Charlatan Gilles-Eric Séralini has a new fraud claiming pesticides are more toxic than what regulatory authorities have assumed.
Fortunately, actual scientists are addressing it already:
Toxicologists have reservations about the study. “There are issues in terms of its design and execution, as well as its overall tone,” writes Michael Coleman, a toxicologist at Aston University in Birmingham, U.K., in an e-mail to ScienceInsider. “Anything is toxic in high concentration, the question is whether the toxicity is relevant to the levels of the agents we are ingesting. This paper does not seem to address this issue at all.” Martin van den Berg, a toxicologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, says the paper deserved to be reviewed. But he, too, questions the experimental design. “The endpoints observed are so general that we could probably find the same kind of toxicity with lemon juice or grapefruit extract,” he says. “It’s not new or shocking. It is what I would have expected at the level he is giving this to the cells.”
Ralf Reski, hitherto BioMed Research International editor, resigned. “I do not want to be connected to a journal that provides [Séralini] a forum for such kind of agitation“, Reski wrote in his resignation mail, thus keeping his integrity intact. Kudos to him.
