The retracted paper linking GM maize to rats' tumor development published in
2012 has been republished by Environmental Science Europe, an open-access
journal. The paper, authored by Gilles-Eric Seralini and colleagues, was
slightly revised, particularly in the way the data were analyzed.

The original article was published in Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in
2012, and was retracted in 2013 after post-publication review, which found
that "the data were inconclusive, and therefore the conclusions described in
the article were unreliable."

The republication of the article gives critics no reason to change their
mind about the issue, according to Richard Goodman, a food-allergy
researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and biotechnology editor at
FCT. The lab rats used in the study were Sprague Dawley rats, which are
known to become prone to diseases when reaching 18 months of age. This makes
the study of Seralini "uninterpretable". "If you look closely at Séralini's
data, giving glyphosate and the GMO protected one group of rats compared to
those having a single treatment. The study was ? and, I believe, remains ?
flawed."

University of Cambridge statistician, David Spiegelhalter, also said that
the study did not use appropriate sample sizes. "The article still does not
appear to have had proper statistical refereeing, and the methods and
reporting are obscure. The claimed effects show no dose-response, and so the
conclusions rest entirely on a comparison with ten control rats of each sex.
This is inadequate," he explains.

[www.nature.com]