Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer

https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-roundup-lawsuit/monsanto-secret-documents/

by givan • 9 years ago

353 113 9 years ago

jgalvez• 9 years ago

Michael Clayton anyone?

Yep, except he wouldve been taken care of by team B and even if he hadn't, the prosecuting DA would've been gotten to and dropped the case under prosecutorial discretion. The movie had to have a semi happy ending for the plots sake. Real life is much nastier.

brndnmg• 9 years ago

yawn, oh no they wouldn't do that would they? sips coffee

43224gg252• 9 years ago

Of course they did. Anyone on the internet about a year - 2 years ago remembers every time you mentioned monsanto they would send shills in to defend them and call you a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.

kfriede• 9 years ago

To be fair, I think a good portion of those 'shills' were organic (no pun intended). To this day, a lot of the popular "anti-monsanto", "anti-gmo" groups (e.g. David Avocado Wolfe) are pretty nutjob and have a large community of people who dislike them.

wu-ikkyu2• 9 years ago

lot of the popular "anti-monsanto", "anti-gmo" groups (e.g. David Avocado Wolfe) are pretty nutjob

It's worth noting that having such groups is a commonly used counter intelligence tactic: create a loud and incoherent pseudo-strawman opposition to distract from those who are actually asking legitimate questions.

An effective astroturf campaign calls for both pro-x and anti-x shills.

themgt• 9 years ago

It's been really frustrating trying to have any nuanced stance on GMOs with proponents doing the "durr all modern crops are genetically modified by human selection" and such. Like no shit, it is still possible to acknowledge that and believe that there are legitimate concerns about intellectual property, or with modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it.

A lot of the pro-GMO people seem to argue in really bad faith if they're not paid shills.

bllguo• 9 years ago

I'd probably blame the fanatic GMO opponents first, who can typically be refuted by the simple arguments you mock.

Unfortunately nuance and middle ground are hard to come by online. And it doesn't help when you dismiss all GMO proponents as paid shills.

vbuwivbiu6• 9 years ago

Exactly this. Every thread on GM quickly polarizes into useless for and against sides, when we need to be selective about it.

And I've never bought the characterization of breeding/selection as a form of GM. Breeding is selection of a pathetically tiny set of modifications, but GM is on a whole other level. With GM we can write arbitrary binary strings of code into any organism. That's simply not comparable with breeding -- the space of realizable phenotypes is orders of magnitude larger with GM.

Laforet6• 9 years ago

The organic food industry is just as, if not more guilty of astroturfing, but in any case it's impossible to have a nuanced conversation with those whose level of argument never goes beyond "baa baa monsanto evil GM poison" It's quite telling that most of them have never even heard about Sygenta.

modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it

This is purely speculation at this point. I recognise the ecological harms of massive monoculture enabled by GM but again, opponents seems fixated on unproven health effects and miss the bigger picture.

tstactplsignore• 9 years ago

Guess I and most of the people in my department are "those people"!

Isn't your comment self-defeating? You have legitimate concerns about corporate abuse of IP law and a specific crop product- not with the scientific field of genetic modification. So why do you insist on villifying the term GMO instead of using accurate language to describe what you're talking about? From the other perspective, I cannot begin to understand how you are the one not acting in bad faith.

driverdan• 9 years ago

It's been really frustrating trying to have any scientific stance on GMOs with opponents doing the "durr all GMOs are bad and are going to kill us" and such. Like no shit, it is still possible to acknowledge gaps in research and believe that there are legitimate concerns about intellectual property, or with not modifying a crop to increase its nutritional content to save starving people.

A lot of the anti-GMO people seem to argue in really bad faith if they're not paid shills.

See, I can create straw man arguments too.

eadz• 9 years ago

It is a real shame not to be able to trust "science" anymore. We'll have to come up with a new word for what we used to call science because I don't think corporations and media set on manipulating public opinion and laws will give it back.

yourapostasy2• 9 years ago

It may take a shift in how we share information and perform science before we find a way to trust as much again.

Beyond the existing standing question of why more science papers don't publish information like the computer code they used, I've wondered why there isn't a push for "science-as-code". For example, if there was a common DSL that describes science lab automation, then a futuristic science paper would come with some a package that would drive another lab's robots and equipment to do the exact same experiment with the same steps, and let other labs alter the steps as they see fit once they reproduce the same results to toy with the experiment's findings.

Then all the calibration steps of each piece of equipment, all the sampling steps, all the measurement steps, etc. are all completely reproduced as code. Steps only expressible as "human hands do [insert-motions-here]" are translated to waldo motions, pressure sensing, etc.

Then a lab notebook would be filled with human interpretations of what scientists are seeing, hypotheses, etc., alongside a time-series recording of every step taken, environmental metrics measured, expressed in that DSL.

hyperpape• 9 years ago

Scientists should publish more detail about methods in general, but we're a long way from the kind of precision that would enable robots to duplicate everything. A good deal of science happens with graduate students literally building their own apparatus.

throwaway57522• 9 years ago

Science is a process and is close to an infallible thing as we have created as humans. There is no problem with science.

What is happening here is "lying". The people creating false and misleading scientific results are liars and it becomes a question of taking skeptical views towards sources and knowing who to trust.

meric3• 9 years ago

Christianity is belief in Christ and is close to an infallible thing as we have as humans. There is no problem with Christianity.

What is happening here is "corruption". The people using Christianity to further their own egos and desires are liars and it becomes a question of taking skeptical views towards authoritative figures and knowing who to trust.

Be careful about making Science™ a religion.

Nothing in this world is infallible.

battwell• 9 years ago

Science is a process and is close to an infallible thing as we have created as humans. There is no problem with science.

Wouldn't you say mathmatics is the most infallible thing human's have come to creating? The level of rigor in mathematics is much higher and there aren't as many repeatability issues.

lumberjack3• 9 years ago

It's not like it was hard to figure out what was going on.

On one hand you have scientists publishing letters of concern regarding glyphosate arguing for more studies to be done because of hints of carcinogenic properties.

On the other hand you have a full blown shill campaign on Reddit and other website, being all like, "there is absolutely nothing to worry about, why do you hate science!". And lobbyists bullying the EFSA into publishing a statement in support of glyphosate so that it could be relicense for further use within Europe.

You can trust science. You just have to be aware of the conflicts of interests. Monsanto hasn't bought every single scientist out there.

eip2• 9 years ago

The funniest/saddest part of this is that even the people that catch on to the probable poison that is glyphosate and the shill campaign behind it will still angrily defend the safety and efficacy of IG Farben vaccines while happily eating Monsanto GM Frankencorn grown with glyphosate.

Depopulation is necessary and luckily it's also fairly easy.

grecy• 9 years ago

It is a real shame not to be able to trust "science" anymore.

I agree. My brother (Aerospace Eng.) and I (Software Eng.) talk often about this with our Dad (Electrical Eng.).

Given that big business and BIG money has now been proven to have hidden the truth about Monsanto Chemicals, sugar and many other things, how many other things in our would would big business pay billions or even trillions to cover up if they had a study that showed it was somehow harmful?

Just to throw out some ideas, how many trillions would they spend to hide that cell phones are bad, or TVs or "new car smell", or plastic containers for food.

It's quite clear that almost everything in our society that is sold for profit is now backed by trillions and trillions of dollars, and they would hide any ill effects if they could.

It's not that "science" failed us, it's that we let money buy it out, much like democracies too (i.e. unlimited campaign contributions)

bamboozled• 9 years ago

So basically, it's becoming harder to know which science to trust ?

gehwartzen• 9 years ago

I don't think the problem is with Science or rather the scientific method. Instead it is largely a problem of how scientific data is published and then ultimately presented to the public.

In order for science to truly work in advancing our understanding of a given problem all studies both with positive and negative results need to be published. However, that is often not what happens. In academia often only the 'interesting' results end up getting submitted to journals and published. In the private sector the problem is even more pronounced because there is a vested interest in only publishing results with a certain outcome.

I work in R&D and we often do scientific studies that don't get published because they don't advance our companies viewpoint or could harm sales. And of course that makes perfect sense when you are not required to do so. So in the end you have to take that into account when evaluating a study, especially when coming from industry. There could be contradictory results that never saw the light of day.

Now there is a very simple fix to this which would greatly alleviate this problem: Have a requirement for publishing that forces the researcher to submit the scientific hypothesis, planed research methods, and variables to be studied before submitting the final results, no matter what they may be. This also prevents a researcher from cherry picking results after the fact and leaving out variables that cast doubt on the original hypothesis.

ourmandave• 9 years ago

Isn't this right out of the Big Tobacco playbook when they "scientists" in lab coats producing studies that smoking was healthy?

The Tobacco Industry: The Pioneer of Fake News

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5402187/

russdill2• 9 years ago

Is there a scientific consensus (or at least majority) as to the carcinogenic effect of the Roundup product?

cholantesh2• 9 years ago

There isn't. Glyphosate is well studied, and all evidence exonerate it. The constituent chemicals of Roundup may interact with each other to render the cocktail toxic. But that's not equivalent to carcinogenicity. And it's not well studied as yet.

ada19812• 9 years ago

Who actually likes Monstanto? I imagine a vast majority of the American people would support an outright shutdown of their business.

lumberjack3• 9 years ago

They do create useful products so they cannot be shutdown. The problem is in doing so, we trust them with too much power. In this case we are trusting them, not to poison our children in the name of profit.

bpodgursky2• 9 years ago

Luckily we still have the rule of law, so the majority can't simply shut down a company they dislike based on an internet misinformation campaign.

colordrops4• 9 years ago

Campaign implies organization. Who do you suppose is working to shut down Monsanto?

ada19812• 9 years ago

Seems that Monsanto is running the misinformation campaign.

0xbear• 9 years ago

I like Monsanto and use roundup to spray weeds behind the house so I don't have to trim them. I would be very disappointed if I could not do this, because those weeds grow on a rather steep grade and trimming there is a nightmare. For the record, based on the science available to me (nut job tree hugger sites are not science), I consider roundup to be safe when used as intended.

kevin_thibedeau• 9 years ago

You could at least buy generic glyphosate and not fund them. The generics tend not to have the modern cocktails of other chemicals that are suspect.

jonplackett• 9 years ago

News-flash, company people have known was evil for ages, actually is still evil.

nerpderp832• 9 years ago

Shouldn't this be illegal in some form? It is morally reprehensible to use "money as free speech" to suppress scientific truth.

olliej2• 9 years ago

Given the number of ghost written publications shouldn't there be a slew of retractions?

It's unethical, and generally a violation of journal rules to publish another's work listed with yourself as an author.

Then there's a journal editor that they pay, who they worked with to get a paper retracted, surely that should result in a re-review of everything involved there as well?

Has anyone done the work to determine which papers are involved and start the retraction notification process?

tptacek8• 9 years ago

I don't know what Monsanto did or didn't do and don't have any particular rooting interest for Monsanto, but I think it's worth noting that the published science for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate (the "weed killer" we're talking about here) is extremely flimsy.

Most publicity about "cancer" and "Monsanto" is traceable back to an IARC report that the World Health Organization (IARC's parent) essentially retracted. The report itself concerned dozens of different pesticides and herbicides and mentioned glyphosate only in passing. The studies it referred to equivocated about any link between glyphosate and human cancer.

(I'm going from memory here and someone will probably correct me on this, which will be great!)

It would be surprising if glyphosate turned out to be toxic, because it straightforwardly targets a metabolic pathway that plants have and the entire kingdom of Animalia lacks.

California recently added glyphosate to its list of chemicals that it's required to alert consumers about. But of course, that list is long and includes substances that virtually nobody controls their own exposure to, such as acrylamide --- a known human carcinogen --- which is universally present in cooked foods.

Finally, and this is obvious, but we're reading articles on a plaintiff lawyer's website. That's fine, but you're clearly not going to get the whole story from them. For instance, the lawyers are happy to leave you with a headline about Monsanto trying to "retract a cancer study". But they're of course going to leave out the fact that the study in question was the Séralini study, of "Séralini affair" fame; you can look this up in Wikipedia to see what I'm referring to.

laser• 9 years ago

My understanding is that the danger of glyphosate is one step removed from direct action on "human" cells, so bringing up metabolic pathways is a straw-man argument. The suspected danger is from disruption to the symbiosis of the entire human system, including the ~10x bacterial cells for every human cell that can be killed by glyphosate.

https://www.nature.com/articles/npjbiofilms20163

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

tptacek8• 9 years ago

If this effect is real, can you link to animal studies conclusively demonstrating it? Because obviously we've been feeding a lot of rats a lot of glyphosate.

bri3d• 9 years ago

While glyphosate is only questionable, Round Up itself, which includes a variety of surfactants, seems to have a more pronounced effect - both cytotoxic and mutagenic.

Many of the later documents in this dump center around formulated Round-Up's unexplained toxicity when compared to the survey of glyphosate studies in the literature, and a variety of understudied surfactants in the formulation.

Ex (ignoring sensationalized document titles):

http://baumhedlundlaw.com/pdf/monsanto-documents/37-Monsanto...

http://baumhedlundlaw.com/pdf/monsanto-documents/38-Email-Sh...

http://baumhedlundlaw.com/pdf/monsanto-documents/42-Internal...

tptacek8• 9 years ago

Sure! And this is a really good point. But then, how many of those surfactants (and other additives) are unique to Monsanto, versus things that are present in lots of other herbicides?

Again: fuck Monsanto, I guess? My interest here is mostly in the notion that glyphosate is toxic, since that, along with "glyphosate is genetic engineering" and "Monsanto sues farmers for growing seeds that blow onto their fields" falls into the bucket of "things the Internet very strongly believes about Monsanto, despite being based on very incomplete information".

Thanks for that clarification.

burntrelish12732• 9 years ago

There's a video where a Monsanto lobbyist spouts circular talking-points about how glyphosate was safe to drink, offered either Round Up or glyphosate and refused to drink it.

https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA?t=25s

It's irrelevant if glyphosate alone is cancerous or not, because 99.9999% of deployment is via sprays like Round Up. The combined product, in both animal and human models, need thorough mutagenic research. It's just news shows don't want to give Monsanto free advertising or face libel laws, so they conflate the generic compound with the product.

cageface• 9 years ago

The problem isn't pure glphosate, it's the complete mixture that is actually sprayed on crops that seems to be toxic to humans:

https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/07/07/monsantos-roundup-pest...

It took until 2014, but eight out of nine pesticide formulations tested were up to one thousand times more toxic than their so-called active ingredients. So, when we just test the isolated chemicals, we may not get the whole story. Roundup was found to be 100 times more toxic than glyphosate itself. Moreover, Roundup turned out to be among the most toxic pesticides they tested.

colordrops4• 9 years ago

It would be surprising if glyphosate turned out to be toxic, because it straightforwardly targets a metabolic pathway that plants have and the entire kingdom of Animalia lacks.

Don't be so high and mighty about the science against glyphosate being flimsy, then throw out your own pet theory in support of glyphosate without any scientific studies. It's hypocrisy. Either you only support theories backed by strong scientific evidence or you don't. You can't have it both ways.

KSteffensen2• 9 years ago

The fact that the metabolic pathway glyphosate mainly targets in plants doesn't exist in mammals does not preclude it being carcinogenic by other biochemical mechanisms.

luckydude• 9 years ago

So this seems like a deflection to me. As I've said before, my dad thought his non-hodgkins lymphoma was due to roundup and you shouted me down saying glyphosate hasn't been shown to cause cancer (though there are certainly a bunch of people who disagree with that).

The real point is that it is not glyphosate we're talking about, it's roundup. And it would appear that the cocktail of whatever makes up roundup may not be fine. So please address that, not glyphosate.

ScottBurson• 9 years ago

It would be surprising if glyphosate turned out to be toxic, because it straightforwardly targets a metabolic pathway that plants have and the entire kingdom of Animalia lacks.

Biochemistry is not that simple. My favorite example is n-hexane, the linear hydrocarbon with 6 carbon atoms. It is more toxic than any of the other small alkanes; about 3 times as toxic as n-pentane, with 5 carbons, but also less toxic than n-heptane, with 7 [0]. Why? I don't know if anyone knows, but seems like it must have something to do with the exact size of the molecule. Maybe it's just short enough to fit someplace and just long enough to cause a problem when it's there.

The point is, so much of biochemistry is about how molecules fit together in 3-D space. This is not something that's easy to predict. Your line of reasoning here is just not valid.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=e4_S46UcI2AC&pg=PT286&lpg=...

znpy• 9 years ago

Uh... My grandpa used to use Roundup in order to kill weeds in his cultivation land.

ugh123• 9 years ago

Great. Whats your point?

Zarath2• 9 years ago

Is he alive? Did he die of cancer?

tnorgaard• 9 years ago

I see there is a few posts repeating the common interpretation that glyphosate is not dangerous because it only targets metabolic pathway only animals has, so for the sake of discussion here is another viewpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVolljHmqEs (disregard the clickbait title), summary: Glyphosate is not bad for your body, but it does kill everything in your stomach, and that is not so awesome.

mgh2• 9 years ago

Here is a study of 12 diseases correlated with glyphosate, it is not official as in a published journal, but given that even pubmed states there are not enough toxicity studies, that most safety papers are not independently funded, and scientists who dare to say the contrary are shut down, I rather be more cautious than sorry: https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson....

_Codemonkeyism2• 9 years ago

Walking by a Bayer - Monsanto owner pending regulatory approval - building every morning, with people streaming in and I'm reminded most people will work for anyone who pays them.

_Codemonkeyism2• 9 years ago

It's interesting how the discussion of Monsanto shifted. The discussion was about how Monsanto changed the seed/weed business from a buy model to a subscription/license model for farmers - which is a disruptive fundamental change. Now the discussion is mainly ab Glyphosate.

Zarath2• 9 years ago

It's weed killer. Literally poison. Can we just curb our faith in science just a little bit and use some common sense. It's incredibly likely that ingesting poison is bad for you. Let's leave open the possibility that it isn't, but I personally require that people prove it's safe rather than continuing to ingest it until proven otherwise.

It's honestly just baffling to me that people find it surprising that consistent, low doses of poison may cause cancer.

stouset• 9 years ago

Just because something is poisonous to the biology of plants, in doses typically used as a weed killer, doesn't make it toxic to humans.

That's not to say this doesn't cause cancer. Whether or not it does is irrelevant to the point that plant biology is not human biology — hell, other mammals' biology isn't human biology (see: cats and chocolate, grapes, macadamia nuts, and onions) — and making inferences based upon this hypothesis is not particularly likely to result in correct assessments.

Further, "the dose makes the poison". Alcohol is a poison. Oxygen is a poison in high enough doses. Is weed killer a poison? In some arbitrarily high dose, certainly. In some arbitrarily small dose, no. In the dose you're likely to encounter on the surface of produce? Possibly, perhaps even probably. But again, making inferences based on the fact that it kills weeds is faulty thinking. By that logic, one would be forgiven for avoiding onions at all cost; after all, they're cat poison.

jacobr• 9 years ago

If my cat is poisoned I would definitely avoid what it ate until there's overwhelming evidence that it's not harmful for me.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)

"the ambivalent quality of pharmakon is more than purely a matter of ‘wrong drug, wrong dose, wrong route of administration, wrong patient’. Drugs, as is the case with anti-retroviral therapy, have the capacity to be beneficial and detrimental to the same person at the same time."

akvadrako• 9 years ago

Y'all should take this with a grain of salt. Monsanto is hated as a company; the media just loves to vilify them. I've been suspicious of any anti-Monsanto news since looking into their lawsuit[1] against a farmer who grew illegally obtained patented seeds. The media and commenters made a big deal about predatory behavior but they it was clearly the farmer being an asshole. Anti-science/GMO nuts just latch on to anything without a care where the evidence points.

[1] Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser

ionised• 9 years ago

Colour me surprised.

Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer

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