Letters to the Bioscience Resource Project

We welcome all letters and comments on topics relevant to food, agriculture and science and especially on subjects covered by this website. We will publish all contributions if asked, provided they are polite and to the point.

Dear Ms/Sir,

I read with interest the article "What is Nature Biotechnology good for?" and allow myself the following comments on it.

All the editor is doing is taking the heat of an extremely hot claim with cold, hard facts. Before making the apology of Dr. Ermakova, you should keep in mind that she didn't publish her results in a peer-reviewed journal, but she did let her results leak to the mass media (how scientifically sound and ethical is that?). The main objection the critics raise, and which your article fails to mention, is the horrendously high level of mortality in the control groups of her experiment. No valid scientific conclusions can be based on a study with such a poor performance in the control group. Period.

You also make an appeal to emotion with the claim "In science, opinions may differ, but it is not usual to attempt to embarrass opponents with overt public criticism." That's plain false, as anyone who reads the opinion columns and letters to the editor of any peer-reviewed scientific journal knows. Especially harsh criticism is to be expected on someone who makes such a massive claim as 'there are 102 million hectares planted with poisonous crops in the world'.

By the way I also fail to see how you can claim the higher moral ground when the authors of your articles don't even bother signing them with their name and affiliation. Allowing for visitors' comments would also add a little bit more credibility to your extremely skewed views on bioscience.

Best regards
 
Agustin Zsögön
PhD student
Environmental Biology Group
Research School of Biological Sciences
The Australian National University
Canberra

To the editor

As someone who has spent quite a few years of his life carrying out
nutritional studies (and publishing over at least 50 peer-reviewed
papers in top nutritional journals) I whole-heartedly agree with your
comments concerning the problems with the quoted papers by the gang of four (What is Nature Biotechnology good for?).

I can also add a few more. The Teshima paper for example was one
of the scientifically poorest papers I ever had the misfortune to read.
As we pointed this out in our 2003 review, from a nutritional study in
which young animals that ought to have grown very rapidly but do not
grow at`all (mice) or grow very little (about 20 g instead of over 300g)
during the feeding for 105 days, no scientifically valid conclusions
could be drawn. This paper could not have been published in proper
nutritional journals, such as Journal of Nutrition, British J Nutr., etc
and only nutritionally illiterate people, like the gang of four, could
hold them up as great examples. And I could go on about the other papers
quoted. The quality of science in most of the papers on which the
safety of the various GM crops is based is so poor that even a PhD
student working in a good lab could not get away with it.

Arpad Pusztai
Aberdeen, Scotland