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, 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.”
‘curses are like chickens…’
There is an expression dating back to the 13th Century, “curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost.” On March 30, 2015, more than a year later, the publishers of the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology announced that ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman had been “removed” from the Editorial Board of the Journal and that Editor-in-chief, pro-GMO Editor-in-Chief, A. Wallace Hayes, was kicked upstairs to the silly position as “Editor-in-Chief for Strategy and Vision.”
In June, 2014, the Springer online journal, Environmental Sciences Europe, saw fit to republish the retracted Seralini paper. Has the new editor of the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology had the moral backbone to attempt to undo the severe damage to Seralini’s scientific reputation and to the truth about the deadly consequences of GMO patented seeds and their paired weed-killers by printing a public apology? Perhaps that will have to await a new Paris court verdict. In the meantime Professor Seralini and his group are making further rat studies and uncovering more proof that ALL GMO is toxic to humans and animals. In true science as in life, persistent honesty eventually trumps fraud, defceit and corruption.
The entire field of so-called biotechnology is corrupt and rotten to its very unscientific, reductivist core. That should not surprise as it was created deliberately by America’s leading eugenics family and funded by their Rockefeller Foundation to advance their mad eugenics agenda at the very same time the Rockefeller Foundation was funding the Nazi eugenics research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
The Rockefeller Foundation Director of Medical Research for 34 years, when Molecular Biology was “invented” in 1938 through his foundation grants to universities such as California Institute of Technology and Cambridge University in England, was a man named Alan Gregg. Gregg once wrote, “There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth ecological economy.” He then asserted that “cancerous growths demand food, but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it. The analogies can be found in our plundered planet.” James Stillman Rockefeller, former chairman of First National City Bank, later Citigroup, sat on the board of Monsanto until his death in 2004 at age 102.
GMO and their “weed-killers” are intended by its founders to kill us off as “useless eaters” or as I titled a recent article, “We’re the ‘weeds‘ for Monsanto Roundup Weed Killer.” That article discussed a new study by the group of Professor Seralini. It’s all there for you to discover if you’re interested in the health of yourself and of your children, relatives and friends.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.