Staunch critics of agricultural biotechnology, including Gary Hirshberg, CEO of organic food company Stonyfield, anti-vaccine osteopath Joe Mercola,[5] Northeast Organic Farming Association,[4] and Organic Valley have sponsored Seneff’s speaking events, including her claims in marketing materials, and have promoted her advocacy on social media.[6],[7] Seneff has appeared alongside other prominent controversial activists including Jeffrey M. Smith[2] [read GLP Profile] and Zen Honeycutt,[3] both vocal critics of crop biotechnology.
Her various papers, presentations and essays, formerly archived on her MIT server account, have largely been removed by the university and the links now generate 403 “forbidden access” results. Emails between organic industry representatives and activists at environmental advocacy groups revealed that Seneff’s claims have even been privately dismissed by fellow biotechnology and pesticide critic Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union. Hansen referred to Seneff and her frequent collaborator Anthony Samsel as “loons”, writing that “significant portions of grass roots activists buy into their nonesense…” [8]
Academic Career
Seneff received a B.S. in Biophysics in 1968, and M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT.
Seneff’s computer science research at MIT centers around spoken language systems, including the development of methods for “correcting misuse of verb forms” and correction software for non-English language speakers.[9] She also claims her academic interests “have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions.” Seneff is married to MIT professor Victor Zue, who heads the Spoken Language Systems Group department where she works,[10] though she is not a professor herself.
Alternative health advocacy
Unrelated to her academic work, Seneff has been an outspoken critic of mainstream medicine for many years. She began blogging about alternative health and nutrition in 2008 under the pseudonym “Cindy.” Since 2011, she has co-authored more than 10 papers—published primarily in low-impact, pay-to-play journals—on topics ranging from drug side effects to the consequences of nutritional deficiencies and exposure to environmental toxins, which, she claims, include Alzheimer’s, autism and cardiovascular diseases. Seneff also alleges that developmental conditions like ADHD are caused by insufficient dietary fat intake,[14] and has worked with low-carb diet advocate and naturopath Tom Ballard to promote dietary cures for developmental disorders.
Seneff also claims that the primary cause of heart disease is deficiencies in biosulfates–especially cholesterol sulfate–and warns holistic medicine followers to not take lipid-lowering statin drugs. She also believes there is a link between sulfate deficiency and numerous other health conditions including autism, eczema, asthma, anemia, preeclampsia, premature birth, and digestive disorder—claims unsupported by medical research and not embraced by mainstream scientists and health practitioners. She has argued that the development of statin drugs was a big-pharma conspiracy.[12] Seneff further claims, without supporting evidence, that glyphosate is one of numerous toil chemicals in the environment that can “disrupt sulfate synthesis and sulfate transport, leading to sulfate deficiency”. Seneff has served as a paid “expert witness” for litigators suing Pfizer for alleged health risks linked to the statin Lipitor. These claims were dismissed, with the court noting:
“Even if Dr. Seneff’s ‘expert reports’ are admissible, they fail to raise a genuine issue of material fact as to specific causation. Her reports fail to offer any evidence that Lipitor—or Pfizer’s failures to warn—caused [the plaintiff’s] specific injuries.[11]
Anti-biotechnology, anti-glyphosate views
Seneff turned her attention primarily to crop biotechnology and pesticides in 2013, particularly the herbicide glyphosate and the genetically engineered crops often paired with it. Citing a correlation between increasing autism diagnoses and the use of glyphosate in agriculture, Seneff claimed that exposure to the weedkiller would cause half of all US children to become autistic by 2025. She postulated in an October 2015 paper that environmental and dietary glyphosate exposure acts “intermittently in utero on human fetuses to disrupt neurodevelopment in a non-dose dependent manner.”
Experts pointed out in response that correlations are not the same as causation. Certain environmental factors, including exposure to organophosphate insecticides, may explain some cases of autism, but that is not established science. One meta-study suggested “9–36% of the variance in autism predisposition with other research concluding that 74-98 percent of autism cases likely 
have no environmental cause and are due to genetics.. No study has implicated glyphosate exposure as a contributor to the disease. In contrast, a February 2021 literature review reported that more than 100 gene mutations have been identified a contributors to autism.
In July 2021, Seneff self-published the book Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. In a review for the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, natural products profiteer Joe Mercola called it “without doubt the best book ever written about glyphosate.” Seneff repeated many of her previous claims about glyphosate in Toxic Legacy. Relying on the retracted research of geneticist Gilles-Éric Séralini, she argued that glyphosate has been shown to cause cancer in rats, though multiple independent studies, published before and after Séralini’s work, have failed to uncover evidence of the herbicide’s carcinogenicity. Seneff also reprised the popular concern that glyphosate prevents microbes that live in the human gut from synthesizing essential amino acids, leading to a variety of serious ailments:
The microbes are being very much disturbed by the chronic poisoning with glyphosate, and then the gut becomes a central starting point for many diseases, including neurological diseases and arthritis. So, you see that disruption of the gut, and glyphosate can cause exactly the things that we’re seeing.
Multiple studies have also failed to uncover evidence to support these claims. Experts have noted that a person weighing 150 pounds would have to consume 330 pounds of legumes in a single sitting, consumed repeatedly over many months, to get a high enough dose of glyphosate to damage his or her gut microbes. Moreover, the food we eat contains more than enough of the amino acids required by the gut microbiome. Her views are considered so extreme that two sharp critics of GMO crops—Robin Mesnage and Michael N. Antoniou, themselves known as fringe activists, ridiculed Seneff’s claims in a journal article, calling them a collection of speculation-based “misrepresentation”, “failed logic” and “syllogism fallacies.”
Misrepresenting causes of the COVID-19 pandemic
In April 2020, Seneff speculated that the herbicide glyphosate was causing COVID symptoms because it is used on corn, which was processed into ethanol, added to automobile fuel, converted to exhaust and then breathed in by humans. The disease itself was the result of SARS-COV-2 infection, she acknowledged, but the virus itself couldn’t explain why so many people had been hospitalized or died. “Corona viruses are the cause of the common cold, a nuisance for sure, but usually not considered dangerous. Somehow this one is different,” she wrote:
My hypothesis is that the biofuel industry is inadvertently introducing glyphosate into fuels that power our cars, trucks, buses, airplanes, and ships. While it has long been known that exhaust fumes are toxic to the lungs, there has been a transformation in the fuel industry over the past decade that may have led to a critical increase in the toxicity of the fumes. Specifically, aerosolized glyphosate may be causing damage to the lungs that makes catching what should be a mild cold into a serious health crisis.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide, Roundup. It’s used extensively on GMO and non-GMO crops alike, both to control weeds and as a desiccant at the harvest. The waste products from these crops are the raw components that go into the biofuels.
Dr. Joe Schwartz, Director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, highlighted several critical flaws in Seneff’s hypothesis. There is no evidence that glyphosate is found in ethanol. Even if the weedkiller were found in biofuel, glyphosate decomposes at 187 °C, which means it could not survive combustion and thus could not be aerosolized. More fundamentally, Schwarts added, trace amounts of glyphosate could not cause the symptoms Seneff’s hypothesis requires:
… [I]s there any evidence that glyphosate has any effect on adaptive immunity, as she claims? Here she brings up the example of a farmer who tried to commit suicide by drinking a cup of a glyphosate-containing herbicide and developed a precipitous drop in blood pressure along with hypoxia, respiratory distress, and acute pulmonary edema. No great surprise there, but drinking a toxic amount of glyphosate is hardly a model for inhaling trace amounts from the air, should these actually be present.
Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines
Seneff co-authored a paper in May 2021 alleging that “the exceptionally rapid movement” of the three FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines through controlled trials and into mass deployment raised “multiple safety concerns.” Among these were a wide range of blood disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune diseases. She also proposed that the shots “could modify the DNA of those receiving the vaccination,” though she acknowledged that there were no studies in support of this possibility.
Subsequent studies investigating adverse reactions in vaccine recipients have uncovered very little evidence in support of Seneff’s safety concerns. Certain blood-clotting disorders have been plausibly linked to COVID-19 vaccination in very rare cases. One study found just 15 cases of thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet count) in 18,841,309 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and 13 cases among 16,260,102 doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine. The researchers also reported that they were unable to identify a mechanism by which vaccination could cause thrombocytopenia. Similar results have been reported for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine. The CDC has also refuted the notion that any of the shots alter the recipient’s DNA:
COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way. Both mRNA and viral vector COVID-19 vaccines deliver instructions (genetic material) to our cells to start building protection against the virus that causes COVID-19. However, the material never enters the nucleus of the cell, which is where our DNA is kept.
The website that published Seneff’s paper—the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research (IJVTP)—is not recognized as a credible publication by infectious disease experts. It’s editorial board consists primarily of anti-vaccine activists, including Seneff, and the journal has not been cited by any peer-reviewed publications. According to one scientist, publishing a paper in IJVTP “seems to be no different than self-publishing a book on Amazon Kindle.”
Seneff’s opposition to the COVID-19 shots made her a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement. During an appearance on “Against The Wind,” a program sponsored by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and hosted by anti-vaccine pediatrician Paul Thomas, Seneff warned the audience not to “go near” the mRNA vaccines:
I believe that they are extremely toxic and a lot of it has to do with all the manipulations that they made on the product. It’s a completely not-natural system. They’ve created this monster messenger RNA molecule that pretends to be human, but the changes that they made in the messenger RNA that would normally be a virus — they turned it into a human messenger RNA. That’s very important.
Seneff also appeared in a 2021 documentary called “Vaccines Revealed,” alongside high-profile anti-vaccine skeptic Andrew Wakefield, who originated the link between the MMR vaccine and autism in a now-retracted 1998 study. Among many controversial claims, the film alleges that the COVID-19 shots were inadequately tested and that US hospitals were paid to inflate the number patients who died as a result of SARS-COV-2 infection. CHD made a similar argument in July 2020, asserting that the CDC “instructed hospitals, medical examiners, coroners and physicians to collect and report COVID-19 data by significantly different standards than all other infectious diseases and causes of death.”
In January 2022, Seneff went on Laura Ingraham’s FOX News talk show to promote what she represented as her “research” although she does no clinical medical research). She claimed to have “discovered” a confident connection between the COVID-19 vaccine and neurological disease, particularly Parkinson’s Disease, saying that “repeated boosters will be devastating in the long term” and parents “should do everything they can to avoid (the vaccine)”.
Criticisms
- Condeming Monsanto With Bad Science is Dumb, Tamar Haspel, Huffington Post, June 2013. “Did you see the latest indictment of Monsanto making the rounds? It’s a “peer-reviewed” paper in the journal Entropy, co-authored by Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, blaming glyphosate, the compound in the herbicide Roundup, for virtually all the ills that can befall us. But here’s the thing — they made it up …. The evidence for these mechanisms, and their impact on human health, is all but nonexistent …. Samsel and Seneff didn’t conduct any studies. They don’t seem interested in the levels at which humans are actually exposed to glyphosate. They simply speculated that, if anyone, anywhere, found that glyphosate could do anything in any organism, that thing must also be happening in humans everywhere.
- Oh, no! GMOs are going to make everyone autistic! by Dr. David Gorski, December 31, 2014. “Seneff, it turns out, is an MIT scientist, but she is not a scientist with any expertise in autism, epidemiology, or, for that matter, any relevant scientific discipline that would give her the background knowledge and skill set to take on analyzing the epidemiological literature regarding autism …. So what we have here is a computer scientist interested in artificial intelligence who thinks she can switch her expertise to medicine, biology, and epidemiology. Let’s just put it this way. An undergraduate degree in biophysics in 1968 does not qualify one to do this sort of research, and, as I discussed in her foray into autism and vaccine epidemiology, it really does show. Badly. The paper was so embarrassingly incompetent that I’m surprised any journal was willing to publish it…”
- Is Glyphosate poisoning everyone?, by Derek Lowe, Science Magazine (AAAS), April 30, 2013. “After spending some time reading this paper over, and looking through the literature, I’ve come to a conclusion: it is, unfortunately, a load of crap. The authors believe that glyphosate is responsible for pretty much every chronic illness in humans, and a list of such is recited several times during the course of the long, rambling manuscript …. This paper is a tissue of assertions and allegations, a tendentious brief for the prosecution that never should have been published in such a form in any scientific journal ….”
References
- http://www.runningthecountry.com/wakefield-and-seneff-address-the-synergistic-toxicity-of-vaccines-and-gmos/#.VtR9F5wrJ1g
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOm2dPA6ws
- http://www.autismone.org/content/featured-session-dr-stephanie-seneff-and-zen-honeycutt-power-prevention-panel
- https://www.nofamass.org/sites/default/files/newsletter-issue/2013_June_Newsletter.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLTK1RpIBxY
- http://prehealth.buffalo.edu/posts/global-health-innovation-conference-at-yale/
- https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/10/14/foia-emails-reveal-anti-gmo-pro-organic-spin-a-team-led-by-tom-philpott-and-michael-pollan/
- https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/11/09/not-even-wrong-seneff-and-samsel-debunked-seralini-crew-12126
- http://www2.lt.cityu.edu.hk/~jsylee/publications/verbforms.pdf
