Did Monsanto engineer campaign to get controversial 2012 Seralini rat study retracted?

A trove of internal documents from Monsanto, recently unsealed in a lawsuit against the agricultural biotech giant, has revealed the firm’s role in the knotty tale of a paper from the lab of a scientist known for his stance against genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

That paper is “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize,” published in September 2012 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) and retracted in January 2014. Gilles Seralini, a scientist known for an adversarial stance towards GMOs, was first author.

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The documents, posted … by the law firm of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei and Goldman, show Monsanto engaged with a network of scientists and other commentators to spread the message that the Seralini paper was bad science and should be retracted.

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While the documents highlight close ties between Monsanto and at least four people who criticized the study, plenty of scientists criticized the paper’s scientific merits in both the mainstream and academic press.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Unearthed emails: Monsanto connected to campaign to retract GMO paper