Warren Taylor, Lennox Head
Mr Olsen (Letters, September 24) discusses a paper by Séralini et al which purports to discover that feeding rats GM food causes them to get cancer.
It is in fact a poorly done study and deeply flawed paper by a group that is prejudicially antithetical to GM foods.
With groups of only 10 per variable, complicated design and no statistical perception, along with cherry-picking of what results they did get while ignoring the results they did not like, they allowed themselves to make headlines while in fact distributing non-truth.
For a full discussion of the faults: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/09/24/bad-science-on-gmos-it-reminds-me-of-the-antivaccine-movement/ for a long version and http://news.discovery.com/earth/gm-corn-tumor-study-120920.html for a short version.
What this study and the monopoly of Monsanto that similarly distorts the science shows is we need a much strengthened public science sector that can do good studies without prejudice. Paying attention in science class and having a look around for various different views on the internet would not hurt either.
Indeed those who publish or promote unscientific, misleading or falsified data are doing a huge disservice. Their claims undermine the credibility of those who are legitimately trying to raise awareness and protest against real environmental problems because it paints all protest with the same tone of untruth.
This political and scientific naivety of average green activist are the greatest issues that the Green movement needs to come to terms with if it is to be taken seriously by the broader population.