8 ms·

Monsanto Effort to Defund Cancer Researchers

261 points by mgamache 7y ago

ptah 7y ago
Event like this convinces me that government is primarily a servant of big business
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
  - specialist 7y ago
    How do we fix this? The core conundrum is the two party adversarial system. More durable are three way food fights (trilemmas), like the USA's Constitution balance of powers (leg vs exec vs court). Not perfect. Just better. IMHO.
- AndrewDucker 7y ago
  "Government" is a broad grouping. It varies depending on the politicians making it to. What you see here is largely a Republican effort to defund an organisation that's... Government funded. So if you want the research to happen then that's not less government, it's different government.
- ghobs91 7y ago
  and it will continue to be, so long as political donations of any size are legal.
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    It’s not just the size of the donation, the PAC system permits tremendous amounts of dark money whose donors aren’t disclosed. Donating directly to politicians is fairly straightforward and transparent due to campaign finance law, but PACs operating “independently” and in the background undermine the system in a huge way
    - ghobs91 7y ago
      My point is that as long as donations of any kind are legal, politicians will continue to optimize for fundraising, rather than optimizing for policies that benefit the largest number of people. Who is most equipped to donate large sums to politicians? The wealthy.
      - snowwrestler 7y ago
        If donations are no longer legal, only the wealthy will have enough money to run for office. It would not have the democratizing effect you seem to think it would.
        save_ferris 7y ago
        This just isn’t true, and this problem largely already exists in the US. Many countries use publicly funded elections where all candidates get a set sum from the government to use towards a campaign. This would stop the billions flowing into races and ensure that all candidates have the same campaign budget. Look at Texas, for example. The annual salary for a state legislator is pitiful (like $10k), which basically prevents anyone who isn’t independently wealthy from running from state office.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    Or as long as we allow free speech. As long as we have free speech, whomever can buy the largest megaphone has the ability to drown out everyone else. You have to regulate speech so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone, but then groups that most people want to drown out also gets to speak. You can try limiting it so only some groups get access, but then you just get regulatory capture of speech.
    - okmokmz 7y ago
      This doesn't make any sense. Government is a servant of big business because we allow free speech? How exactly would you go about regulating speech "so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone"? Censorship would absolutely not help improve the situation
      - Elrac 7y ago
        I think _theoretically_ the way this is thought to work is that Amazon or Google could take out daily ads in all major media that say "vote for John Doe, he's a great guy!", i.e. well-heeled companies could do candiates' campaigning for them, while we ordinary people can't afford that much public exposure. That may be true enough, but it's not a phenomenon we've been seeing. What we _have_ been seeing in the past few years, especially after _Citizen's United_ and the dawn of PACs, is wealthy corporations legally handing money to candidates to do their campaigning with. This would and should have nothing to do with free speech, except that there have been recent (SC?) rulings declaring financial donations, i.e. money, to be a form of speech, so basically unlimited political donations are considered protected under the 1st Amendment. I personally consider this a grave error in judgment, undoubtedly politically motivated.
      - SkyBelow 7y ago
        >Government is a servant of big business because we allow free speech? Well, you have to include the middle step that voters are strongly influenced by what they hear, advertising, and the like and that many voters do not do a deep amount of digging. Also you have to include the other step that there is a lot of research in marketing and psychology to sway people's reactions and opinions. But once you combine the above, it turns out that those with control of the primary information distribution can influence public opinion. Now, they can't convince people that grass is purple and the sky is green, but they can sway public opinion. Politicians realize this and are thus swayed by those who control the information lest they make enemies who will seek to promote their opponents either in primaries or general elections (at least in the US with its government system). >How exactly would you go about regulating speech "so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone"? I don't have a clue, and as you suggest, such actions won't be without unforeseen consequences which could end up worse than the original problem. A few countries in the EU seem to have laws made to dampen the problem without fixing it, but the actual effectiveness of the laws is something I haven't seen any peer reviewed research on.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  Ego is the servant of money, and government is highly corrupted with ego at the moment.
NPMaxwell 7y ago
Roundup, asbestos, leaded gas, and lots of other engineering products say to me that the industry/culture of engineering has a problem. I think that problem is not engineering itself, but emerges when engineering is mixed with current MBA culture of stockholder value rather than stakeholder value. Obvious, and obviously worthless, strategies are to add BS "ethics" courses to engineering programs. It's possible to turn this ship. I don't yet have ideas for how it's actually done.
- throwawaywindev 7y ago
  It’s an economic problem that boils down to not putting a high enough price on negative externalities.
  - zzzeek 7y ago
    the 11000 lawsuits against Monsanto are the high price of the negative externalities. the article is about them attempting to game the political process to neutralize that.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    Agreed. This is a major problem in the energy sector as well. I regularly hear "oil and gas are cheap energy compared to the alternatives" but they're really not. They're just punting the real costs down a generation or two.
    - sprafa 7y ago
      Plus why in the heck do we have fossil fuels being subsidised? That always felt absurd to me, at least these days
      - CountSessine 7y ago
        Almost all of what are called subsidies for oil and gas (can’t speak for coal), at least in North America, are just the fact that we don’t price in externalities. There are a few token non-operational subsidies that oil companies enjoy, but they are orders of magnitude smaller than the taxes we apply to oil and gas at multiple levels of production, distribution, and sale. Oil and gas, if you ignore global warming, really is very, very cheap.
AngeloAnolin 7y ago
These type of behavior has always been prevalent with any for-profit corporation. Generally, companies would try to find loopholes and way around regulations just to ensure that their cash cow is able to fulfill their own bottom line. Come to think of it - it is always a big news when companies' wrongdoings are exposed. But for companies who've turned around and is trying to make their operations better and abide by regulations and focused on ensuring safety and well-being of everyone directly and indirectly, they never make the news.
- refurb 7y ago
  These type of behavior has always been prevalent with any for-profit corporation. This type of behavior has always been prevalent with any corporation staffed by humans. You don’t need a profit motive to get these sorts of things. Look at what the gov’t has done in the name of national security, war against crime, etc.
Circuits 7y ago
Great, so now on top of all the other $#!% farmers have to deal with they also need to be concerned their going to get blood cancer. So what is the suggested alternative? Farmers can't just not use weed killer. They need an effective weed killer and it has to be cheap.
vertis 7y ago
The first time I read about Monsanto being evil it was in the fiction novel Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez (sequel to Daemon). Daniel Suarez had neatly integrated Monsanto suing farmers[1] into the storyline. It's a great (neo)cyberpunk read, as are his other novels. One of the things I love about novels of this style are that they prompt me to go off and learn more about a subject. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
- stringyham 7y ago
  Thanks for the author recommendation, had never heard of him.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
>During his deposition, Rands said that he believed it appropriate for Monsanto to draft a letter on behalf of a lawmaker to NIH, calling such ghostwriting a “common practice in Washington.” I feel an iceberg metaphor looming.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Is this a surprise? Monsanto doing what Monsanto does to keep screwing people for profit. Take money out of politics, pay our public servants well out of taxpayer money, implement short term limits, problems solved. It’s not rocket science, but powers that be will not give up easily.
- reacweb 7y ago
  and sell before facing trials. Should we have empathy for Bayer that has made a very bad purchase ?
  - mikro2nd 7y ago
    I'll bet Swiss Money that Bayer knew exactly what they were getting into before buying and (upper management) decided to go ahead anyway. Presumably they've done the math and think it's worth it, having priced the risk in. Scary thought imho.
    - linuxhansl 7y ago
      German speaking here... I suspect they came to this with an understanding of German interpretation and application of law. In Germany a jury cannot just declare a substance as carcinogenic, there are no class action suits, no punitive damages, etc. That's why the defence has focused so far on facts and studies. (Note: I'm not saying one is better than the other. Just that the risk was probably assessed with assumptions that turned out to be incorrect.)
jimbob45 7y ago
>Great, so now on top of all the other $#!% farmers have to deal with they also need to be concerned their going to get blood cancer. So what is the suggested alternative? Farmers can't just not use weed killer. They need an effective weed killer and it has to be cheap. I really don't think this should have been downvoted to hell. We spend every Monsanto thread talking about how bad the company is and I think we can all agree at this point that the company would be best off dead. However, there are still very real farmers out there who need real solutions to avoid going bankrupt. Why can't we talk about all the good weedkiller companies that we should be buying from?
- wnevets 7y ago
  How was farming possible prior to the cancer causing weed killer being created?
  - thebooktocome 7y ago
    Buckets of free/cheap labor that no longer exists in much of the world.
  - iamvik 7y ago
    However it was done, we have much higher productivity requirements nowadays.
    - superpermutat0r 7y ago
      Much higher productivity demands for luxury products. If we want back to produce a variety of direct human edible vegetables the productivity would not be necessary at all. When you're raising corn, soybean and wheat for cattle then it's obviously a much bigger higher order problem.
  - cwp 7y ago
    80% of the population spent their lives in extreme poverty, toiling in the fields from sunup to sundown.
ocschwar 7y ago
History repeats itself. When Clair PAtterson started researching the environmental persistence of ethyl-lead (leaded gas), Du Pont offered to sponsor any research he wanted to do so long as it wasn't ethyl lead. Not only can you not trust a company to research possible bad effects of its products, you can expect companies to interfere with research into their products done by outside parties.
- fencepost 7y ago
  Clair "Pat" Patterson was a graduate of Grinnell College and their summer 2019 college magazine has a nice comic style summary: http://magazine.grinnell.edu/news/get-lead-out http://magazine.grinnell.edu/news/get-lead-out
jcranberry 7y ago
According to their Preamble, what IARC does is collect studies on a particular substance and categorize them according to how likely it is they carcinogenic to any degree. So they essentially publish reviews of existing literature. They evaluate whether there's a hazard, but not how much risk there actually is. The article title should probably be "Monsanto Effort to Defund Cancer Research Reviewers". Glyphosate sits in the same category ('probably carcinogenic') as: >Emissions from frying stuff >Being a barber >Being a night shift worker >Red meat >Malaria >Glass manufactoruing >Burning wood biofuel And some other stuff and a bunch of chemicals whose usage I don't know. In the 'definitely carcinogenic' category are lots of things that you would expect, such as coal production and ionizing radiation, but there's also: >Being a painter >Mineral oils >Processed meat >"Salted fish, Chinese-style" Because I wasn't sure, this is the IARC's definition of processed meat: >Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve reservation. Most processed meats contain pork or beef, but processed meats may also contain other red meats, poultry, offal, or meat by-products such as blood. There's also the third group of 'possibly carcinogenic', which includes beverages above 65C (149F), aloe vera, carpentry, asian pickled vegetables, and radio waves. Source: https://monographs.iarc.fr/list-of-classifications https://monographs.iarc.fr/list-of-classifications
The_rationalist 7y ago
This press article is mostly void of substance. Yes, Monsanto do everything, even semi illegal things to defend it's economical interests. I actually learned they hired fake journalists. But nothing about the real issue: is glyphosate carcinogenic and if so, how much compared to very common carcinogenics. By far most independent studies (listed on Wikipedia) conclude that glyphosate is not or is unlikely to be carcinogenic. This is solid evidence of glyphosate being of little worry, especially when we have far more worrying carcinogens in our everyday life. The FTI-written letter declared that glyphosate “does not cause cancer,” accused the IARC of peddling “bunk science,” and threatened a reassessment of the NIH budget to ensure that the agency is “committed to only funding organizations that produce information and conclusions based on sound science, robust processes, and credible methodology.” How solid scientifically are the IARC reviews? Nobody adress this real question. Btw everybody talk about potential lives that Monsanto indirectly maybe killed. Monsanto is often considered as evil. But thanks to their scientific innovations, they feed the world. It's difficult to realize how many lives they have saved or improved, but they are probably on the top 10 list of most impactful entities for increasing well being and diminishing suffering.
- wickedwiesel 7y ago
  > But thanks to their scientific innovations, they feed the world. It's difficult to realize how many lives they have saved or improved, but they are probably on the top 10 list of most impactful entities for increasing well being and diminishing suffering. How can you be so sure about this? Monsanto's GMOs depend on the use of their tailored pesticides. It's their whole USP. The negative impact of the current use of pesticides, of which roundup is a bestseller, is _immense_. The vicious cycle of pesticide use, GMOs and debt is horrible for farmers in low- medium-income countries and often leads to suicide. Just pesticide poisoning accounts for a yearly death toll of 200,000 to 250,000 people according to the UN [0] and the WHO [1]. This does not even go into the topic of loss of biodiversity where pesticides play a vital role. According to the OHCHR, if we were to eliminate bees by using neonicotinoid pesticides as usual, we will likely see a collapse of "the very basis of agriculture as 71% of crop species are bee-pollinated."[2] Monsanto and its practice have been directly linked to the demise of bee populations [3]. Monsanto and the like are again, cashing in all our chips for short-term gain. This is not innovation. This is a growth hacking at its worst. [0] - 2017, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/017/85/PDF/G1701785.pdf?OpenElement https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/017/85/PDF... "pesticides are responsible for an estimated 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year" [1] - 2006, https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/en/PesticidesHealth2.pdf https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/en/Pest... Worldwide, an estimated three million cases of pesticide poisoning occur every year, resulting in an excess of 250,000 deaths. [2] - https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21306 https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N... [3] - https://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684 https://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-be...

261 points by mgamache 7y ago

ptah 7y ago

Event like this convinces me that government is primarily a servant of big business

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- specialist 7y ago
  How do we fix this? The core conundrum is the two party adversarial system. More durable are three way food fights (trilemmas), like the USA's Constitution balance of powers (leg vs exec vs court). Not perfect. Just better. IMHO.
AndrewDucker 7y ago
"Government" is a broad grouping. It varies depending on the politicians making it to. What you see here is largely a Republican effort to defund an organisation that's... Government funded. So if you want the research to happen then that's not less government, it's different government.
ghobs91 7y ago
and it will continue to be, so long as political donations of any size are legal.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  It’s not just the size of the donation, the PAC system permits tremendous amounts of dark money whose donors aren’t disclosed. Donating directly to politicians is fairly straightforward and transparent due to campaign finance law, but PACs operating “independently” and in the background undermine the system in a huge way
  - ghobs91 7y ago
    My point is that as long as donations of any kind are legal, politicians will continue to optimize for fundraising, rather than optimizing for policies that benefit the largest number of people. Who is most equipped to donate large sums to politicians? The wealthy.
    - snowwrestler 7y ago
      If donations are no longer legal, only the wealthy will have enough money to run for office. It would not have the democratizing effect you seem to think it would.
      - save_ferris 7y ago
        This just isn’t true, and this problem largely already exists in the US. Many countries use publicly funded elections where all candidates get a set sum from the government to use towards a campaign. This would stop the billions flowing into races and ensure that all candidates have the same campaign budget. Look at Texas, for example. The annual salary for a state legislator is pitiful (like $10k), which basically prevents anyone who isn’t independently wealthy from running from state office.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  Or as long as we allow free speech. As long as we have free speech, whomever can buy the largest megaphone has the ability to drown out everyone else. You have to regulate speech so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone, but then groups that most people want to drown out also gets to speak. You can try limiting it so only some groups get access, but then you just get regulatory capture of speech.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    This doesn't make any sense. Government is a servant of big business because we allow free speech? How exactly would you go about regulating speech "so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone"? Censorship would absolutely not help improve the situation
    - Elrac 7y ago
      I think _theoretically_ the way this is thought to work is that Amazon or Google could take out daily ads in all major media that say "vote for John Doe, he's a great guy!", i.e. well-heeled companies could do candiates' campaigning for them, while we ordinary people can't afford that much public exposure. That may be true enough, but it's not a phenomenon we've been seeing. What we _have_ been seeing in the past few years, especially after _Citizen's United_ and the dawn of PACs, is wealthy corporations legally handing money to candidates to do their campaigning with. This would and should have nothing to do with free speech, except that there have been recent (SC?) rulings declaring financial donations, i.e. money, to be a form of speech, so basically unlimited political donations are considered protected under the 1st Amendment. I personally consider this a grave error in judgment, undoubtedly politically motivated.
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      >Government is a servant of big business because we allow free speech? Well, you have to include the middle step that voters are strongly influenced by what they hear, advertising, and the like and that many voters do not do a deep amount of digging. Also you have to include the other step that there is a lot of research in marketing and psychology to sway people's reactions and opinions. But once you combine the above, it turns out that those with control of the primary information distribution can influence public opinion. Now, they can't convince people that grass is purple and the sky is green, but they can sway public opinion. Politicians realize this and are thus swayed by those who control the information lest they make enemies who will seek to promote their opponents either in primaries or general elections (at least in the US with its government system). >How exactly would you go about regulating speech "so that everyone gets an equal size megaphone"? I don't have a clue, and as you suggest, such actions won't be without unforeseen consequences which could end up worse than the original problem. A few countries in the EU seem to have laws made to dampen the problem without fixing it, but the actual effectiveness of the laws is something I haven't seen any peer reviewed research on.
mikelyons 7y ago
Ego is the servant of money, and government is highly corrupted with ego at the moment.

NPMaxwell 7y ago

Roundup, asbestos, leaded gas, and lots of other engineering products say to me that the industry/culture of engineering has a problem. I think that problem is not engineering itself, but emerges when engineering is mixed with current MBA culture of stockholder value rather than stakeholder value. Obvious, and obviously worthless, strategies are to add BS "ethics" courses to engineering programs. It's possible to turn this ship. I don't yet have ideas for how it's actually done.

throwawaywindev 7y ago
It’s an economic problem that boils down to not putting a high enough price on negative externalities.
- zzzeek 7y ago
  the 11000 lawsuits against Monsanto are the high price of the negative externalities. the article is about them attempting to game the political process to neutralize that.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Agreed. This is a major problem in the energy sector as well. I regularly hear "oil and gas are cheap energy compared to the alternatives" but they're really not. They're just punting the real costs down a generation or two.
  - sprafa 7y ago
    Plus why in the heck do we have fossil fuels being subsidised? That always felt absurd to me, at least these days
    - CountSessine 7y ago
      Almost all of what are called subsidies for oil and gas (can’t speak for coal), at least in North America, are just the fact that we don’t price in externalities. There are a few token non-operational subsidies that oil companies enjoy, but they are orders of magnitude smaller than the taxes we apply to oil and gas at multiple levels of production, distribution, and sale. Oil and gas, if you ignore global warming, really is very, very cheap.

AngeloAnolin 7y ago

These type of behavior has always been prevalent with any for-profit corporation. Generally, companies would try to find loopholes and way around regulations just to ensure that their cash cow is able to fulfill their own bottom line. Come to think of it - it is always a big news when companies' wrongdoings are exposed. But for companies who've turned around and is trying to make their operations better and abide by regulations and focused on ensuring safety and well-being of everyone directly and indirectly, they never make the news.

refurb 7y ago
These type of behavior has always been prevalent with any for-profit corporation. This type of behavior has always been prevalent with any corporation staffed by humans. You don’t need a profit motive to get these sorts of things. Look at what the gov’t has done in the name of national security, war against crime, etc.

Circuits 7y ago

Great, so now on top of all the other $#!% farmers have to deal with they also need to be concerned their going to get blood cancer. So what is the suggested alternative? Farmers can't just not use weed killer. They need an effective weed killer and it has to be cheap.

vertis 7y ago

The first time I read about Monsanto being evil it was in the fiction novel Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez (sequel to Daemon). Daniel Suarez had neatly integrated Monsanto suing farmers[1] into the storyline. It's a great (neo)cyberpunk read, as are his other novels. One of the things I love about novels of this style are that they prompt me to go off and learn more about a subject. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...

stringyham 7y ago
Thanks for the author recommendation, had never heard of him.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

>During his deposition, Rands said that he believed it appropriate for Monsanto to draft a letter on behalf of a lawmaker to NIH, calling such ghostwriting a “common practice in Washington.” I feel an iceberg metaphor looming.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

Is this a surprise? Monsanto doing what Monsanto does to keep screwing people for profit. Take money out of politics, pay our public servants well out of taxpayer money, implement short term limits, problems solved. It’s not rocket science, but powers that be will not give up easily.

reacweb 7y ago
and sell before facing trials. Should we have empathy for Bayer that has made a very bad purchase ?
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  I'll bet Swiss Money that Bayer knew exactly what they were getting into before buying and (upper management) decided to go ahead anyway. Presumably they've done the math and think it's worth it, having priced the risk in. Scary thought imho.
  - linuxhansl 7y ago
    German speaking here... I suspect they came to this with an understanding of German interpretation and application of law. In Germany a jury cannot just declare a substance as carcinogenic, there are no class action suits, no punitive damages, etc. That's why the defence has focused so far on facts and studies. (Note: I'm not saying one is better than the other. Just that the risk was probably assessed with assumptions that turned out to be incorrect.)

jimbob45 7y ago

>Great, so now on top of all the other $#!% farmers have to deal with they also need to be concerned their going to get blood cancer. So what is the suggested alternative? Farmers can't just not use weed killer. They need an effective weed killer and it has to be cheap. I really don't think this should have been downvoted to hell. We spend every Monsanto thread talking about how bad the company is and I think we can all agree at this point that the company would be best off dead. However, there are still very real farmers out there who need real solutions to avoid going bankrupt. Why can't we talk about all the good weedkiller companies that we should be buying from?

wnevets 7y ago
How was farming possible prior to the cancer causing weed killer being created?
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  Buckets of free/cheap labor that no longer exists in much of the world.
- iamvik 7y ago
  However it was done, we have much higher productivity requirements nowadays.
  - superpermutat0r 7y ago
    Much higher productivity demands for luxury products. If we want back to produce a variety of direct human edible vegetables the productivity would not be necessary at all. When you're raising corn, soybean and wheat for cattle then it's obviously a much bigger higher order problem.
- cwp 7y ago
  80% of the population spent their lives in extreme poverty, toiling in the fields from sunup to sundown.

ocschwar 7y ago

History repeats itself. When Clair PAtterson started researching the environmental persistence of ethyl-lead (leaded gas), Du Pont offered to sponsor any research he wanted to do so long as it wasn't ethyl lead. Not only can you not trust a company to research possible bad effects of its products, you can expect companies to interfere with research into their products done by outside parties.

fencepost 7y ago
Clair "Pat" Patterson was a graduate of Grinnell College and their summer 2019 college magazine has a nice comic style summary: http://magazine.grinnell.edu/news/get-lead-out http://magazine.grinnell.edu/news/get-lead-out

jcranberry 7y ago

According to their Preamble, what IARC does is collect studies on a particular substance and categorize them according to how likely it is they carcinogenic to any degree. So they essentially publish reviews of existing literature. They evaluate whether there's a hazard, but not how much risk there actually is. The article title should probably be "Monsanto Effort to Defund Cancer Research Reviewers". Glyphosate sits in the same category ('probably carcinogenic') as: >Emissions from frying stuff >Being a barber >Being a night shift worker >Red meat >Malaria >Glass manufactoruing >Burning wood biofuel And some other stuff and a bunch of chemicals whose usage I don't know. In the 'definitely carcinogenic' category are lots of things that you would expect, such as coal production and ionizing radiation, but there's also: >Being a painter >Mineral oils >Processed meat >"Salted fish, Chinese-style" Because I wasn't sure, this is the IARC's definition of processed meat: >Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve reservation. Most processed meats contain pork or beef, but processed meats may also contain other red meats, poultry, offal, or meat by-products such as blood. There's also the third group of 'possibly carcinogenic', which includes beverages above 65C (149F), aloe vera, carpentry, asian pickled vegetables, and radio waves. Source: https://monographs.iarc.fr/list-of-classifications https://monographs.iarc.fr/list-of-classifications

The_rationalist 7y ago

This press article is mostly void of substance. Yes, Monsanto do everything, even semi illegal things to defend it's economical interests. I actually learned they hired fake journalists. But nothing about the real issue: is glyphosate carcinogenic and if so, how much compared to very common carcinogenics. By far most independent studies (listed on Wikipedia) conclude that glyphosate is not or is unlikely to be carcinogenic. This is solid evidence of glyphosate being of little worry, especially when we have far more worrying carcinogens in our everyday life. The FTI-written letter declared that glyphosate “does not cause cancer,” accused the IARC of peddling “bunk science,” and threatened a reassessment of the NIH budget to ensure that the agency is “committed to only funding organizations that produce information and conclusions based on sound science, robust processes, and credible methodology.” How solid scientifically are the IARC reviews? Nobody adress this real question. Btw everybody talk about potential lives that Monsanto indirectly maybe killed. Monsanto is often considered as evil. But thanks to their scientific innovations, they feed the world. It's difficult to realize how many lives they have saved or improved, but they are probably on the top 10 list of most impactful entities for increasing well being and diminishing suffering.

wickedwiesel 7y ago
> But thanks to their scientific innovations, they feed the world. It's difficult to realize how many lives they have saved or improved, but they are probably on the top 10 list of most impactful entities for increasing well being and diminishing suffering. How can you be so sure about this? Monsanto's GMOs depend on the use of their tailored pesticides. It's their whole USP. The negative impact of the current use of pesticides, of which roundup is a bestseller, is _immense_. The vicious cycle of pesticide use, GMOs and debt is horrible for farmers in low- medium-income countries and often leads to suicide. Just pesticide poisoning accounts for a yearly death toll of 200,000 to 250,000 people according to the UN [0] and the WHO [1]. This does not even go into the topic of loss of biodiversity where pesticides play a vital role. According to the OHCHR, if we were to eliminate bees by using neonicotinoid pesticides as usual, we will likely see a collapse of "the very basis of agriculture as 71% of crop species are bee-pollinated."[2] Monsanto and its practice have been directly linked to the demise of bee populations [3]. Monsanto and the like are again, cashing in all our chips for short-term gain. This is not innovation. This is a growth hacking at its worst. [0] - 2017, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/017/85/PDF/G1701785.pdf?OpenElement https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/017/85/PDF... "pesticides are responsible for an estimated 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year" [1] - 2006, https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/en/PesticidesHealth2.pdf https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/en/Pest... Worldwide, an estimated three million cases of pesticide poisoning occur every year, resulting in an excess of 250,000 deaths. [2] - https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21306 https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N... [3] - https://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684 https://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-be...