NOTE: Interesting that no one is asking for this Golden Rice study to be retracted. Quite apart from the total lack of ethics involved, the Chinese investigation into how the research was conducted has apparently provided evidence that seems to contradict the claims made about how often the children were actually fed Golden Rice during the study.
As Wang Zheng, a policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Policy and Management in Beijing, has commented, "How much Golden Rice did the children have exactly? Either the researchers are lying about this now or they lied about it in their paper. It's a serious offence either way."
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14512
And if, as Zheng maintains, the researchers can be shown, either now or in the past, to have lied about a key point in their research, then the rest of the information given about the study in their published paper has to be treated as highly suspect, particularly given the more general lack of ethics exposed by the Chinese investigation - see the article below.
Already this year we have had the retraction of a study by researchers at the Monsanto-backed Danforth Center that claimed to have found a way through genetic engineering to boost the protein content of cassava. The retraction occurred "after researchers failed to find any supporting data to back up its [the paper's] claims."
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/51-2012/14251
Retraction, of course, is inescapable once the fact has emerged that there is simply no data at all to back up the published claims! But a blind eye sometimes seems to be turned to other breaches of scientific ethics.
Only in the last few weeks has come news of researchers studying the Bt toxins used in GM crops having doctored images in a whole series of published papers. This is an academic crime as heinous as plagiarism, but neither of the researchers involved seem to be facing the sack, although they have been disciplined and one of the researchers is having to step down as head of their university's Committee on Bioethics!
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/university-disciplines-researchers-who-study-toxins-used-in-gmo-crops-at-least-seven-corrections-to-follow/
In October of this year came the headline, "Top GM researcher falsified patent claim to grab national award." Yet to date that researcher seems to neither have lost the award or been disciplined in any other way!
http://www.gmwatch.org/component/content/article/14364
Back in February we had another remarkable headline, "Untangling India's Bt cotton fraud: ICAR's top research institutes and GEAC [the key GM regulator] exposed in Bt cotton research scam."
http://www.gmwatch.org/component/content/article/14364
That's all just in the last 12 months!
---
---
Better supervision of research urged
Wang Qingyun
China Daily, 13 December 2012
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-12/13/content_16012644.htm
*Genetically modified rice project reveals lack of scientific ethics
The controversial genetically modified rice experiment in Hunan province shows that science research projects in China need tighter supervision, said Deng Haihua, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health.
"The incident has revealed that individual scientific researchers lack understanding of laws and self-discipline regarding scientific ethics. Some individual projects have not been well supervised by the institutes responsible," Deng said on Wednesday. "The ministry has required institutes to improve the supervision of their projects while encouraging international cooperation in scientific research."
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement on Dec 6 saying that researchers in an experiment on Vitamin A efficiency - which tested genetically modified rice on schoolchildren in Hengyang, Hunan, in May and June 2008 - kept health authorities and subjects in the dark.
Guangwen Tang, a researcher at Tufts University in the United States who was responsible for the project, brought the GM rice to China for the experiment.
Tang and her Chinese counterparts in charge of the project told the parents that their children would eat "rice rich in carotenoid" and "purposely concealed" the fact that the rice was genetically modified, said the statement.
The China CDC also said authorities learned in July 2008 that the experiment used GM rice and they conducted an investigation, but Yin Shi'an from China CDC's institute of nutrition and food safety and Wang Yin from the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences, the other two in charge of the experiment, "lied and said the research had not started yet".
In August, Tang published a paper on beta-carotene in GM rice in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which she co-wrote with others, including Yin and Wang, in which she cited the experiment in Hunan in 2008, saying the study recruitment processes and protocol were approved by the Institutional Review Board, Tufts Medical Center and the Ethics Review Committee of the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences in China.
The Zhejiang academy admitted on Sept 7 that its committee of ethics had approved the project in 2003, but it had no idea that its experiment in 2008 tested GM rice.
Yin and Wang were fired for academic misconduct.
Hu Yuming, a researcher at the Hunan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, another Chinese author of the paper, was fired as the assistant director of the center for slack supervision of the experiment.
Yin admitted in an interview with China Central Television that aired on Dec 8 that the project's team translated "golden rice", a type of GM rice, into "rice containing rich carotene" in the Chinese version of the informed consent agreed to by the parents in an attempt to avoid sensitivity.
Zhai Xiaomei, a member of the medical ethics expert committee under the Ministry of Health, believed that part of the reason for concealing the fact that the rice was genetically modified may be people's irrational fear about GM food, though food such as oil made from GM soy beans has been widely sold in China.
"There is not yet evidence showing GM food is either safe or hazardous," she said. "However, they were not justified in keeping the subjects and their parents in the dark. One of the prerequisites to conducting such experiments is consent based on total information."
The Health Ministry in 2007 issued a regulation on ethics reviews of biomedical experiments on humans, stipulating that nobody is allowed to trick or threaten people into agreeing to be subjects, and that the subject has the right to back out at any stage of the experiment.
Besides deliberately lowering the standards in an ethics review, ethics committees, especially those at grassroots medical institutes, lack the capacity to judge the validity of an experiment, Zhai said.
"Grassroots workers need more training to prevent similar incidents from happening," she said.