seralini article with the incredible justification that his study was “inconclusive.” If you open the footnote here, you can read the entire exchange between Elsevier, the journal’s publisher and the Seralini team.
Just prior to the Seralini retraction, the journal had hired a new “Associate Editor for biotechnology”, Richard E. Goodman. This was a new position, apparently established especially for Goodman in the wake of the “Séralini affair.”
Goodman was a former Monsanto employee and an active member of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is funded by multinational GMO and agrochemical companies, including Monsanto, to develop “industry-friendly” risk assessment methods for GMO foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations.
One of Goodman’s first acts at the journal was to retract the Seralini article as “inconclusive.” Were that criterion applied to all science studies, there would be no science journals left. All science by definition is a process of mining, testing radical hypotheses, retesting old ones, on an ever deeper level. Seralini’s paper called for further research to confirm the alarming findings. Instead, Monsanto and the GMO lobby decided to “shoot the messenger”…
http://ragingbullshit.com/2016/01/03/victory-in-paris-vs-monsanto-gmo-cabal/
Related…
What They are Not Telling You about GMO’s
There is a lot of talk about GMO’s recently. Some places want mandatory labeling of GMO’s. Others want GMO’s banned outright. Are GMO’s really that bad?
First we need to define GMO. A GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) is any organism whose genetic material has been altered. We tend to think of GMO’s as a modern invention. Something dreamed up in a lab and sneakily pushed unto the masses by mad scientists. However, Mankind has been genetically altering our food products since the dawn of time.
Corn gets a lot of press as a GMO crop. Monsanto, a company on the forefront of the GMO controversy) has created many strains of corn for specific purposes. But shouldn’t we just grow corn the way nature intended it? That would be a bit difficult. You see, corn is not a natural product. It was created 7,000 years ago by the native peoples of what is now central Mexico. It was developed by selective breeding, and encouraging mutations. Modern corn started out as a small grass called Teosinte. The teosinte was modified at the genetic level to become the corn we all eat today.
Is teosinte’s genetic modification into corn a unique in the history of mankind, or are a lot of our food created by early genetic engineers? You may be surprised to know that a lot of foods that you eat everyday did not start out as the food you know.
Broccoli (considered one of the most healthy foods) was originally engineered from a relative of the cabbage by ancient Etrucians (a people who lived on the Italian peninsula before the Roman Empire). It is believed that the earliest broccoli crops were engineered through selective breeding around the 6th century BCE.
Carots were first cultivated in Persia about 5,000 years ago. It is thought that the modern carrot was a cross breading of dill, and Queen Anne’s lace. The domestic carrot has been selectively bred for its greatly enlarged and more palatable, less woody-textured edible taproot. Early carrots were white, yellow, or purple in hue. It is believed by some that the orange carrot was first developed by to honor William of Orange and his Royal House. It is further rumored that the orange carrot achieved dominance in the market when England’s King Henry the 8th complained about the lack of color in his meals. In an attempt to please the king, farmers searched for more colorful vegetables and found the Dutch orange carrot as a good choice for brightening up the kings meals.
The seedless revolution was created by genetic engineering. Almost all “seedless” varieties of popular fruits and melons were created by infertile plants of the species. Seedless watermelons, oranges and even bananas are only able to be grown through genetic modification. Domestic bananas can only be grown by splicing shoots off of previous banana plants. The naturally growing banana has hard, marble sized seeds in them that make them inedible.
GMO’s for pest control. This is a subject most anti-GMO activists bring up the most. Genetically modifying food by selectively breeding and cross breeding is ok, but genetically modifying foods specifically for pest control is bad, In the mid to late 1800’s, France suffered what was known as the Great French Wine Blight. French grape vines were being decimated by a species of Aphid accidently brought back to France from North America. The way to solve the problem? Grafting North American vines (that are resistant to the North American Aphid) into the existing French vines. This genetically modified the French plants making them resistant to the North American Aphid.
GMO’s are not bad. They increase food production in a world with an ever increasing population. Genetically Modified foods may be our only hope at avoiding future famines with global impact. Instead of banning Genetic Modification to our foods, we should be more concerned with creating proper oversite on the companies that are making the genetic modifications. All modifications should be properly tested by the FDA, or a neutral third party testing facility, before they are allowed to market, and the company creating these modified strains should be forced to foot the bill for the testing. Humans have always genetically modified our food products, and always will continue to do so. The process increases food output, and lowers prices of food. These are good advancements. If a consumer wishes to have unmodified foods, then they can (and should) grow their own.
RIELPOLITIK 