http://www.biosicherheit.de/pdf/aktuell/zentek_studie_2008.pdf is the link you should've posted. Or some blog doubting the results.

Anyway, glancing at Google, the methodology on the study might have been sub-par. I'm of the opinion that's there's a lot of unjust paranoia about GMO crops, which have huge potential for good.

however I found out the study was thrown out due to ""the study did not present a satisfactory statistical analysis of the data"" and ""The original study had not been subjected to peer review by qualified, scientific experts, nor published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal."" . LINK

Well anyone can review it anyway, expert or not. And though it may not contain data analysis, it contains the data itself. I understand Zentek did not want to do further conclusions over the data, as being anti GMO can paralyze you in science community. The main point is that data were true.

however I found out the study was thrown out due to ""the study did not present a satisfactory statistical analysis of the data"" and ""The original study had not been subjected to peer review by qualified, scientific experts, nor published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal."" . LINK

Well anyone can review it anyway, expert or not. And though it may not contain data analysis, it contains the data itself. I understand Zentek did not want to do further conclusions over the data, as being anti GMO can paralyze you in science community. The main point is that data were true.

I'll mention a couple of things. I do have a degree in Biology, though it's a B.S. and not a postgraduate degree, so take my opinion as seriously as you feel is warranted.

1. If a study isn't published in a journal, it has almost zero weight in the scientific community. The publication process, for all its faults, allows for rigorous critiques of your methods and results, and also provides other scientists with the information they need to try to replicate your results. There are several tiers of journals, and plenty of dubious junk gets published in the lowest-quality ones. That this study wasn't published anywhere speaks volumes about its quality.

2. I have no idea how hard Zentek worked to try to get his study published, but if he didn't think that it was publish-able he wouldn't have released it to the Austrian government (assuming, of course, he cares about his research career). That he did so is, again, very suggestive.

3. "Being anti-GMO can paralyze you in the science community"? Please. The fastest way to establish your reputation in the research community is to ruthlessly pick at other people's work, with soundly challenging a widely accepted result as the most effective example. If your work is shoddy it doesn't matter if you challenge anything or not, other researchers will just conclude that you're incompetent. Putting out a study like this will blackball you from working for a GMO producer no matter what, but putting out a high quality study like this will keep you swimming in research grants for the rest of your life.

4. I looked at the study, and the methodology does indeed seem to be lacking. That's not to say that the conclusion can't be correct, just that this study doesn't establish it any more than rank hysteria does. The study states things like:

Over all generations about twice as many pups were lost in the GM group as compared to the ISO group (14.59% vs 7.4%).

We should never be playing "which is bigger" in a study write up like this. In that case it's because there were not statistically significant effects at the 95% confidence interval. Other results were so patchily significant. In the only effect to be reported as statistically significant between GMO and non-GMO (litter size), we get things like:

Inter-litter comparison within the ISO group showed significantly less pups born in the 1st than in the other three litters and in the GM group significantly less pups were born in the 1st and 4th litters.

Additionally, the GM vs. control corn effects look an awful lot like the control corn vs. Austrian corn effects. Again, with no explanation. But the author seems to feel comfortable speculating on why the effect he expected (despite the lack of previous studies in agreement) didn't materialize.

And don't get me started on the cross-tabs.

5. Given the above, the data are not "true", as you assert. They failed to reach the threshold at which the scientific community rules out variables other than those being studied. That standard is arbitrary, and you can argue about that if you want, but even if I totally bought this study (which I don't), the authors failed to demonstrate that the effect exists. Though they seem to believe that it does.

6. A single study, even if peer-reviewed, isn't enough on its own. Had others reproduced the results, or improved on them, that would be evidence worth weighing seriously. Had other studies found results which support a mechanism that might explain this study's results, that also would be worth examining more closely. This alone doesn't stand up very well in the first place, and is uncorroborated.

7.

I would like this thread to be a speculation over couse of patologic effects, rather than questioning the effects existance.

We could, but we would need to determine what color invisible unicorns are first. This is as unscientific as it gets given that there isn't really any evidence that these effects exist and a huge body of research establishing that they appear to not exist.

And by the way, the pathology of any negative effect from a GMO crop would depend on the specific modifications made to that crop. "Genetically modified" is an umbrella term which does not refer to any specific modification, modification method, or effect on the resulting organism. This makes speculation on a pathology in the absence of a particular effect impossible.

14.59% vs 7.4% [...] not statistically significant effects at the 95% confidence interval.
[...]
Baffling. With effects so spottily distributed in the very groups that are reported as having significant results I would expect an explanation rather than, you know, nothing

.
Well you know, given n = 18, there's not much else one can expect, really. One animal dies (by accident, or by whatever cause), that's 5.5% of your population. You don't even need to calculate a CI to see that something's not quite right with that approach.

Such a study setup is kind of... ridiculous (though admittedly it's exactly the kind of study that is regularly done in human medicine, too).

14.59% vs 7.4% [...] not statistically significant effects at the 95% confidence interval.
[...]
Baffling. With effects so spottily distributed in the very groups that are reported as having significant results I would expect an explanation rather than, you know, nothing

.
Well you know, given n = 18, there's not much else one can expect, really. One animal dies (by accident, or by whatever cause), that's 5.5% of your population. You don't even need to calculate a CI to see that something's not quite right with that approach.

Such a study setup is kind of... ridiculous (though admittedly it's exactly the kind of study that is regularly done in human medicine, too).

Agreed, though we could expect a study to be better designed from the start, given that it was run by someone with a PhD. Or that a paper built on such a weak methodology wouldn't be written up. Or at a minimum not have the incidence of the event reported with such a weighted implication, right underneath where the author states that the result doesn't satisfy his significance test.

The "baffling" comment was meant to describe the report of statistical significance in groups like the first and fourth generations, but not the second or third, presented all alone like that establishes an actual effect. A small sample size I can understand: sometimes it's unavoidable, especially in an exploratory test, and the take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt part is built in. Reporting results like this, I don't understand. How could a scientist write up a paper with something like this in it, especially in the only "result" he found?

@ Khaiy

The person who wrote this study ( Dr. Jürgen Zentek ) isn't a scientist, he is a veterinarian . LINK

@ Khaiy

The person who wrote this study ( Dr. Jürgen Zentek ) isn't a scientist, he is a veterinarian . LINK

The person who wrote this study ( Dr. Jürgen Zentek ) isn't a scientist, he is a vegetarian medic , yes, he is a animal doctor, with, mind me, a lot of deep structural stuff rsing to our health

I canot argue Khaiyt, away, but. We must consider this trial as a very dangerous way , as we know no way of how dna produces proteins that composes our very body. Though we make a fun of this controled, lets make rational argumantes fighered in place. That will compose some chracteristics viable to this sustem viable to existance

@ Khaiy

The person who wrote this study ( Dr. Jürgen Zentek ) isn't a scientist, he is a veterinarian . LINK

I would count any kind of medical doctor as a scientist, though not necessarily a research scientist. However, a PhD is fundamentally a research degree, so even if his primary job is as a veterinarian he has no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.

@JohnnyCode:

The only rational argument to be made is that GMOs have yet to present an actual danger to the organisms that eat them. DNA is destroyed in stomach acid (it's not that durable), so the potential danger comes from the effect of modifications, not the mere presence. An example (theoretical) I heard a while back was a strawberry modified to have some specific sequence of peanut DNA in it could potentially trigger an allergic reaction in someone allergic to peanuts. It has nothing to do with the spliced DNA itself, but only relates to the modified berry producing peanut proteins that can trigger the reaction. And for that to happen, the intended modification would have to be that the modified berry will actually produce that protein. It's massively unlikely to happen by accident, and for this specific example there are safeguards in place (at least in the US) in case it were to happen.

There are definitely unintended consequences from certain modifications, but those don't have anything to do with the genetic modification process itself. Huge amounts of time, money, and brain power have been invested in researching effects of GMOs, and they have not come up with any negative consequences like you are describing. Years and years and years of GMO products being consumed regularly by millions of people have also not displayed any such consequences.

If there is a specific modification or type of modification that you are concerned about, that would be something to discuss. If there is a specific aspect of the modification process that you are concerned about, that also would be something to discuss. But if you just have a general concern about GMOs, based on nothing in particular, that's just wild guessing. It's panic. It's not science, nor is it rational. One poor quality, unpublished study isn't going to overturn that.

Research isn't ever really finished. But after a long period of study looking for something that never materializes, at all, the evidence becomes pretty compelling that the danger isn't real. If people want more research into this, they can have at it. But we're well past the point where we can say that we should be frightened because we have no idea about GMO effects on organisms that eat them.