Rats fed with OGM, a scientish and ethical scandal : The response of Pr. Narbonne

Jean-Francois NARBONNE has issued a statement clarifying the position of the Pro Anima Scientific Committee :

“The project involving rats fed OFM is utterly scandalous. It is vital that Gilles-Eric Seralini be discouraged from mounting any new project involving the study over a period of two years of rats fed OGMs.

He stipulates : ” I myself was involved, along with other researchers, in the development of several experiments on OGMs in 1995, which we ultimately rejected as being completely ill-adapted to the goal of understanding the effects of OGMs. We subsequently recommended alternative fields of analysis, for example molecular microbiology.”

NARBONNE goes on to denounce what he regards as an obvious and totally outrageous manipulation by the various media, adding that he had asked Seralini, as far back as 2005, to abandon his method as being patently ineffective.

To no avail, “as it turns out there were as many tumors on the controls as there were on the subjects.
“Which result was already known ahead of time.”
“Seralini used groups of ten rats. Completing a live study over a period of two years would have necessitated using groups of fifty, for a total of 1000 rats ! More significantly, there exist techniques that specifically do not require the use of live animals, such as : genomic, proteomic, metabolomic.”
Most significantly, these latter methods have been proven to be as if not more effective than any two-year study involving live animals in dectecting the differences between OGM and non-OGM plants.
Employing an alternative method, would have spared the rats from suffering and at the same time would have guaranteed far better-targeted results.

NARBONNE adds that “at a time when we have already clearly succeeded in developing the means to replace so-called ‘classic’ methods within the framework of REACH, it seems totally incongruous that a researcher sing the praises of a method using thousands of live animals in long-term experiments that today are considered to be obsolete. If, indeed, toxic substances are existant in OGMs, the use of techniques involving ‘omics’ as well as biological trials are far more effective. Using these methods, it is currently possible to detect mutations, cancer-inducing cells, or endocrine anomalies in far smaller quantities than those affecting live subjects. For example, the threshhold of detection of an estrogennomimetic (as found in BPA’s or phtalates) is in the order of extremely few pg/kg. The Seralini project clearly demonstrates the underlying inefficacy of long-term live experiments in the study of OGMs. Which, in fact, many researchers had already predicted and is the reason why this type of study was not originally retained.

One can conceivably be anti-OGM and at the same time consider the Seralini project to be totally unacceptable.”

We at Pro Anima are intent in expressing our fear that this type of two-year study could continue to be utilised on the grounds that the majority of the researchers who are opposed to to this approach are necessarily “in Monsanto’s pocket”.