All you wanted to know about killing Russian rats with GM soybeans?

A Russian story about soya-feed killing baby rats that first appeared on the internet some years back continues to be raised through press-releases and internet discussions, but as far as GMO Pundit can acertain, has yet to be professionally published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Previously Pundit has treated the story as a Russian super-myth that resprouts.

The story continues to sprout, and Pundit carries some of the fresh shoots below.

Some key questions still loom in the Pundit's mind.

1. Did the Russian neurologist I. V. Ermakova who publicises the results have sufficient relevant previous experience in nutritional studies with rats have sufficient experience to feed the rate a nutritiously balanced diet, which is essential to obtain meaningful results? A previous misleading report by Arpad Pusztai got strange results and lots a variability by feeding rats uncooked potatoes. (Pundit raised that issue here, gave key data here, and presented Nina Fedoroff's commentary on it at The Full Monty.)
2. What were the full details of the diets, and why were the studies not done under conditions that assured that all rats received a nutritiously sound diet?
   
3. Why havn't the results been subjected to publication through peer-reviewed scientific channels?

Here some updates about the story:

ISIS Press Release 28/11/06
GM Soya Fed Rats: Stunted, Dead, or Sterile

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reviews the latest findings on the hazards of GM food and feed amid a continuing campaign of denial and misrepresentation by our regulators

A fully referenced version of this paper is posted on ISIS members’ website. (Details behinf firewall)

Alarming findings dismissed by regulators

Female rats fed genetically modified (GM) soya produced excessive numbers of severely stunted pups with over half of the litter dying within three weeks, and the surviving pups are sterile.

These alarming findings came from the laboratory of senior scientist Dr. Irina Ermakova at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The experiments began two years ago, and the initial findings hit the world press when Ermakova was invited to speak at the 11 th Russian Gastroenterological Week in Moscow in October 2005.

Preliminary results have been published in a Russian journal [1], in conference proceedings and official reports [2-7], and a fuller paper containing further results is in press [8]. Ermakova has also spoken at numerous public meetings and scientific conferences and in the popular media, both at home and abroad, but regulators have continued to ignore and dismiss her findings.

UK's Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP) has been systematically biased in favour of studies that fail to show significant effects of GM food and feed right from the beginning. Not surprisingly, it continued to cite research that's seriously flawed as evidence against Ermakova's findings [9], and Ermakova has lodged her own protest [10]....

(continues at ISIS, reference details behind firewall.)


Unfortunately, the NCBI Pubmed medical database does not yet record relevant publications by Dr Ermakova in peer reviewed literature so these citations are unverified. Other comments about this controversy:


STATEMENT ON THE EFFECT OF GM SOYA ON NEWBORN RATS

- Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, 5 December 2005

The Committee has examined a report provided to it by Dr Irina Ermakova containing preliminary results from a study of genetically modified (herbicide-tolerant) soya that was conducted in Russia. The report described reduced growth and increased mortality amongst pups born to rats given soya flour from GM soya beans, when compared with those born to rats given non-GM soya flour or a control group given no soya. The report lacks detail essential to meaningful assessment of the results. In particular, it does not provide key information concerning the composition and nutritional adequacy of the test diets. Also, the Committee notes that these are preliminary results; the study has not been quality-controlled through the normal peer review process preceding scientific publication.

It is well known that rodents fed large quantities of raw soya will suffer various nutrient imbalances that cause reduced growth rates and other adverse effects. This would be expected whether the soya beans are from a GM or non-GM source. It is also well known that protein quality varies between varieties and geographical origins of soya, independently of whether they have been genetically modified. It is therefore essential to ensure that diets which contain a high proportion of different types of soya are carefully balanced and equivalent in terms of nutrients and anti-nutritional components. It is not known whether this was done in the present study.

Unusually, the soya flour was given to the animals alongside conventional feed pellets rather than incorporated into the feed. The mothers received up to 20g of soya flour per day during the study, which could have displaced a significant quantity of the conventional feed pellets which normally assure optimum vitamin and mineral intake. The quantities of soya consumed by each animal are not known and there are no data on the consumption of the conventional feed. Neither were any data on cause of death provided. The GM and non-GM soya samples were obtained from different sources and there is no information on the presence of potential contaminants, such as mycotoxins, resulting from contamination during transportation and storage.

In conclusion, there are a number of possible explanations for the results obtained in this preliminary study, apart from the GM and non-GM origin of the test materials. Without information on a range of important factors conclusions cannot be drawn from this work. The Committee Secretariat is contacting Dr Ermakova to obtain further information on this study and the Committee will consider any further information that can be obtained and review the position if a full report of the study is published in the peer-reviewed literature.

The Committee also notes that Dr Ermakova's findings are not consistent with those described in a peer-reviewed paper published in 2004.1 In a well controlled study no adverse effects were found in mice fed on diets containing 21% GM herbicide-resistant soya beans and followed through upto 4 generations.

A Generational Study of Glyphosate-Tolerant Soybeans on Mouse Fetal, Postnatal, Pubertal and Adult Testicular Development
- Brake, D.G., and D.P. Evenson. 2004. Food Chemistry and Toxicology 42:29-36

Abstract. The health safety of transgenic soybeans (glyphosate-tolerant or Roundup Ready) was studied using the mammalian testis (mouse model) as a sensitive biomonitor of potential toxic effects. Pregnant mice were fed a transgenic soybean or a non-transgenic (conventional) diet through gestation and lactation.
After weaning, the young male mice were maintained on the respective diets. At 8, 16, 26, 32, 63 and 87 days after birth, three male mice and an adult reference mouse were killed, the testes surgically removed, and the cell populations measured by flow cytometry. Multi-generational studies were conducted in the same manner.

The results showed that the transgenic foodstuffs had no effect on macromolecular synthesis or cell growth and differentiation as evidenced by no differences in the percentages of testicular cell populations (haploid, diploid, and tetraploid) between the transgenic soybean-fed mice and those fed the conventional diet. Additionally, there were no differences in litter sizes and body weights of the two groups. It was concluded that the transgenic soybean diet had no negative effect on fetal, postnatal, pubertal or adult testicular development.

Don't Swallow Genetically Modified Statistics

- Stephen Strauss CBC News (Canada), Feb. 3, 2006

I hold in my hand a document which if true likely spells economic decimation for the Monsanto Company - if not every other agribusiness who ever shuffled a gene around inside a plant.

But before going on, let me underscore the qualifier again in italicized capital letters: IF TRUE.

The document is a draft paper sent to me by Russian brain researcher Irina Ermakova which describes a rat/soy experiment. In addition to their regular food, she gave some female rats Monsanto's genetically modified soybeans before mating, during mating, during pregnancy and while they were nursing.

She gave a second group non-genetically modified soy and a third bunch of rodents ate plain old rat chow. When the rats gave birth, 55 per cent of the offspring of the animals fed genetically modified food died within three weeks as opposed to about seven per cent of the control animals, and nine per cent of the animals fed unmodified soy.

As well, a very large number of the GM-fed rat pups were severely underweight. Ermakova believes is that the bacterial genes in the GM soy had somehow made their way through the acid turbulence of the rat's stomachs and into some of the developing fetuses. Once in the fetus, the genes proved deadly.

Ermakova's findings are quite troubling but curiously they haven't made it into the world's general consciousness via science's usual, high banked channels.

Other scientists didn't look at the methodology, try to pick holes in the results, and if they couldn't then agree that it was worth being published.

Instead Ermakova presented her research last October at a meeting of a Russian environmental organization which later put a summary of the findings up on the web. The fact that it hadn't been reviewed by scientists has stopped newspapers in England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the Philippines from describing the results, often under inflammatory headlines such as "GM could harm your unborn baby."

You will by now have a couple of other questions. Why publish via the internet? Happenstance, according to Ermakova. She says she ran out of money before she could complete a larger study, and while awaiting her new funding, decided in the interest of the general good to report what she had already found.

She swears she is going to submit the final project to a peer reviewed publication.

Why would a brain researcher do research on soy beans? The simplest answer seems to be that Ermakova has become, as they say in French, parti pris. Specifically she has moved from being a sort of disinterested brain wiring scientist into the greenest and most anti-GM of environmentalists.

In addition to the rat/soya work, she has recently one paper suggesting that genetically modified organisms somehow will cause climate change and another that they will induce "mental and genetic degradation."

It's not that she isn't entitled to these opinions it's just that when someone with them produces such a remarkable study you want to immediately call the impartiality police. The purpose of a peer review is that if should pronounce: These true results transcend the fierce politics of their initiator.

Having said that, a casual scan of the unpublished paper doesn't reveal any obvious winces.

The rat mothers came from the same genetic stock, were impregnated by the same males, were offered the same amount of food which seems nutritionally to be similar, yet produced dramatically different progeny.

Why the die offs, then? Well all the external evidence suggests either that this result was either an aberration, or that someone is cooking the data. Worse than cooking, boiling it.

The external evidence is a kind of unscripted animal GM experiment that has been going on. A huge proportion of the soy that is fed to cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry in North America, Brazil, Argentina and some other places has been genetically modified. If the six-fold increase in death was real, many farmyards today should resemble a dead baby battlefield.

Why hasn't that been happening, I e-mailed Ermakova. She responded that she heard from someone that 25 American farmers reported similar problems but "also I think that most of farmers are under the pressure of transnational companies. And scientists also: many of them refused to perform these kinds of experiments."

Oh, yeah if GM soy was killing more than half a farmer's animals and leaving many others looking like pig or chicken anorexics, the first thing on his mind is how can I keep this terrible, terrible news from those nice people at Monsanto. And of course there wouldn't be a single scientist in the world interested in understanding such a barnyard holocaust.

What's wrong with Ermakova's numbers is that they are simply too big to be true. A 15 per cent increase in mortality, yeah, well, maybe. A six-fold jump in corpses, would have already turned into a class action suit the size of Alberta.

This is a study which I predict will never, ever pass peer review, because all the external evidence says this is that worst of all scientific results a bogus one.

--
Stephen Strauss wrote articles, columns and editorials about science and technology for the Globe and Mail for more than 20 years. He has also authored three books, several book chapters, and for his efforts received numerous awards. Through all his time in journalism, he still remains smitten by the enduring wisdom of the motto of Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Say what is.


Genetically-modified Soy Affects Posterity?
AgBioView on Oct. 27, 2005
- Christopher Preston

The following story is starting to do the rounds of the anti-GM websites. The original report was published in a Russian online newspaper in mid-October, but is only now starting to do the rounds.
The story can be found at a variety of places including http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html
and on the NAGS website
http://www.geneticsafety.org/info.php?txt_id=19&nid=7768&page=0.

On the surface, this study appears to indicate a major danger with GM soy fed to rats. There was 6-fold increase in the number of deaths and the surviving progeny were significantly smaller. The study in question was conducted by Dr. Irina Ermakova of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the results released at a conference organised by National Association for Genetic Security. Dr. Ermakova is a researcher on brain function whose specialty is in the function neurotransplants into the brain, and who has published in both Russian and English journals.

....continues at The Full Monty.


Update
See September 2007 report analysing this issue in Nature Biotechnology