11 ms·
Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication
- striking 10mo agohttps://archive.is/dRAMg https://archive.is/dRAMg
- jeffwask 10mo agoFaking research data that then leads to the death of citizens from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Kenji 10mo ago[dead]
- oftenwrong 10mo agoThe problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
- readthenotes1 10mo agoand criminal penalty consequequences fornthe people who prepared and signed the paper in bad faith
- CGMthrowaway 10mo agoWhat is a corporate death sentence? And if true, the list would be LONG
- isolli 10mo agoWiping out shareholders. I bet shareholders would be a lot more cautious if that was an option.
- u8vov8 10mo agoIdeally this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
- peppersghost93 10mo agoDissolution of a company by revoking the charter and liquidating all it's assets to anyone who will buy them.
- soulofmischief 10mo agoPrivate equity?
- stubish 10mo agoThe list would grow short very quickly.
- dmix 10mo agoIt's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because: > authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto and > He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
- zackmorris 10mo agoA mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies entering the bloodstream. Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet). All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time. Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness. Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you. My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention. For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.
- Havoc 10mo agoCorporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to. One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
- nathan_compton 10mo agoWhen are we going to start imprisoning people, I wonder.
- smt88 10mo agoIt's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
- onli 10mo agoRight. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
- franktankbank 10mo agoIn this economy? We have people murdering CEOs for free!
- delichon 10mo agoI can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it. I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective. So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
- vinibrito 10mo agoSalt for cattle. Lasts for a few months.
- moab 10mo agoHow about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoHow about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
- snapdeficit 10mo agoHow about thinking about society and not just every man for himself? Clearly you didn’t read TFA.
- morkalork 10mo agoNo, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when it inevitably all goes wrong.
- rybosworld 10mo agoThe sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still actively publishing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-williams https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...
- smartbit 10mo agoIn an interview earlier this week [1], with one of the new Editors-in-Chief states that before retracting he tried contacting Gary Williams and send him 3 emails to which Gary never replied. [1] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/03/er-zijn-richtlijnen-over-wanneer-je-een-onderzoek-moet-terugtrekken-hier-gold-dat-zonder-enige-twijfel-a4914288 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/03/er-zijn-richtlijnen-ove... or https://archive.is/rjXrR https://archive.is/rjXrR [2] Ik heb Gary Williams, de enige van de drie auteurs die nog leeft, drie e-mails gestuurd. Daar heeft hij nooit op gereageerd. Op een gegeven moment houdt het op, hè?
- samlinnfer 10mo agoSo what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer? Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans. Is it killing gut bacteria?
- hammock 10mo agoMechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells. A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2152265025042855 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S21522...
- pfdietz 10mo agoMy theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
- smt88 10mo agoIf what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist. There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid this.
- pfdietz 10mo agoThere are, but there are also strong incentives for what amounts to fraud, on both sides. Glyphosate has become both highly politicized -- it's used as an argument against GMOs -- and subject to concerted and lucrative legal attack. At the same time, the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection. Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...
- pella 10mo agohttps://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-article-retracted-elsevier-monsanto-ghostwriting/ https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art... """"Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
- Zigurd 10mo agoThe longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate. It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
- masfuerte 10mo agoOats too.
- xhkkffbf 10mo agoNot just wheat. Other crops. I was pretty shocked to see a field full of soybeans that were all dead. They were being dried before harvest. Terrible scheme.
- bluGill 10mo agoI've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
- fransje26 10mo ago> Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. Wheat, soy, lentils, ...
- zug_zug 10mo agoTl; dr: One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto. A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades. [ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-glyphosate/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]
- mhitza 10mo agoVeritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
- draw_down 10mo ago[dead]
- jl6 10mo ago> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees. Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?
- readthenotes1 10mo agoIt's hard to admit we're wrong
- CGMthrowaway 10mo ago[flagged]
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoBig Dr Oz fan eh? Got any quotes from Oprah or other HNers to balance the epistemic master class?
- superxpro12 10mo agoeven a broken clock can be right every now and then
- dctoedt 10mo ago> even a broken clock can be right every now and then But a broken clock isn't a reliable indicator of time: You don't know when it's right unless you have another, known-good indicator — in which case just use that other one.
- CGMthrowaway 10mo agoNo the opposite. I trust Monsanto, they know this chemical better than anyone.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto. I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
- observationist 10mo agoCan even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
- CGMthrowaway 10mo agoMany such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
- reeredfdfdf 10mo agoI can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway? Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
- Stevvo 10mo agoCutting dandelions with a lawnmower just sends the seeds everywhere making the problem worse.
- quesera 10mo agoOnly if you wait for them to go to seed. If it's important to you, don't do that. I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.
- Supermancho 10mo agoDandelions are calcium pumps (among other benefits). If you have dandelion, the topsoil has problems. If it's too large an area for someone to treat, there's no point in trying to kill them. They will always come back.
- WillAdams 10mo agoSome neighbors spray poison ivy --- I just cover it with stones/bricks when I see it.
- quesera 10mo agoPeer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries. There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoImo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
- quesera 10mo agoOK, but that is not how you properly test pesticides for safety.
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoWell, don't leave me hanging. Though I didn't prescribe a test. I set a low bar of evidence that we should at least pass before we Kony up over our bowl of Cheerios.
- quesera 10mo agoAre you asking me to describe modern pesticide safety testing protocols? I'm not qualified to do that authoritatively. But I'm certain that "spray it everywhere for 30 years and see if people die" is not the way. Bypassing the proper protocols, publishing dishonest research, is the issue under discussion today. Glyphosate might be safe, or safe enough. Proper research could reveal more subtle effects than mortality numbers.
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoI still don't understand what you're responding to. Glyphosate is already out there. We have large papers that look into occupational and dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't converge on much of anything that should make us concerned about our dietary exposure. Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that would somehow be more robust than the analyses already being done on real world populations that were inconclusive? At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments look like.
- lenerdenator 10mo agoScientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed. The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter. We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now. It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health. However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues? [0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines https://ourworldindata.org/famines
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- frm88 10mo agoI have news for you: “It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” [0] It also exposes how far the pesticide industry has gone to suppress information about negative impacts on the environment and public health while spreading the totally false myth that rampant growth in pesticide use is needed to feed the world’s population.” [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/07/un-experts-denounce-myth-pesticides-are-necessary-to-feed-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/07/un-exper... [1] https://civileats.com/2017/03/13/new-un-report-pesticides-dont-feed-the-world/ https://civileats.com/2017/03/13/new-un-report-pesticides-do...
- myrmidon 10mo agoThis kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done. IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused. We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
- wslh 10mo agoScience and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper “Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate” [1] shows population groups with significantly higher cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their hands" [1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate
- Beijinger 10mo agoI have a feeling that it is this causing the collapse of our insect population.
- chrisbrandow 10mo agoIf so, presumably because it kills the weeds that feed the bugs.
- Beijinger 10mo agoResearch from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses, impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval development.
- yeah879846 10mo ago[dead]
- shrubble 10mo agoSo any misdirection has served its purpose.
- chrisbrandow 10mo agoI’m not actually familiar with current state of scientific research. Are there any quality studies that contradict the ghost-written report? I understand the valid reasons for pulling the study, but that does nothing to specifically address its claims or evidence.
- lisbbb 10mo agoThe same thing is going to happen with that covid "vaccine" study that claims there were no excess deaths found. Wait and see.
- fat-soyboy 10mo ago[dead]
- numitus 10mo agoI watched a video on the Vertasium channel, and I got the impression that this story is completely different from the story of PFAS. The actual links to diseases are very weak; it wasn't even labeled as carcinogenic, but rather listed as possibly carcinogenic. I have a theory that this scandal was caused by the company itself because its patent was expiring, and if not for the scandal, competitors would have been able to use this extremely effective herbicide.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoMaybe Patrick Moore will offer to drink some again? https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA