Report on Improbability A

The concealed but deleterious effects of pesticides upon the people exposed to them should come as no surprise. According to a French documentary screened recently at the Riddled Film Club, these effects include robbing the victims of wits if they are male, turning them into murderous rage zombies, and of clothes if they are female.

Since 1978 when that documentary was filmed, the Big-Farma pesticide manufacturers have got better at suppressing The Truth. Among their tactics is to block the publication channels for researchers like G.-É. Séralini (whose name should be familiar). Leaving him with no way of disseminating his report on Glyphosate-based Herbicide,* other than paying an execrable junk-journal from the pits of SCIRP to host an on-line copy.

SCIRP journals are not designed to be read, or cited, only to provide padding for CVs, and we only know of this report because it came to the attention of Retraction Watch, after an obscure Indian plagiarist paid it the highest form of flattery, re-publishing it under his own name.**

Anyway... it turns out that Séralini was hiding the lede under a bushel, and burying his light beneath a haystack (or something like that). We must read all the way to the antepenultimate sentence of his report before it careers abruptly off the rails and morphs into an advertisement for the pesticide-protective properties of commercial plant-based medicaments.

On following Ref [13], it proves to be one of two reports from Séralini's laboratory. Both published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology, and both pimping homeopathic preparations from Sevene Pharmacorp for their in-vitro cyto-protective effects ["five precise medicinal plant extracts called Circ1, Dig1, Dig2, Sp1, and Uro1"]. And in all fairness, I am prepared to believe that granulated sucrose might help keep cells alive in a Petri-dish culture... whether or not it is the end-product of an elaborate process of diluting herbal extracts into non-existence.

Whoops, wrong Petrie dishes

Other researchers -- more diligent than your humble Riddled staff -- have followed the skein of threads, and unwoven the tangled web, and found that despite Sevene Pharma's generosity with research funding, consultancy fees and the provision of co-authors to Séralini, it is not yet making money. It seems to be kept afloat by support from IVI, Invitation to Life. A French whacko-religious grouping that's weird enough to have escaped from the pages of a Neal Stephenson novel. Think of a Catholic version of Scientology, but with more vibrational-harmony homeopathic faith-healing. And the Stephenson novel will be slimmer on account of the escape, so it's a win-win!

Here is that link again, because the whole account of the cult's belief-system is sufficiently bizarre that you will benefit from having two copies of it open at once and reading it in stereo.

Then we watched another documentary... this one about using non-chemical methods to control crop pests. And wouldn't you know it, sending out inimical pest-destroying vibrations into the soil also turns people into murderous rage zombies, while reviving corpses from their graves, without even the mitigating aspect of the clothing loss. So we're stuck with the Round-up and the Atrazine and the Bt-toxen, and must hope that Séralini is right about the protective power of granulated sugar. Heaven knows, the sugar industry could do with some good publicity.

"Ice-cream-cone Mutation"
-- Increasingly common

* SPOILER -- Séralini doesn't recommend drinking it. It will rot your genes, mutate your children, leap from victim to victim through fleeting skin contact alone, and it probably sterilises frogs.

** Hitendra J. Jani could be described as an expert in recycling, and the management of toxic waste; he has made a career of stealing material from places that already seem like the bottom of the barrel and somehow finding even cheaper and nastier ones to reprint it.