This guy went to the italian Senate for an audition of experts about OGM. Unfortunately for him one of the senators was a top-class scientist (Elena Cattaneo) and she decided to take a closer look...
May be we need more scientist within politicians, isn't it?

That is an excellent point. But I'm afraid not many scientists want to be politicians.

Must be the irreconcilability of seeking physical truths and politics. :)

Isn't it odd that there are a lot of politicians who think they are scientists?

I dared to be involved into Government (Bolivia), until my boss wanted me to lie in a report. Then I stepped out and I'm seeking a job still.

Ms. Elenea Cattaneo was appointed Senator for life by President Giorfio Napolitano on account of her
distinguished services to her country in the scientific domain. Carlo Rubbia, 1984 Physics Nobel Price and former director general of CERN is another Napolitano nominee.

Yeah, we don't have anything like that mechanism in the US. Here it requires regular campaigning, and obscene amounts of fund raising.

Reading this, and considering other debunked anti-GMO studies, it's almost as if GMO food is perfectly safe and the only way anti-GMO people can claim GMOs are not safe is by doing bogus science.

Wow. This will have rippling repercussions throughout the scientific community. I'm always amazed when people think they will get away with outright fraud.

I can't believe that people hate GMOs so much that they'd destroy their reputations and career by faking results. I mean, I get that the rhetorical flourishes of evangelists like Vandana Shiva will be amplifying BS that's out there. But actually publishing fraudulent data? I can't even begin to fathom that.

It has happened more than once already. The motive may be something as simple as an easy way to become famous and idealised, rather than hate per se. There are enough unscrupulous people willing to fake results as we have seen. The real wonder is that they think they won't be found out: Wakefield, Mikovits, Woo-Suk Hwang, Obokata and so on. It seems to come undone eventually.

I don't think it has anything to do with "hating" GMOs, but rather it's about getting more and more research funding. What I find fascinating is that all the anti-GMO folks are always so quick to call out financial bias in any study that opposes their beliefs, but turn a blind eye to any studies that support their beliefs.

The ends justify the means mentality tends to set in with strong ideologies.

Sadly though, this isn't career destroying. It's career making.

Sure, he probably won't be publishing in premier journals, or talking to Italian politicans again - but there's a lucrative trade to be made on the anti-GMO lecture circuit, particularly for people who have been 'crushed by the system' on 'invented technicalities'

There also remain a slew of pay to play journals who will willingly accept any old horseshit.

So while lacking the amazingly thin veneer of credibility that Seralini may have, he is still Seneff or Hubner class, and thus has as much of a career as he likely wants.

I am not sure that Federico Infascelli
is really – I mean a Premier Ligue – GMO hater, judging from a
quick perusal of his publication summaries.

You may wish to read Ms. Cattaneo's
open letter to Marcello Buiatti to see the difference. Buiatti is
deeply involved in CRIIGEN, you know that famous association... I
won't say more : if you criticize them you end up in Court...
stated and publicized policy.

I noticed that he (and Tudisco) had a speaking engagement with ENSSER at one point. http://www.ensser.org/incre...

You can draw some conclusion from that.

He has also signed the "no consensus" crap. http://www.ensser.org/filea...

To this day, i don't know how Seralini escapes being called out. He may not have manipulated the raw data but to continue to purport his conclusions on such shoddy stats analysis is beyond me.

Yet the junk science presented in his retracted/re-barfed paper is still held up as a beacon of outstanding science by these ignorant zealots. Mind boggling.

No different than the Wakefield research or the Hewistson monkey studies being held up by anti-vax zealots. You combine people who aren't interested in critically evaluating their beliefs with a lack of understanding of science and it's not too hard to find them regurgitating the same stuff over and over again.

It's like this ridiculous pig study published in Australia. The woman who published it was seemingly a reasonable scientists, but the study is so bad, any scientist should be ashamed of having their name on that kind of thing ( Myles Power got a video on this). And of course you have Séralinim so yeah maybe it's to bbecome a instant star in the crank of sphere, after Andrew Wakefield got job and money after his fraud. Séralini got a cult following him, money stream from anti gmo or the organic lobby.

Yup, The first thought I had when I saw this headline was about the recent Volkswagon episode and its' repercussions.

At least the Volkswagon fraud was pretty clever on a technical level. :)

Does anyone forsee the day when all the evidence will be cut and dried and it will be 100% completely clear that the "organic" industry is behind all this crap?
Would it be plausible/possible that there could at some point be a consumer revolt to the point that it would take down the "organic" industry?

Hey folks, don't miss the update in the teeny print at the bottom. Links to the image analysis that's been released. In summary, it looks like 1 grad student thesis in 2006 was the source of most of the original images. There was recycling of them with re-named tissue lanes, same exact stuff was called 3 different species, and other shenanigans.

Where I have I seen this before?

It reminds me of a paper retracted from Science on XRMV.

This is such obvious fraud that I don't know why the retractions was just for self-plagiarism.

This reminds me of the scene in the movie, "China Syndrome", where Jack Lemmon's character discovers the periodic x-ray inspections of a pipe joint were all copied from the first one.

The premise of the research seems flawed. According to this article, "Professor Infascelli’s research has focused on the detection of DNA from genetically engineered (also known as GM or GMO) foods in the tissues of animals that consume them." My question is why it would be necessary to look for GMO DNA in animal tissue. After all, if the DNA of GMO foods could be found in the animals, why not expect that of non-GMO foods to be present? Conversely, if the DNA of non-GMO foods is not found in animal tissue, why expect that of GMOs to be present? Is there no rigor applied prior to performing the research?

Yes - that is the conclusion of the only other researcher who has found rDNA in animal tissues (Sharma et al. 2006)who concluded - as you did - "This study confirms that feed-ingested DNA fragments (endogenous and transgenic) do survive to the terminal GI tract and that uptake into gut epithelial tissues does occur. A very low frequency of transmittance to visceral tissue was confirmed in pigs, but not in sheep. It is recognized that the low copy number of transgenes in GM feeds is a challenge to their detection in tissues, but there was no evidence to suggest that recombinant DNA would be processed in the gut in any manner different from endogenous feed-ingested genetic material." The table shown below is from "The fate of transgenic DNA & newly expressed proteins" by Einspanier (2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1079/9... from an EXCELLENT book by G. Flachowsky (2013), an independent German researcher, entitled "Animal nutrition with transgenic plants." http://www.cabi.org/cabeboo...

Retraction Watch has published an account of this alleged scientific fraud. http://retractionwatch.com/...

Can someone translate into layman's terms what GMO (or non-GMO) DNA found in animal tissue even means? We are what we eat, yeah? So I would expect some minute amount of food dna in my dna, does that imply harm? if so, what?

And also wonky, but what would the mechanism for making goats milk less nutritious even be? I.e how would GMO or non-GMO feed even make a difference?

Seems a long way around to make a bogus point. At least Seralini's fearmongering was clear and easy to communicate. See these rats? They got cancer by eating that. Total lie, but much more effective communication.

Here's an infographic to explain the point. I have a more detailed description here: http://frankenfoodfacts.blo...

very helpful. TY.

The idea with this claim is that somehow bits of nucleotide sequence could survive digestion, then somehow get into cells, and then somehow monkey-wrench either gene expression, or protein-making, or something.

It's not completely far-fetched. This is because you can affect gene expression this way--if you have very precise matches, and if you have sufficient levels to impact things. This can be done artificially by putting a construct within cells so the cells themselves make it. It might be possible to dump enough on a system, add detergents, and get enough in. In some organisms that don't have all the levels of digestion or barriers that we have, it can impact them (insects, for example).

But eating alone doesn't seem to provide this for humans. A paper came out a couple of years back claiming this, but nobody could reproduce it.

The reason they need to fear-monger with this is because they lost on all the other claims they've tried. Allergies! Tumors! They can't figure out how to make the nucleotides alone scary. This was how they tried.

Gotcha. TY. So perhaps analogous to Bt in a way... the protein affects insects but not humans because we have enzymes that digest / deal with it whereas the insects don't. Could you direct me to a database of peer-reviewed studies that debunk the allergies/tumors/nucleotides type claims? Whatever are the most vetted scientifically speaking? I.e. prestigious, independent, etc.

Have you turned into a plant or a cow lately? No, of course not. But any food derived from a living organism contains DNA in one form or another - especially if you're eating raw fruits and veggies, or undercooked meat, where the DNA has not been degraded by time, temperature, or endogenous nucleases. It is not going to magically be incorporated into your actively replicating chromatin and suddenly start expressing foreign proteins. It's mostly going to be digested in our stomach into pieces small enough that they don't contain any complete sequences for structural or regulatory genes anyway.

In a recent survey, 80% of the respondents thought that food containing DNA should be labeled. So, that's a head-scratcher.

The folks here at Biofortified have a database called GENERA: http://genera.biofortified.... It has a huge collection of research. But it's hard to point to any one and say that's the one that shows no allergies. You have to consider the entire sphere of the research, where there's no evidence of problems. It's also really hard to publish negative data, which complicates these arenas.

Lately a lot of people turn to this review: https://www.geneticliteracy...

Look for the link to the PDF in there for access to the paper.

There's also the study by Alison's team: https://www.ucdavis.edu/new...

And I keep asking the people who tell me we have to label to track allergies, and that 60+ countries label, to show me evidence of allergies. There's not a single case. You know if there was it would be all over their memes....

Finding DNA in goat milk could lead to very interesting applications. For example you could barcode how animals was fed with a simple PCR. I think it's an interesting point for food industry and for consumers.

It's been awhile since i last seen it, but in Genetic Roulette, i thought i saw them take some photos and graphs toward the end and imply the opposite of what they were portraying. They flash them quickly by too.

Here's Dr. Enrico Bucci sides from slide share.
https://www.slideshare.net/...

Is editing the negative control lane the most blatant and egregious act of fraud in this case? I would think the evidence of this alone would be justification for a retraction and potential firing.

Wow! There is clear manipulation that extends well beyond excessive sloppiness. Someone needs to be brought up on serious ethics violations. I am completely baffled about why someone would do that unless they felt inordinate pressure for producing papers to sustain their position, or were desperate to advance at all costs. Either place is a terrible place to be! Thanks for sharing those slides.