Hack job on Monsanto

Huffington Post has a breathless report of a new study purporting to show that GMO foods produced by Monsanto cause organ damage. I read the study, and man, does it suck.

First, the journal. The International Journal of Biological Sciences. Scientists can gauge the general importance of a journal through a number called Impact Factor -- on average, how often does a paper published in that journal get cited by other papers? Top journals like Science and Nature have impact factors near 30. The best journals in a field (Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, etc.) are around 10-15. Then there are the low-quality specialty journals (Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences) which are around 1. The International Journal of Biological Sciences isn't even in the database.

Second, the authors. The lead author is Gilles-Eric Séralini, a French researcher who has built his entire career attacking GMO foods. If their experiments didn't show effects of GMOs, do you think he would have published?

Finally, the statistics. This is not a difficult question to analyze. When rats are fed GMO food, do they show signs of organ damage? You get your treatment group, your control group, your outcome measures, and you do an unpaired t-test between the two. These guys use "nonparametric methods," "Principle Component Analysis," and a bunch of other unnecessarily advanced statistics. Basically, they tried doing it the right way, failed to find what they were looking for, and pulled out the fancy (wrong) techniques to get the result they wanted.