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Important to note it's not Glyphosate on trial, it's Roundup. There is a huge gulf between studies and conclusions on Glyphosate, and studies and conclusions on

Important to note it's not Glyphosate on trial, it's Roundup. There is a huge gulf between studies and conclusions on Glyphosate, and studies and conclusions on Roundup. Glyphosate is the safest and most effective herbicide known to mankind. Roundup - which includes Glyphosate, in addition to other additives - may be unnecessarily dangerous. Also worth noting that Monsanto could stop selling Roundup entirely, and it wouldn't really matter. Monsanto's Glyphosate patent expired, so you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Distancing the pesticide from the "evil corporation" might actually make people less afraid of it.

parineum 6mo ago
> you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical. It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.
- victorbjorklund 6mo ago
  They literally said that Roundup is bad because of the OTHER chemicals that it contains in addition to Glyphosate which is not dangerous. Then it makes total sense to use pure Glyphosate instead of Roundup. Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
  - parineum 6mo ago
    > Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
    - victorbjorklund 6mo ago
      That makes no sense. If you accept that Glyphosate is 100% harmless. Why on earth would you drop it?
      - recursive 6mo ago
        > Why on earth would you drop [Glyphosate]? You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
keane 6mo ago
A key paper on its safety from 2000 was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125 Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-article-retracted-elsevier-monsanto-ghostwriting/ https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
- tptacek 6mo ago
  There isn't one single study that glyphosate safety is based on. It's an intensively studied substance.
  - keane 6mo ago
    I didn’t claim there was only one study. The concern is the corporate culture introducing biases into studies. In the tobacco industry, this was a pattern.
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      There was overwhelming evidence, some of it preceding modern human health science, that smoking was damaging.
      - pfdietz 6mo ago
        Indeed. It's rare in environmental medicine to see an effect as strong as that from smoking. The straw the tobacco industry clung to for a while (it was debunked) was that people who had cancer smoked to sooth their lungs (or, that cancer caused smoking, not vice versa.)
brightball 6mo ago
There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health. "Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease" https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106 "Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/ "Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0162013409001810 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
- tptacek 6mo ago
  That first paper you cited is kind of a running joke. ScienceBasedMedicine ran a whole article on Seneff's work: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman... It's based on a Rube Goldberg causal mechanism and a slapdash correlation analysis that vibes glyphosate as the presumed cause of sleep disorder and autism diagnostic increases over the preceding 20 years --- glyphosate went up, autism went up, what more is there to say? A later review of the literature on glyphosate went out of its way to exclude it: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0#citeas https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0...
stubish 6mo ago
While glyphosate may technically be considered safe, there are reports and I believe lawsuits about it reacting with hard water creating extremely unsafe compounds. ie. it poisons your ground water. https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient-connected-to-epidemic-levels-of-chronic-kidney-disease/ https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient...
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  I'm not opposed to further studies, but basic critical thinking makes it unlikely that this is a danger outside of those specific areas. First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place. 85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka. You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.
- hinkley 6mo ago
  And real farmers have bad days and have difficulty maintaining the prescribed application conditions. For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)
  - defrost 6mo ago
    Real farmers, all 3,500 of them in local coop, take careful measures to control everything on large farms- spraying is generaly done at night for the cooler temps, rates are watched as over spray costs $$'s etc. Seed volumes are manually run through air seeder calibrate seed weight per acre, etc. The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike. Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.
hinkley 6mo ago
Monsanto is pretty consistent about trying to change the noun to glyphosate from roundup any chance they get. If you refer to it as glyphosate, as GP does, that either means you've fallen victim to their PR campaign, or labels you as a paid astroturfer.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  Or, third option, it could mean you're one of the few scientifically literate critical thinkers who doesn't jump on one or another end of extreme arguments, looks for evidence, and understands nuance I admit that's probably like 1 out of every 100,000 people, but they're out there

parineum 6mo ago

> you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical. It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.

victorbjorklund 6mo ago
They literally said that Roundup is bad because of the OTHER chemicals that it contains in addition to Glyphosate which is not dangerous. Then it makes total sense to use pure Glyphosate instead of Roundup. Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
- parineum 6mo ago
  > Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
  - victorbjorklund 6mo ago
    That makes no sense. If you accept that Glyphosate is 100% harmless. Why on earth would you drop it?
    - recursive 6mo ago
      > Why on earth would you drop [Glyphosate]? You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]

keane 6mo ago

A key paper on its safety from 2000 was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125 Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-article-retracted-elsevier-monsanto-ghostwriting/ https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...

tptacek 6mo ago
There isn't one single study that glyphosate safety is based on. It's an intensively studied substance.
- keane 6mo ago
  I didn’t claim there was only one study. The concern is the corporate culture introducing biases into studies. In the tobacco industry, this was a pattern.
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    There was overwhelming evidence, some of it preceding modern human health science, that smoking was damaging.
    - pfdietz 6mo ago
      Indeed. It's rare in environmental medicine to see an effect as strong as that from smoking. The straw the tobacco industry clung to for a while (it was debunked) was that people who had cancer smoked to sooth their lungs (or, that cancer caused smoking, not vice versa.)

brightball 6mo ago

There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health. "Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease" https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106 "Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/ "Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0162013409001810 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...

tptacek 6mo ago
That first paper you cited is kind of a running joke. ScienceBasedMedicine ran a whole article on Seneff's work: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman... It's based on a Rube Goldberg causal mechanism and a slapdash correlation analysis that vibes glyphosate as the presumed cause of sleep disorder and autism diagnostic increases over the preceding 20 years --- glyphosate went up, autism went up, what more is there to say? A later review of the literature on glyphosate went out of its way to exclude it: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0#citeas https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0...

stubish 6mo ago

While glyphosate may technically be considered safe, there are reports and I believe lawsuits about it reacting with hard water creating extremely unsafe compounds. ie. it poisons your ground water. https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient-connected-to-epidemic-levels-of-chronic-kidney-disease/ https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient...

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
I'm not opposed to further studies, but basic critical thinking makes it unlikely that this is a danger outside of those specific areas. First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place. 85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka. You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.
hinkley 6mo ago
And real farmers have bad days and have difficulty maintaining the prescribed application conditions. For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)
- defrost 6mo ago
  Real farmers, all 3,500 of them in local coop, take careful measures to control everything on large farms- spraying is generaly done at night for the cooler temps, rates are watched as over spray costs $$'s etc. Seed volumes are manually run through air seeder calibrate seed weight per acre, etc. The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike. Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.

hinkley 6mo ago

Monsanto is pretty consistent about trying to change the noun to glyphosate from roundup any chance they get. If you refer to it as glyphosate, as GP does, that either means you've fallen victim to their PR campaign, or labels you as a paid astroturfer.

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
Or, third option, it could mean you're one of the few scientifically literate critical thinkers who doesn't jump on one or another end of extreme arguments, looks for evidence, and understands nuance I admit that's probably like 1 out of every 100,000 people, but they're out there