Friday, January 15, 2010

GM Toxicity Study

My (very expensive) Lenovo laptop just committed suicide after a year and 1 month (which is ironic since I thought that buying computers more expensive than Dell would help them to last longer than the typical 2-3 years). Hopefully I can manage to keep posting regularly with my work computer or (god forbid) my phone.

Anyway...

I was asked about the recent GM toxicity study where researchers re-analyzed Monsanto toxicity data and came to a different conclusion. It's a good example of how the Truth in science lies in the tiny details.

I (along with other) responded to this question recently on U.S. Food Policy.

Other scientists wade in on blogs compiled in the AgBioWorld mailing list.

For example? The "Impact Factor" of scientific journals is rated based on how many people use and cite the articles within. Prestigious journals with huge audiences (e.g. Science and Nature) have Impact Factors in the high teens, twenties and up. Very good journals with small, specialized audiences often have Impact Factors above 5. Journals with Impact Factors below 4 are usually mediocre, specialized journals or (more often) lousy journals. The International Journal of Biological Sciences is not even rated (though they assign themselves their own number of 3.24!).

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for commenting in this issue, Mat! And I'm sorry to hear about your computer.

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  2. Sorry to hear about your computer Mat. I hope you either had good back ups, or the hard drive was at least recoverable when you pulled it out of your computer.

    I've been slacking off on the comments lately, but have really enjoyed your run of posting since the start of the new year. 4,000 LBs Hard Labor in particular as I'll often talk about why old fashioned farming isn't something many people would choose to spend their entire lives doing once they tried it, but don't have many of my own stories to illustrate the point.

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