"The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services."
This is the real story - Monsanto interfering with our ability to find out what is safe. But I'm sure needless endangerment of the health of ~tens of thousands of farmers will carry a stiff prison sentence for all involved...
Monsanto have been very, very good at controlling the discussion regarding the negative impact their products have had on the world - they're very well known for the investment made in astro-turfing various and sundry places that Monsantos' crimes are discussed.
I think that, besides the obvious corruption that these court documents reveal, another conversation has to be had about how disingenuous Monsanto and its agents have been in discussing these things - using classic deflection, obfuscation techniques online.
The "Monsanto Field Manual for Internet Representatives" would be a very interesting leak indeed ..
This is an interesting comment on HN, where the most vociferous defenders of Monsanto are high-karma accounts rather than sockpuppet greenbeans. Are you saying they've been influenced by such techniques in other fora?
I would say so. In a world in which being against corporations is increasingly seen as "passé", defending Monsanto is just the edgiest possible position for someone looking to have the hottest take.
I'm very pro-GMO, but time and time again I see pro-GMO people taunt and belittle anti-GMO people as mean-spirited tinfoil hatters who have zero reason to doubt Monsanto. It's very "Team Red" vs. "Team Blue", and unproductive.
The pro/anti GMO has too little science in the debate imho. I take the Nye position: from a "people starving" vs "GMO boosted yields" perspective, I take GMOs. On "Monsanto, etc make too much money", I realize that creating new strains is hard and expensive.
But. That's not to say I'll defend all their practices (like this one) or will not admit the anti-GMO crowd has some very valid points.
My favorite and most effective pro-GMO take is to talk to people about how cheese is made. Many anti-GMO people are concerned with animal welfare and love cheese, and it's important to make them realize that it's thanks to GMO that you can have cheese without slaughtering a calf.
Interesting, I am/was of the understanding that there are also vegetarian rennet's made by extracting enzymes from certain plants; fig, thistle, etc. The place where I buy my cheese making supplies (well, would buy if the first attempt hadn't been such a disaster) has both calf and "vegetarian" rennet available for the home cheese maker.
Sure, baby cows aren't being (literally) gutted for the lining of their stomachs, but that's hardly the extent of the misery we inflict upon dairy animals.
EDIT: not directed at you. Just entertained at the semantic hoops people will set up and then jump through.
I am a predator. Predators kill prey animals, including (and sometimes especially) the babies. Cheese is delicious. Im anti-GMO and have been killing animals for food since I was 3.
GMO and monsanto practices are health issues. The pesticides are a problem in terms of chemical pollution.
As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system. Releasing Gene-mod into a complex dynamic self-regulating self-propagating system is like modifying diseases them and releasing them into human society. It may not be a problem, but we can't know if it will be a problem till it's done, and once it's done, it's done. You can't remove or erase your mistakes.
We cant know what any particular gene-mod will do in the wild, if it will be harmful or not, but we do know that monsanto and their cronies at the FDA and EPA don't give a flying fuck about systemic consequences of new technologies.
We do know that the technology is potentially catastrophic, and there are a lot of disincentives to be responsible baked into the system of those holding the keys to this tech.
> As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system.
You mean like life had been doing since its inception?
You can gripe about the speed and power with which we're performing genetic modification (and things like gene drives are powerful), but I can't agree with the "It's something that's never been done before!" angle.
We're just doing so intelligently. With incomplete knowledge, but a hell of a lot more intelligently than random mutation.
Permaculture is a much more wholesome solution. GMOs become a side detail, and even unimportant. Traditional farming is highly inefficient, even with machinery
> Of course if you take two fields and plant each with a monocrop, then the one without pesticides will do worse than the one with, but that isn’t really what organic farming is.
> It is true that the old, control-based methods of agriculture are nearing the peak of their productive potential. Further investments in this kind of technology are bringing diminishing marginal returns – witness the proliferation of Roundup-resistant weeds and the “necessity” of new kinds of herbicides to deal with them.
There's a relevant quote in-between the two you cited. (And noting that the author is obviously a proponent of permaculture farming, rather than a less biased investigator)
> Conventional agriculture doesn’t seek to maximize yield per acre; it seeks to maximize yield per unit of labor. If we had 10% of the population engaged in agriculture rather than the current 1%, we could easily feed the country without petrochemicals or pesticides.
Interestingly, it may be that with coming automation we may be better served by reallocating 9% of our population back to agriculture...
Thanks for your reply :) I'm enjoying that article so far. Very good quote and point about automation. There's a forum called permies [1] where I've seen posts about such permaculture automation :D
But people starving is not a crop efficiency problem. It's a political problem, every time. There's absolutely no reason to defend GMOs on the basis of feeding the starving: it's rather disingenuous.
> But people starving is not a crop efficiency problem. It's a political problem, every time.
Yes, one example of that political problem would be food prices being driven up by creating political barriers to more resource efficient crop technologies.
Got some examples of high-karma, pro-Monsanto accounts?
You don't have to be a sock-puppet to gain karma, nor have high-karma to be qualified as a sock-puppet, but you certainly can be, karma regardless..
(Plus, there's an easy solution to your supposition: Monsanto pays its people to establish reputation that can be utilised to forward Monsanto's positions...)
Seriously though, who are you referring to? I'd be quite interested to know who the potential Monsanto sock-puppets are on HN.
I've historically defended glyphosate as a miracle herbicide on HN.
At the end of the day, Monsanto is just a red herring. Besides just not being that significant - money-wise - in the food industry, glyphosate and the first generation glyphosate-resistant soybeans are no longer under patent. You can buy non-Roundup glyphosate and non-Roundup soybeans that do the same thing for a fraction of the price.
My primary objection here isn't to glyphosate, which appears to be in the same fuzzy territory as other chemicals (e.g. food additives) which are legal in Europe/America but banned in America/Europe.
The thing I'm deeply upset by is the rather clear evidence that Monsanto worked with the EPA to prevent a planned review and create misleading evidence of safety. Even of glyphosate is 100% safe that's still frightening regulatory capture with ugly implications for other products, and in that Monsanto isn't a red herring.
People are regularly making claims like "Monsanto has near monopoly on global food supply", apparently because activist web sites repeat such claims and people start believing them when they hear them often enough.
In reality, Monsanto is about 0.2 % of global food business.
> People are regularly making claims like "Monsanto has near monopoly on global food supply"
Which is silly, Monsanto doesn't even sell food.
What it does have is market power in the seed market for certain key global crops, and even more in the GM sector (e.g., 80%+ for GM corn, 90%+ for GM soy.)
Monsanto's relationship to food is sort of like 1990s Microsoft's relation to computers.
>What it does have is market power in the seed market for certain key global crops, and even more in the GM sector (e.g., 80%+ for GM corn, 90%+ for GM soy.
Fortunately, we don't need those seeds. They can try to patent and sue all they want; the people will prevail.
Though yes, I hope ultimately humanity will prevail -
There are cases where farmers in adjacent plots were sued for using monsanto 'patented' plants without a licence because their crops cross-pollenated with Monsanto ones - further, if I recall correctly, Monsanto was illegally stealing crop samples or using some other form of shady tricks to perform the analysis required to determine the plants contained the 'patented' genes..
Also, much like bacterial resistance in other areas, if the monsanto GMO crops facillitate mutation such that their 'patented' genes are essentially required for a crop to be viable, over the long run, the argument that we 'dont need' the seeds becomes moot..
The closest case I recall is that some seed banks were mixing the Monsanto's seeds with other seeds (in a seed vault) and trying to argue that the resulting seed didn't need a license from Monsanto.
Probably the main case that comes up is the Schmeiser case, where Schmeiser claims that his roundup-ready canola came from cross-pollination from a neighbor's field. Schmeiser's account does include the fact that he specifically tested the canola in question and found it to be resistant to Roundup--and subsequently used that in later crops. The court concluded that he had to know that at least some of his crop had the GMO canola, and that his deliberate use of it in the subsequent year constituted infringement.
Oh, fair enough. I was thinking about this article very specifically, where Monsanto is deeply tied to what looks like clear regulatory capture - a problem even at small scale.
On Monstanto coverage writ large, I completely agree. The amount of excess attention and paranoia paid there is ridiculous, especially on topics where they have clear competitors like Archer Daniels Midland that people haven't even heard of.
Oh yeah, on this particular news story, it's definitely about Monsanto. Any sort of tampering with a regulatory body is a real black mark on them.
When I say "Monsanto is a red herring", I mean that 90% of the time when people vilify Monsanto, they don't actually care about Monsanto. They're playing a shell game, "Monsanto is evil, therefore we should ban all GMO food crops." Hell, they barely care about glyphosate - they just don't like Roundup-Ready crops, because they're GMO.
Realistically, Monsanto is a large (but not one of the largest) corporations, and some people who work there are trying to save the world, and some people who work there are trying to make all the money by any means necessary, and most of the people are somewhere in between, just working at a job. They've definitely done some things wrong, but they're no Uber.
I have to say that you seem to be uninformed about their practices. You do realize the implications of this very article that you are commenting on, right? Monsanto is no uber, is a misomer. Uber IS a Monsanto is a better characterization. Monsanto is obviously a very evil company. Look at this headline! They did the exaxt same thing with rGBH growth hormone.
> On Monstanto coverage writ large, I completely agree. The amount of excess attention and paranoia paid there is ridiculous, especially on topics where they have clear competitors like Archer Daniels Midland that people haven't even heard of.
ADM is predominantly a food processing company; they don't really compete with Monsanto, which is a seed and chemical company. They are basically dominant players in different stages of the food supply chain. (They both have some diversification so there is probably some competition but neither is a major player in the others main markets.)
> the first generation glyphosate-resistant soybeans are no longer under patent.
Sure, they've been off-patent for two years and been replaced with 2nd generation RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, which have additional herbicide resistance and better yield (RoundUp Ready 1 apparently had a pretty significant yield-for-herbicide-resistance trade-off.)
While you can get RoundUp Ready 1 off-patent beans for now (IIRC, there are regulatory issues that will become an issue in a couple years unless someone picks up the burden of doing that now that Monsanto has no commercial incentive to do so), but there's little market in commercial ag for them.
There are plenty of agricultural techniques that work better than the current system.
The current system has low productivity per acre. It is very input intensive, inefficient, and is subject to volatile price swings. It's only advantage is that it's highly mechanized, so you get economy of scale with high output per worker and per asset, but that mechanization in it's current form is a system that destroys arability(soil health) over time. So your returns over time degrade, but input costs are on a 40 year uptrend... It's a broken system.
There are food systems that are more labor intensive (less return per human and per asset) but you can produce more food more predictably at lower margins for the producers and higher prices for consumers, but the with more stable input and end-user costs. The three added (and in my opinion most important) side-effects of this system are higher quality food, more jobs, and IMPROVED fertility over time. These new systems use science as well. They were developed by ecologists, systems theorists, and soil microbiologists.
Credentials: (i'm the first son of a 6th generation land-owning family in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas.)
It really depends on the weeds and the situation. I've used citrus-based formulas around the house, but you might check out Holistic Management (Allan Savory, 2016) for advice applicable to agriculture.
in japan, they put plastic bags on fruit on the vine/branch, but in the US that would require far more exploited immigrants, so that's not perfect either.
Thomas Ptacek (tptacek) has been quite impatient and dismissive with me when I've expressed concerns about glyphosate.
I don't know if that exactly makes him a "Monsanto sock-puppet", but I do think he's being too credulous toward the claims that glyphosate has been shown to be safe. The problem, as we see here, is when there's this much money involved, actually unbiased research gets to be very difficult to come by.
As an old account with reasonably high karma, I would certainly be a sock-puppet for Monsanto if they paid me enough.
Just putting it out there, guys. Reasonable rates for reasonable arguments. Rhetorical trickery will cost just a bit more. I am almost certainly not joking about this.
I fit that bill, I've posted pro-GMO comments in the past. I have a B.S. in Biochemistry, which has led me to see GMOs more as a tool that can either be used poorly or used well. I swear I'm not a socket puppet! waves hand perfectly at the elbow
I've been defending GMOs and Monsanto against the anti-GMO crowd so many times at various places over the Internet, that at some point as a joke, I actually sent a job application for "Junior Monsanto Troll" to the local Monsanto branch. After all, why should I do this for free?
Controlling the discussion would mean just P/R. This is unethical/bodering on illegal and it should be downright illegal with jail terms for execs when this sort of news comes out.
I often see the opinion on HN that opposing GMO food is anti-science. I know this article is not about GMOs, but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on GMO food hasn't been influenced in the same way?
> I often see the opinion on HN that opposing GMO food is anti-science.
Opposing GMO food, in the abstract, may or may not be anti-science.
In concrete terms, many of the specific criticisms of GMO foods (especially those of GMO foods qua GMO foods, rather than of specific foods that happen to.be GMOs) actually made are factually unfounded and reveal.a gross ignorance of the basic relevant facts (like what "GMOs" are and how they differ from modern crops that are not "GMOs", and the regulatory environment facing both types of crops), and suggest that the criticism is originally from someone who is at best disinterested in science and facts if not actively opposed to them.
No offense intended, but you could say this about anything.
-I often see the opinion on HN that opposing vaccination is anti-science. I know this article is not about vaccines, but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way?-
I'm not so sure. His claim is coming from the fact that the research was obviously funded or written by an ill-intentioned party. Andrew Wakefield received loads of money from lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine manufacturers. In this case, Monsanto paid money to academics for them to put their names on papers Monsanto had written. In this way, the pro-gmo position is more similar to the anti-vax position than pro-vax.
Well, Monsanto does GMOs, and this article is about Monsanto hiding the scientific evidence in a blizzard of PR. So saying we should question GMOs based on this article is reasonable. But, so far as I know, Monsanto doesn't do vaccines.
There's no evidence here of Monsanto hiding scientific evidence relating to GMOs; there is evidence of Monsanto and allies in government to hiding scientific evidence relating to chemicals, which face a different regulatory regime.
Now, this might reasonably lead one to want to close regulatory gaps that provide insufficient oversight to prevent similar actions relating to GMOs, but none of the evidence here directly implicates the safety of GMOs as such. (It does implicate the safety of an herbicide whose use is a major motivation for the use of some of Monsanto's flagship GMO traits, but it's the herbicide, not the GMO, whose safety is implicated.)
But there is still the association of: "if they hide scientific evidence for X, what's stopping them from hiding scientific evidence for Y?"
In layman's example, it's like having a friend that steals other people's things, what's stopping him from stealing your things when you're not looking?
No it is not harder to say about HPV. The HPV vaccine is one of the sturdiest linkages between atomic-level scientific understanding and social policy.
HPV produces a protein called E6, which inhibits the protein called p53 in your cell. P53 is the centralized monitor of the health of the cell's DNA. When HPV inhibits the ability for the cell to monitor its DNA, it cannot respond to ordinary damage like UV, etc. This DNA damage builds up and triggers cancerous mutations that would otherwise have been repaired were the HPV E6 protein not inhibiting the p53 protein.
By getting a vaccine, HPV cannot infect you, thus it cannot produce the E3 protein, thus your p53 protein is functional, thus when you get ordinary DNA damage you repair it rather than accumulating cancer-causing damage. If you do not get a vaccine and you get infected with HPV you now have lost a significant checkpoint in preventing cancer.
Fortunately there are a number of different ways to justify the efficacy of particular technology prior to its implementation that do not require millions of people to prematurely contract cancer. If you have a hypothesis about a particular long-term consequence that could arise, by all means let's design a system to investigate it.
I get that it is problematic to even vaguely cast doubt on something that is a big public health win, but you are ignoring the context I commented in, where someone said:
but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way
Do we know for certain that HPV vaccine research has not been influenced by the companies selling the vaccines?
Rephrasing, I wasn't doubting the effectiveness of the HPV vaccines, I was pointing out that there are vaccines that we can be pretty much absolutely certain about.
Most opinions like this are either sock puppets or people who drank the GMO koolaid without knowing it. For a while it was even taboo to question GMOs, and you'd get labeled "anti-science" with almost the same hatred as "anti-semitism". The propaganda campaign has been strong.
How is this article in any way not about GMOs? The whole point of roundup is that you can douse food crops with enormous quantities that would normally kill them, thanks to genetic modifications.
The whole point? We still spray roundup on many of our non-GMO crops. It's inconsequential, if not desirable, to kill the crop near harvest. Roundup had a couple of decades of use in food production before GMOs arrived on the scene.
Also, most of what you see coming out of the sprayer is water. The actual amount of glyphosate used in an application is minimal.
The whole point of roundup is that you can use it earlier in the growing cycle, when weeds and non-GMO crops are more vulnerable. This should mean that farmers can use less chemical so long as they're using GMO crop.
"Buy our product, you'll spend more on inputs" would be a fucking stupid USP for Monsanto.
It _should_...until the pests attaching the crops develop resistance to the chosen combination of agrichemical/genetically-induced resistance to said agrichemical.
I would separate GMO, the technology and field of research, from Monsanto. I don't see why corporate corruption and dishonesty must go hand in hand with GMOs. Even glyphosate itself is not the whole story about GMOs.
> How is this article in any way not about GMOs? The whole point of roundup is that you can douse food crops with enormous quantities that would normally kill them, thanks to genetic modifications.
No, it's not. RoundUp was around and commercially used as a weedkiller, including in agriculture, before transgenic RoundUp Ready traits were developed.
It's true that RoundUp Ready and similar traits increase the demand for and use of the herbicides they provide resistance to, but the safety of the herbicides is orthogonal to the safety of the herbicide resistant crops.
Corporate ghostwriting is pervasive in the pharmaceutical industry. For some drugs, most of the relevant medical literature has been industry-funded. But that's not really very surprising, considering how firms influence politicians, judges, journalists, etc.
Edit: It's also worth noting that much legislation and regulations is ghostwritten by affected corporations.
> needless endangerment of the health of ~tens of thousands of farmers
This affects an incredible array of life. Roundup is used on millions of perfect suburban lawns and landscape plants, impacting countless wildlife, pets, and humans. Glyphosate-grown foods are pervasive in our food supply, and eventually find their way into countless rivers and streams.
Using chemicals that are designed to kill living things in such a widespread manner is just a dangerous idea.
But why pick on Monsanto? I wonder if they have even a two-digit percentage of the global glyphosate market. And there are many other herbicides, many of them much worse that glyphosate.
> I wonder if they have even a two-digit percentage of the global glyphosate market.
They do. I can't find any free sources with hard numbers, but numerous reports indicate that Monsanto is the top producer and the top four together have over 50% share, so Monsanto has no less (and probably substantially more) than 12.5% of the global market.
In addition, the global glyphosate market growth in the last two decades has largely been driven by another set of Monsanto products, "RoundUp Ready" (RoundUp is Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide product) glyphosate-resistant transgenic crops. So Monsanto not only has a large share of the glyphosate market, it also sells the products that are driving most of the glyphosate market.
> RoundUp Ready has been off patent for MANY years
No, it hasn't . The 1st Gen RoundUp Ready soybean trait patent expired in 2015 (two is not "many"), and most commercial volume has moved to product using the still-under-patent RoundUp Ready 2 Yield trait (such as RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend seeds, which also have another herbicide resistance trait.)
That said, I'm pretty sure the "RoundUp Ready 2 Yield trait" has nothing to do with the application of RoundUp. It is the same gene that gave resistance to RoundUp but when inserted into a different location it caused the soybeans to add another bean per pod, increasing yield. I don't believe any RoundUp application is required although it usually is since it is normally paired with the original trait.
> That said, I'm pretty sure the "RoundUp Ready 2 Yield trait" has nothing to do with the application of RoundUp.
And you'd be wrong from what I can tell; RoundUp Ready 2 Yield is a trait that provides glyphosate-resistance without (or maybe with less of) the yield cost of 1st Gen RoundUp Ready.
> I don't believe any RoundUp application is required
RoundUp application isn't required for growing any RoundUp Ready crop, but you wouldn't choose a herbicide-resistant crop (especially with a yield cost) if you weren't going to use a herbicide it provides resistance to.
> it is normally paired with the original trait.
No, it is itself a new glyphosate-resistance trait; it's usually paired with an additional herbicide-resistance trait in RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend seeds.
I can't disagree with what you said. It's certainly not just Monsanto. I think the original article focused on Monsanto because of their potential role in manipulating research and investigations into a chemical used widely by many companies.
Are the others manipulating science and politics, and driving farmers out of business with spurious lawsuits? If so, i'm happy to throw them under the bus too.
All big companies surely influence, or "manipulate" or "lobby" politics. Like everyone does.
About that "driving farmers out of business with spurious lawsuits", every instance of Monsanto-bashing I've seen has been based on malicious and untruthful claims about Monsanto. So if you have evidence of such, please cite it.
And please, not naturalnews or similar fake news sites.
In this, the widely publicized case which was the basis of many documentaries, the farmer went into bankruptcy attempting and failing to defend his right to collect seeds from his plants on his farm, having never entered any business agreement with Monsanto.
If you bother to read it, you will find that it completely demolishes your argument.
Wikipedia summarizes it:
"The case is widely cited or referenced by the anti-GM community in the context of a fear of a company claiming ownership of a farmer’s crop based on the inadvertent presence of GM pollen grain or seed.[21][22] "The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘. . .none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’" - in other words, even if the original presence of Monsanto seed on his land in 1997 was inadvertent, the crop in 1998 was entirely purposeful."
In other words, the farmer knowingly collected Monsanto's seeds and used them. It definitely was no accident; he was willfully attempting to take advantage of Monsanto.
This has nothing to do with GMO or Roundup; the seed patent laws apply to all seeds.
This is the real story - Monsanto interfering with our ability to find out what is safe.
I'm not sure why you're singling out Monsanto, to the exclusion of the government meddling.
Given the statement
a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review
Shouldn't we be pointing a finger at the EPA - even more so, because it's their duty to protect us?
We should all be watchdogs, pointing out malfeasance. But it can't stop when we discover a corporation doing wrong, especially when the implication of that finding is that the government needs more power to keep us safe - when part of the problem is malfeasance in the government itself.
Who was the senior official? What was the purpose in them squashing it? Was there a conflict of interest? This raises many more questions than "shouldn't we be pointing a finger at the EPA?"
I want to know why this was squashed and what interest this senior official had in squashing it.
> I'm not sure why you're singling out Monsanto, to the exclusion of the government meddling.
I'm sure you meant "to the exclusion of the [lack of] government meddling, [quashed on behalf of and directly coordinated with Monsanto by a public official.]"
First, the OP doesn't say anything about "on behalf of and directly coordinated with".
Second, my intent is to point out the futility of vesting greater in public agencies to handle problems arising (in part) from malfeasance in public agencies.
It seems like the old adage about digging deeper to get out of the hole you're in. I'll grant that there may be ways to finesse this, with proper checks and balances. But it would certainly be an exception to see a proposal that tries to create such interlocking responsibilities, rather than just casting Public Choice economics to the wind.
I can only read your statement as sarcasm. But I am not completely sure. Are you actually suggesting that higher people at Monsanto could actually face jail time?
Site investigations show that the former Monsanto Corporation's PCB manufacturing plant released the vast majority of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the area. The plant produced PCBs from 1929 until 1971. [https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...]
There's nothing scientific in a blatant lie.
For the background, Monsanto is not trustworthy.
Given that the company can afford to pay for the damages, and that no one has ever been imprisoned for their crimes, maybe start doing it is a good way to stop them.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases]
What still gets me is how people could justify this type of behavior. I suppose, it's not just one person, but a group (possibly large) that are complicit in all of this. At the end of the day, Jim or Monica goes home and thinks "sure, I know this was an immoral course of action, but I'm glad we just got control of the narrative".
We see these scenarios in movies all the time, but I just wonder how people could do these things in real life? Are people really that short sighted that they think it's ok to own the patent on genes for a plant created in nature just because the law says so? And then on top of that, they make some nasty chemicals that kill things other than their patented plant.. I'm not a dystopian acknowledger really, but wow, life is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Anyway, I just don't understand how Monsanto could be seen by any rational person as a step forward in humanity's progress.. To me, they are a prime example of how humanity will self destruct at some point.
I'm going to Godwin myself here, but it kind of echoes Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' — this summary from Wikipedia covers it a bit, but I recommend reading the actual text, especially in the context of today's political climate... for those who aren't familiar, Eichmann was a Nazi on trial in Israel who was defending his complicity as "following orders."
"Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept "the banality of evil". Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional. She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity."
"Godwin"-ing is comparing your opponents in an internet argument to Hitler/Nazis, not relying on their historical example as an existence proof for how terribly our cognitive gaps can be exploited.
I'm comparing Monsanto to the Third Reich, so I considered it Godwinning (what an amazingly terrible phrase). Fair enough though, I don't disagree with you.
I could buy that regarding a regular company employee or even a mid-level manager. But there are a lot of corporate executives who do shitty, evil things and also happen to be quite cunning, if not brilliant. Those are the scary ones, because they know how to get away with their actions.
But at the end of the day a lot of low-level employees are the ones making this stuff happen — they're doing the gruntwork and ghostwriting this stuff. They might be shielded by some specific data that is direct top-down evil, but many people are complicit.
> What still gets me is how people could justify this type of behavior.
To quote Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Companies like these are run by psychopaths who want nothing but money and power, and their employee base is self-selecting for the quality of being cowed into complacency.
When faced with the choice to harm themselves a great deal (i.e. losing their job, especially in such a way that might make it hard to find another) in order to probably accomplish nothing at all, or to contribute in a small way to evil, most people choose to go along with evil. The ones who don't we rarely hear about (there are exceptions, obviously) because... they didn't accomplish anything.
> You can have a lower-middle class lifestyle as a consumer advocate.
The same lower-middle class that's shrinking? I personally am afraid of joining the ranks of the lower class, especially if I end up as another rural overdose datum.
In general, a scaffolding of mental rationalizations is constructed. Happens a lot. And generally, it isn't completely black and white; in this case, roundup has benefits to humanity as well as risks and costs.
Further down, we have PR firm controlled "sock puppets" discussed. Certainly a reality on the internet and HN.
In my view, a sign that discussion of a given issue being influenced by a lot of PR dollars/industry propaganda is an excess of emotion. The emotion is a side effect of all the propaganda, as invoking strong emotions appears to be necessary to influence people using PR/propaganda techniques.
I don't really understand why the NYT is so terrible on ag policy issues--they could really do some of the heavy lifting here for us and at least try and evaluate the claims being made--like severity and concurrence rates being claimed by the plaintiffs.
The NYT apples to oranges study on rate of yield increase in countries that don't use GMOs (lower starting point) to countries that do (higher starting point) over the same time really undermines their editorial credibility on these kinds of issues with people, like me, who actually deal with agriculture.
God knows their coverage of other topics I'm knowledgeable about isn't much better.
They cover some political and recent-events stuff solidly (international topics much less so), but the domain-specific sucks well outside of agricultural policy. If ag policy and computer security and rock climbing are all poorly covered, I eventually have to assume they aren't doing any better on the topics I don't know.
(Where, of course, "terrible" and "better than most" are not contradictory.)
Maybe its not the NYT's job to do these things, but rather just inform those who know better, such as yourself, that the docs have been un-sealed, and we can get better analyses of this previously-hidden material in order that lay people, such as myself, can better understand just how Monsanto have fooled so many people into poisoning the world with their highly profitable product.
The problem is that lay people are the audience for NYT. Most of the population won't really understand it, honestly. If they wanted to make sure someone informed knew, they could have easily reached out.
The truth is that this was published without because it is an issue that gets folks to read, making their job of selling newspapers easier.
My favorite example is the coverage of the Dawn Wall rock climb a few years back. It was 'news', but there was very little time pressure for coverage, there was (almost) no divisive/political aspect, and the technical aspects were easy to break down to lay-reader level. Plus, there were thousands of online guides and experts willing to clarify context and terminology for free. It should have been covered flawlessly, just because there was nothing standing in the way of that.
And instead, the results were shameful. There was no real harm done, but most of the articles were less accurate than a Simple English Wikipedia page would have been. It made for an interesting demonstration of how atrocious any form of expert-knowledge news is, even by sites like the NYT, even on uncontroversial topics.
Completely disagree. The nyt readers (I'd assume) are generally well educated, but despite my education I'm in no way able to assess this information. By reading the NYT I'd expect to be informed about an area which my education has not covered.
Is there a better source for reading about agriculture policy issues? I feel like all of my sources have a subtle anti-ag bias or a blatantly pro-ag one. Maybe an ag econ blog?
Subtly anti-ag: one-sided articles in liberal news outlets about the dangers and social injustices associated with ag tech like GMOs, and books like The Omnivore's Dilemma. Purporting to be unbiased but might not be.
Blatantly pro-ag: research funded by agribusiness or the USDA. Clearly intended to benefit the industry.
As a scientist, I had read the research on glyphosate and felt pretty safe about it. The surfactant used with it seemed more dangerous, which tells you a lot. But what do I do if the science, was just untrue? This is the ugly secret about science I keep discovering the longer I am in it. Science is great, but people are so fallible.
My limited understanding was that they wanted to test only glyphosate and not glyphosate in combination with the surfactant, which is after all how people would encounter it in the real world, as that is how RoundUp is distributed to users.
For instance, could the surfactant allow glyphosate to more easily be absorbed?
Yes the surfactant helps it cross membranes. But what I meant is that when people tested the two parts separately the reasonably safe surfactant seemed more toxic than glyphosate, which provided me peace of mind that glyphosate can't be too toxic if soap is worse. But if a lot of the data is faked or manipulated that assumption isn't valid.
Oh, the only data I've seen are the published papers. I have no inside info.
#2 won't load for me
For #1 and 3 I would say that the concentrations used are very high. I would not expect anyone except workers spraying Roundup maybe to ever encounter something like millimolar levels of it. We usually deal with things at the nanomolar or micromolar scale of concentrations in science.
Can't remember where I read this, but I believe in the EU the "maximum residue levels" of the active ingredients of pesticides are set orders of magnitude lower than the estimated safe ingestion threshold. That gives a significant leeway for errors in judgement or scientific process, which is understandable when it comes to public health. Must be a major concern for homeopaths, mind.
There have been many studies in recent years examining the sub-lethal effects of agricultural dosages of glyphosate on honeybees. Newer research is showing conclusions of long-term negative consequences. Renewed studies have been done in the face of devastating managed bee losses, which widespread deployment of ag chemical combinations are undoubtedly direct contributors.
Glyphosate application is susceptible to extensive drift, affecting non-target vegetation and animals potentially hundreds of meters from the target site. Beyond direct exposure, this results in habitat destruction for many organisms.
It seems like we're a long way from claiming there is no environmental concern. The effects on non-target organisms through both direct exposure and indirect exposure through ecosystem (food, habitat, etc) changes may be far more widespread than we realize.
>There have been many studies in recent years examining the sub-lethal effects of agricultural dosages of glyphosate on honeybees
Poorly done studies, whose effect pales in comparison to neonicotinoid (and other) pesticides.
The authors of said studies clearly have a conclusion looking for data.
>Glyphosate application is susceptible to extensive drift,
This is true of all pesticides and doesn't impact the chemicals specific effect.
>It seems like we're a long way from claiming there is no environmental concern
The media is a long way away. The scientific consensus is crystal clear however.
Much like other hot-topics such as GMOs, Global Warming, and Vaccines, there are those who ignore data and cite specious articles to support a false debate among experts.
People want to find these effects. It is in academic scientists best interests to make headlines. Look at the lead in flint for evidence. It turns professors into heros. The only problem is when there is nothing to actually find.
as a scientist, i wouldn't trust a single iota of "evidence" that passes through a private corporation with a financial interest in the results reading a certain way.
they won't outright fabricate, usually. but they'll repeat experiments with various perversions until they get the result they want. and this is commonplace elsewhere in science, too, but it's typically disclosed in the methods section and people can put the pieces together for themselves.
The issue I have here is that research data can often be falsified or biased when there are billions of dollars on the line, and there are so many unknowns with some of these things that it's hard to make absolute safety conclusions.
When you take something and spread it so pervasively that it has the chance to impact such a wide spectrum of life, the risks are extreme. Perhaps there is no level of scientific evidence acceptable for this kind of widespread usage, but we are probably far less conservative than we should be.
If you go through all the available studies on Glyphosate (there aren't that many peer reviewed), you will find Monsanto consults or is directly involved in EVERY SINGLE ONE. This is because, while Monsanto does not have a monopoly on Glyphosate anymore, they meticulously collected the data when they did and use/manipulate it (supposedly) when providing it to data scientists. This is the primary way they have been able to steer the data. The one study being cited in this story wasn't particularly good and had no basis for the finding. The correlation was just noise.
"...every study I've seen uses and SOLELY RELIES on Monsanto supplied data and is usually run by a Monsanto agent (current employ, previous employ, or political friend of Monsanto), although there was one study from Germany that did not have a Monsanto agent and came up with "probably not carcinogenic". You do not get data on how Roundup affects a population, excepting through Monsanto's blessing."
This leads someone to believe that the data can be considered "known to be tainted" or "pure". I would suggest that you can't have a data source of this nature, because of the almost certain bias (now for certain after the internal memos).
Part of science is assuming that people are dishonest, incompetent, or subject to influence.
But the scientific method should correct for those occasions when other individuals attempt to reproduce the original results. If we're not doing that, it really isn't science. Appearing in a peer reviewed journal is just the first step for an idea to become an accepted scientific truth.
With enough money you can distort the results for decades before the truth comes out. The sugar industry and tobacco industry spring to mind as examples of vested interests completely owning the narrative in spite of a growing body of incriminating evidence. Selectively choosing scientists to fund is a choice method in that regard.
I won't defend Monsanto's behavior here, but this is all arising as a response from the IARC's determination that glyphosate is a potential carcinogen. As a cell-biologist/biophysicist, this determination seemed primarily politically motivated by anti-GMO crusaders - existing evidence really doesn't seem to support it. Glyphosate isn't at all like known mutagens. Longer-format critique: https://risk-monger.com/2016/07/06/iarcs-disgrace-how-low-ca...
My problem with glyphosate isn't related to health concerns. It's related to the fact that I grow crops (grapes) which it drifts over and kills, and roundup ready (and even worse, the new 2-4d resistant GMO corn/soy) now means there's nowhere safe in the entire northeast to grow anymore.
Every spring I come out to find many plants damaged. Infuriating.
Farmers behave entirely irresponsibly with it and if it's damaging my grapes imagine what it's doing to the natural ecosystem, riparian buffers, etc. near their farms. 2,4-d can drift for several miles and both volatilize on hot days.
Thanks so much for the insight (grew up on a small farm in the northeast)! I'm curious how much worse you've found the "drift-killing" of these newer chemicals than traditional herbicides - are farmers simply being more reckless with application of glyphosate and 2,4-d or are they intrinsically more volatile?
RoundupReady GMO corn and soy means they just blast the crap out of it without fear of where it will go. They are supposed to pay attention to wind speed etc. and I suspect most _try_ but every year I get damage from one of the three -- glyphosate, 2-4,d [the worst], or glufosinate (most harmless).
And again my concern is primarily ecological. It will kill any herbaceous plant. Natural plant diversity within any wooded area nearby is going to be a problem.
The other issue is that while glyphosate itself may be unproblematic from a health POV the formulations it comes in (stickers, spreaders, applicator solutions) are known to be nasty but are not required to go through the same kind of testing or disclosure really.
So spraying RoundUp near streams etc. means the detergents that it is bound up with are getting into the water system. Which is trouble for amphibians, fish, and insects at least.
Glyphosate is known to be safe for mammals, at least for now. I have been known to use it here or there. I have my sprayers application license, tho I don't really use it.
So I followed your link, and was immediately blasted with the kind of rhetoric and name-calling that does not give me the feeling that I'm about to read an impartial analysis. I didn't read further.
Well... scientists get passionate when we see ideological actors that systematically ignore evidence. If you prefer a more serious source, the EU's European Chemical Agency (ECHA) just announced their review finding that “the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or as toxic for reproduction”.
So what you're asking me to believe is that this chemical, which does not occur naturally and which is biologically active, indeed quite toxic to some species, and which we are manufacturing and introducing into the environment in massive quantities, has no deleterious effects on animals or humans? Wouldn't that be pretty much a first? I mean, I'm not an expert here, but is there any other molecule of which all that is true? I certainly can't think of any.
It's possible that humanity has just gotten very lucky in chancing on a compound that does something useful for us with no side effects (on animals or humans, that is -- as cmrdporcupine points out, there are effects on plants which weren't the intended targets -- but let's leave those aside). I can't rule out this possibility completely. But do you see why some of us think the standard of evidence should be extremely high?
"I won't defend Monsanto's behavior, I'll just belittle their critics as anti-GMO crusaders." It's that attitude why I'm against GMO on ethical grounds no matter how much scientific evidence there is to support it. You guys need to clean up your act.
I'm not trying to belittle anyone. I work on cancer therapeutics -- when people push questionable science in a field I work in, I feel it important to highlight this. There are many better-supported objections to modern anti-herbicidal GMOs, we should focus our limited attention on the issues that are supported by evidence.
Oh come on - this is a disingenuous stunt masquerading as debate. Salt is safe to drink, but I'm not going to down a mystery glass filled with putative 5 molar solution of it on stage like a trained circus animal.
I get the sentiment, and it makes for good TV, but you could also drink a whole quart of urine without any ill effect and you can be sure I would decline that opportunity.
Lol, I posted the same thing at nearly the exact same time.. amusing how the mind converges on certain things when you think of "Gross things to drink".
I would pass, the surfactants are likely to be at least as hard on your guts as the glyphosate (I wouldn't want to drink a bottle of dish soap, for example).
If that's the point he was trying to make, I think he worded it poorly. If people were scared of trace quantities of Monster energy drinks leaking into their food, a representative could simultaneously claim that the product is safe for human consumption and decline to chug a quart all at once on live TV. Even if he were scared of having a heart attack, it doesn't matter since the topic is trace quantities being ingested over long periods of time which add up to a quart.
One theory is that glyphosate causes harm because it gets weaved into protein chains instead of glycine. Proteins made with roundup don't work the same as proteins with glycine. Experiments to figure out if this is what's happening would be relatively simple and cheap.
Now that lots of weed are resistant, farmers will have to figure out how to farm without this shortcut. Roundup is obsolete, so nothing of value will be lost.
> Now that lots of weed are resistant, farmers will have to figure out how to farm without
> this shortcut. Roundup is obsolete, so nothing of value will be lost.
I'm a part-time farmer. My father and I manage about 35 acres, half in corn and half in soybeans. We no-till our fields which is very helpful for preventing soil erosion and fertilizer/manure runoff. We are located in the Chesapeake Bay watershed so we have to (and want to) pay close attention to farming best practices regarding excess nutrients and runoff.
We use Roundup for both a burn-down in the spring and for post-emerge weed management (1 quart to the acre). It continues to work well for us. Based on what I've heard, round-up resistant weeds mostly commonly occur in fields where crops are not rotated. Some farmers do plant corn on corn, year after year. I can see where that would lead to significant problems.
So, I'd say that your unqualified statement above "roundup is obsolete" is true for me although it may be partially true depending on the application.
What could you grow in your area that isn't corn and soybeans [c&s]?
How does the profitability of c&s compare to, say, silage? I was friends with a grass fed beef farmer in teh college, and learned from him that many weeds are actually a pretty good source of protein for cattle.
Have you thought about farming fruit or trees? My grandmother was going to devote some of her acres (Illinois) to black walnut trees (iirc), but she'd moved away from her parents' farm in the 1940's and just managed it from afar after her parents passed away.
Look at the difference between glycine and alanine. Alanine is glycine with a methyl group attached. If the cellular polypeptide construction mechanisms have to be sensitive enough to distinguish between glycine and alanine in normal operation, then a phosphate sticking on the amine should be ringing alarm bells.
Additionally, the reactivity of glyphosate should be rather changed. You're going from a primary amine to a secondary amine, one with a moderately steric hindrance on it (considering that the amine is the focal point of the polypeptide production reactions). It's no tert-butyl, but it's still hefty. (Note also that proline, the only amino acid with a secondary amine, is by far the slowest amino acid in peptide production).
Anthony Samel, a chemist researching glyphosate, has already practically proven this weaving is happening.
He is finding glyphosate in everything that has proteins in it. Especially things that contain gelatin, where gelatin is made out of animal collagen, and collagen is the most abundant protein in mammals.
For example gummy bears, protein powders, nutritional supplements, and even in vaccines (several vaccines contain gelatin). So we are eating it, getting injected with it, and it is integrating into our own proteins as well.
You mean Anthony Samsel ? If so, he's known to have published shoddy research along with Seneff that makes wild claims about glyphosate being the cause of many ills like autism and celiac disease based on correlation and without much evidence
You do understand that there is a vast financial interest in "debunking" scientific findings like this?
The first red flag that there are corporate interests behind any "debunking" effort is that an actually serious finding is not discussed openly, but various outlets immediately go for the discredit and debunk method.
That's corporate modus operandi 101 for burying inconvenient people and data.
Maybe instead of being cynical about people's motives you should try to go through what they are saying and see if it makes sense or not, or if the evidence its based upon is correct.
"The first red flag that there are corporate interests behind any "debunking" effort is that an actually serious finding is not discussed openly"
So which finding was not discussed properly in the link i posted?
Sometimes those writers have good points, sometimes they engage in propaganda campaigns to protect the medical guild's interests. For example, Hariett Hall is a regular defender science-free psychiatry. Psychiatric residents are trained to think that Wall Street's palliative patent medicines are useful, when the actual science has pointed at causes of many psychiatric disorders since the 1970's.
The anti-psychiatry movement is about to reach a tipping point, /methinks, and the science based medicine folks will have some crow to eat.
The results are fairly easy to find on Google, but I'm disappointed how hard it could be for someone without academic experience to find reasonable summary. This news is a perfect mix of Monsanto, GMO, vaccines, and animal products. The amount baseless speculation is insane...
From the article, it just shows that emails had suggested academics edit and sign their name to documents written by Monsanto. It appears that everyone involved claims they never actually carried through with this.
Anyone else see evidence that they actually did it? It wouldn't surprise me if they did. I'm genuinely curious.
That's all I saw as well. It just looks like someone spitballing over email. That being said, I looked up some information regarding the safety of glysphosphate using Ames testing and other methodologies. It looks to be safe according to this presentation-pdf by the European Food Safety Authority: https://echa.europa.eu/documents/10162/22863068/glyphosate_e...
Anyways, one could argue that the studies have been tampered with by dastardly Monsanto agents. Also it's a presentation and I didn't follow through to the studies themselves, I just trusted the information as it was presented.
I'm going to trust that glysphosphate is not a carcinogen and that multiple protection agencies worldwide haven't been duped/sold out to Monsanto. The cost of independent testing by any competitor or curious party is low, these are just toxin tests and Ames tests that have to be done. If it really was a dangerous carcinogen, Monsanto would have its pants sued off already.
Yes. I recall learning that the clinical trials proving the effectiveness of Effexor, among other things, being shown to have been faked/not actually completed, which lead to a recall of the drug.
Some of the connections out there between glyphosate, it's effects on gut bacteria, the rise IBS/Crohn's Disease/Celiac and even connections autism are pretty incredible.
The autism speculation has gone on for as long as it has because we have an information vacuum and nobody is outright publishing a "cause". Until that vacuum is filled, you leave people free to speculate. Most of what I've seen at this point (recently from a lady at MIT[1] who presented in a Congressional Hearing) points to a serious need for a study of aluminum...and glyphosate supposedly allows a lot more aluminum into your system.
Would be great if we could get a study on both independently and both combined.
> Some of the connections out there between glyphosate, it's effects on gut bacteria, the rise IBS/Crohn's Disease/Celiac and even connections autism are pretty incredible.
Can you point to some credible sources that show these connections? The only time I've ever seen Glyphosate linked to these ailments is from quack doctor Mercola or fake news sites like Natural News.
To the good, she does have a biophysics BS (from MIT), and some of her research unites the two fields (e.g. NLP data-gathering from big drug side effect databases).
To the bad, this looks an awful lot like "old physicist's disease". The tendency for CS and physics people to turn up dubious breakthroughs in other fields is so extreme that I'm instantly suspicious of this sort of result, especially when it claims to find a powerful connection no one else recognizes.
In her defense, a lot of people have recognized it for years.
People tend to think of autism in its mental aspects only but it always comes with gastrointestinal issues. There are a lot of kids who see fairly significant improvement from diet changes (most notably gluten free and casein free). When people started putting that together with the people who suffer from IBS and Celiac also needing to avoid gluten the connections started popping up. Gluten free turned to GMO wheat which led to round up and glyphosate.
On the pure autism side, people have talked about heavy metals (not just mercury) for well over a decade and aluminum has been high on the wonder list. When people realized that there was a digestive connection between glyphosate and aluminum...all the alarm bells went off.
Now all people want is a real study...and if that turns up nothing then people will want to study something else because right now there isn't an answer and parents really, really want an answer.
Interestingly, the primary reason people I know who eat organic or non-GMO foods are doing so specifically to avoid glyphosate and other pesticide/herbicides.
>The records [...] indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
That's exactly why I buy organic produce, to (hopefully, who really knows) avoid eating pesticides, and to (hopefully) reduce the pesticide exposure of agriculture workers.
There are several shill accounts on Reddit that pop up to defend Monsanto in every thread. I would be interested to see how much money companies like Monsanto are spending on disinformation campaigns. I bet it's much more active than we are aware.
Agree here. Definitely some comments in this thread that look suspicious...only because Monsanto already does this on a closely related platform :) Hi Guys! Thanks for tuning in!
My suspicions are only getting worse as I click through some comment history. Really? The debate on GMOs is the _only_ discussion on HN you want to partake in?
Conflicts of interest throw serious doubt on the validity of the research. There's always a certain degree of trust in the people who do every phrase of the research, and obvious biases should at least be reason to not draw strong conclusions from the research. Especially if they're going out of their way to not upfront about the conflict of interest / bias.
You don't trust Monsanto, someone else only trusts Monsanto, and I don't trust anyone. But trust doesn't matter because the system isn't built on trust. It's built on peer review and repeatability.
The underlying incentives can influence which studies make it all the way to publication. This has happened with drug trials, for example; if you don't force drug companies to pre-register trials and publish the results after the fact for every trial, they can run multiple for the same drug and only report the ones that show favorable results.
I could imagine something similar happening if you wanted to "prove" the safety of a particular herbicide. Run tests for carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption, whatever across common test species A, B, C, D, and E. D shows significant adverse effects from exposure to your product. The others don't. Silently drop the D results, write up the "proof of safety" from the others, and optionally launder the origins of the research through unaffiliated scientists. Repeat for a few years and later a completely independent researcher may say "all N of these published papers used sound methodology, and a meta-review of this high-quality subset shows no demonstrated risk at ordinary exposure levels." That last researcher won't know about the deliberately introduced systemic error that influenced which results were published.
But that's exactly the logic global warming skeptics use - there are underlying incentives to arrive at certain conclusions. If you find yourself in the business of having to defend or attack incentives and influences, you're not addressing the science. Instead, you're just playing in the politics.
If bad science is making it to publication, or bad science is being accepted by other scientists, then it's not really science. Right?
Don't mistake my statements for justifying the lack of transparency Monsanto has apparently engaged in. It's unfortunate, for sure, and those who are carrying their water should be castigated for it. It's not in the spirit of good science.
But it's reasonable to think that had they been transparent, it wouldn't have been published. Because we have decided their underlying incentives are bad (and consequently, the underlying incentives of others are good). And that's not in the spirit of good science, either.
If bad science is making it to publication, or bad science is being accepted by other scientists, then it's not really science. Right?
That's a very interesting question. I used to be a researcher myself. I love Feynman's "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." In practice, I would say that there are often incentives for researchers to fool themselves, and researchers do sometimes succeed in fooling themselves and their colleagues. The practice of science has a better capacity for correcting these errors over time than other practices, but I wouldn't retroactively declare a paper "not really science" just because later scientists falsified its findings. (E.g. in chemistry, reports of iron-catalyzed reactions that actually turned out to be catalyzed by traces of platinum group metals in the iron. How did the incentive to report something new and wonderful -- reactions catalyzed by a very cheap catalyst -- influence the original researcher's experimental design and evaluation of the evidence? Unknown.) Nor would I declare that a publication showing "compound X does not induce cancer in mice" not-really-science even if it turned out later that the same researchers silently dropped a line of inquiry that showed X does induce cancer in rats.
I tend toward thinking that social phenomena -- including the practice of scientific research, or the practice of religion -- are defined by what their participants do rather than what the ideal definition says they should do. So bad science is still science (if the practitioners are still recognized socially as such), bad Christianity is still Christianity, and so on.
These issues are more visible when there's a lot at stake outside the scope of the published findings (global warming, tobacco health impacts, etc.) AGW skeptics are not exactly wrong to mention incentives, but I think they're weighting incentives backwards. I think that many of them see the likely policy implications of certain research conclusions and motivated-reason their way backwards to an exceptional level of skepticism about the research itself.
I myself think that AGW skeptics are wrong, that GMOs are a facially neutral tool with potential for both benefits and harms, that herbicides too present both harms and benefits, and that industries trying to influence research to their own financial benefit (Monsanto here, drug companies with drug trials, food and beverage companies with nutrition research...) is both bad and common. This article that we're discussing does not make me think that glyphosate is more harmful than previously reported. I still require affirmative research findings in that direction to change my view. It does make me think that regulatory agencies should be sufficiently funded and staffed to set up their own experimental design and trials for safety, because industry-linked research (worse, facially independent but covertly industry-linked research) is incentivized toward affirming safety rather than investigating it neutrally.
But only because peer review and repeatability increases the number of people in the pool whose credibility can be attached to the research. If you don't trust anyone, why would you ever trust any research that wasn't done 100% by you under conditions 100% controlled by you (which I'm sure includes exactly no research)? Don't trust Monsanto? Okay. But what if one does trust some government lab that repeated it? Or some environmental non-profit that reviewed it and signed off? It's still based on trust, but you're able to choose from more people to trust. Transparency also promotes trust - like I said, going out of their way to not be transparent about it hints that there IS something to hide but they don't want a lot of eyes on it.
>> The safety of glyphosate is not settled science.
and then Monsantos claim:
>> In a statement, Monsanto said, “Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.”
>> It added: “The allegation that glyphosate can cause cancer in humans is inconsistent with decades of comprehensive safety reviews by the leading regulatory authorities around the world.
which is backed by "leading regulatory authroities around the world" and then I reflect on the CO2 / climate change issue which is also claimed by a lot of people to be settled science. I just found that comparison (mine, not the articles) interesting.
The scientific method can be trusted, but how it is implemented can not.
Science only considers something to be "fact" or "true" when a large (and usually expensive) study has been conducted, the results have been peer reviewed, and the results are then published.
The problem comes when the people paying for research only pay for research they want to be "true" and nobody will pay for research leading to things that might not be so good for sales.
As an example - think about how much money it cost to do a study on this Monsanto chemical to find out if it's "safe". Monsanto are paying for the study - do you really think if that study finds out it's not safe that it will be peer reviewed and published and then considered "true" (that it's not safe). Or will the whole study be swept under the rug, and therefore never be found to be unsafe in the eyes of science?
How many multi-million dollar studies have ever been conducted, peer reviewed and published (therefore making them "true" in the eyes of science) that tell us really anything in today's world is "bad" for us? I'm willing to bet that number is close to zero. Any published study was paid for by a system with very, very strong interests in the results, so science will only ever "learn" what the people with money want it to.
"Science only considers something to be "fact" or "true" when a large (and usually expensive) study has been conducted, the results have been peer reviewed, and the results are then published."
If it hasn't or can't be replicated by and independent entity it's not good science. Peer-reviewed is simply not a high enough bar to consider something fact.
Great, so if I think there are a lot of companies (solar, wind, "sustainable materials", etc) that have a vested interest in trying to prove that global warming is a man made construct, then I'm just practicing good science?
I'm always reminded of my Wall Street trader friend, and his chat with me:
From 9:30 to 4, I'd kill my mother to make a dime on a trade. My own mother, that's how driven I am to make money. I'd kill her on the spot for that dime if I could get away with it.
Of course, after 4, she's my mom. And I'd love her to death. He works for a very well respected Wall Street Firm.
Quote: “People should know that there are superb scientists in the world who would disagree with Monsanto and some of the regulatory agencies’ evaluations, and even E.P.A. has disagreement within the agency,” ... (emphasis added)
Without addressing the article's basic thrust, which seems meritorious, this talk about "superb scientists" contradicts the most basic premise of science, which is that science rejects authority, relying instead on evidence -- some superb, some not. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
Worse, to begin a debate that pivots on the authority of scientists only invites a reply in kind -- whose scientists are more authoritative, more "superb"? The process quickly loses any resemblance to science.
So for those responsible for the tone of this debate, it seems there are two goals. First, achieve some immediate, tangible goal. Second and more nefarious, turn a scientific debate (relying on evidence) into a political one (relying on eminence).
Another example of a company's liberal use of email to discuss potentially incriminating things (ie, ghostwriting studies). The glyphosate stuff still seems debatable - the PR team could handle that easily - but now we have employees on record acting shady and conspiratorial, that just makes them look more guilty.
I wonder if we'll ever enter a time where people won't be dumb enough to put this stuff down on paper and just assume an FBI agent will read anything they write in email at a future date? Especially when you work for such a villianized company like Monsanto... with so many people chomping at the bit to bring them down.
From another perspective this is (still) a golden era of criminal investigations.
There's selection bias here. In my experience people rarely email or write dubious stuff down and prefer to meet in person or informally off-site, but obviously all the people who get caught due to what they've emailed or written down did email it or write it down.
Typically you don't need to worry about non-gmo food being contaminated with roundup - a scandalous fact about roundup is that it tends to kill plants that are exposed.
You also don't need to worry about contamination of e.g. water supplies. Glyphosate tends to adhere to soil pretty well, where it is eventually consumed by microbes. Glyphosate isn't absorbed through the roots and isn't effective as pre-emergence herbicide.
The real safety challenge with roundup is the surfactant use. Glyphosate alone just isn't very effective without the surfactant to punch through the plants' waxy outer layers. These surfactants do cause loads of problems.
Note that there are actually very few GMO foods - it only makes sense to develop them for high volume crops. Anything you can buy whole or minulally processed (e.g. an ear of corn) is going to be untouched by glyphosate, even though gmo corn does exist.
Apparently they've had this product out for about a decade now; coincidentally its been about a decade since I've really done my research. Time sure does fly and its easy to forget that biotech, like any other tech, moves quickly.
Roundup is (and many other treatments are) definitely not allowed for organical farming. There are several certifications checking that farmers comply to their rules.
This is beating a dead horse... but look up the ties between Hillary and Monsato. Monsato is one of the most crooked, and corrupt corporations out there.
The best thing they can do for public health is to jail Jess Rowland for a very long time, and prosecute the scientists who took payments to add their names to papers that Monsanto wrote and Monsanto itself for conspiracy to commit fraud. My guess is that searching for payments between Rowland and Monsanto will be exceptionally and immediately fruitful, and that should result in prosecutions for people within Monsanto who planned and approved those payments.
None of that will prove whether there's any connection between glyphosate and cancer, but it will do a lot to make sure that studies that are done by Monsanto are signed by Monsanto, and regulators might second-guess themselves for a moment when they see an easy buck to be made by becoming corrupt.
This comment counts as government fan-fic for all the likelihood that anyone will see any punishment here other than a fine for Monsanto resulting in an immediate stock bump for being lower than expected.
Time and time again we see regulators working for the monopoly corporations, not against them. Monopolies like Monsanto only exist /because/ of regulation. If the market were free, both Monsanto and the EPA would have to compete. In a regulated market, neither of them do.
Edit: Realize there's a good chance you're being sarcastic, but responding anyway since there are many people who'd take this at face value.
> both Monsanto and the EPA would have to compete.
what does the EPA have to compete against? They regulate! Unless you mean monsanto could choose to be regulated by a different agency, whose funding comes from monsanto, hence regulators will tend to weaken regulation to get "business"!
Nobody, which is exactly my point. In an actual free market, people would still want consumer information (e.g. Consumer Reports magazine, Organic-certified labels). Therefore, consumer information companies would be required to compete with each other by offering better products i.e. accurate information, and a solid reputation.
The EPA has a terrible reputation and a long track record of failures, but it doesn't matter, because they have a state-enforced monopoly. They can take bribes all day long. However, if they existed in a competitive market, their reputation would be ruined and the market would be ripe for new competitors to enter.
And what is to stop those consumer information companies taking similar bribes. Especially without any regulatory agencies. Or do we just need another free market for consumer information on the consumer information companies.
When there's competition, reputation matters, since consumers have a choice about who to trust.
> Especially without any regulatory agencies.
The history of progressive regulation is agencies protecting monopolies from competition, not protecting the public from economic abuses though that is how it is advertised. Corporations want state-enforced regulation because it allows them to cartelize. [1]
Governments mandate minimum wage laws. They protect intellectual (and other) property rights. They license banks to create money, and they set interest rates.
There is no such thing as a market free from government interference.
History is more nuanced than the propaganda delivered by our state education would lead us to believe. Murray Rothbard has uncovered much here, so I will link this teaser article again. [1]
Highly recommend his books to anyone wanting to dig into the history of Progressive Era regulation, which transformed our laissez-faire economy into a centrally managed one. It offers deep insights into why our economy seems completely dysfunctional and unfair; it was designed that way to benefit powerful interests. People actually were better off with more freedom.
The free market works properly when there is transparency and both sides have the same information. The only regulations needed are ones requiring transparency.
Its basically a motion to compel an EPA guy to go under oath and sounds like the complainant had some run ins with Rowland.
The complainant, Marion, makes some claims about the effects of glyphosate without really citing any scientific evidence. Marion also claims there is a lot of evidence to back it up, but if so why not cite it?
"Your trivial MS degree from 1971 Nebraska is far outdated, thus CARC science is 10 years behind the literature in mechanisms."
So we have to take her word that Rowland didn't keep up to date with the literature? I find that hard to believe that someone would still be in a position that requires constant learning to keep their job.
From the Wikipedia plot summary for the movie "Michael Clayton":
"Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), U-North's general counsel, discovers that Arthur had come into possession of a confidential U-North document detailing the company's decision to manufacture a weed killer it knew to be carcinogenic."[1]
That there is debate about the health effects and environmental impact of glyphosate is a huge improvement over many previous pesticides which where obviously toxic to humans and environmentally persistent.
I've been telling HN about this, and mostly derided for it. I was working as a sysadmin for a bigag company in 2010 or so, who touted themselves as good ol local farm people who take care of their own. Come to find out, the millions the owner got to fund his extravagant lifestyle (besides from daddy), was from selling some of the genetic modifications to Monsanto. I was in the middle of my Decartes reset after getting back from Iraq, and dug into Monsanto.
Monsanto is one of the worst companies in America. As a constitutionalist, my primary issue is with their blatant undermining and corruption of the legal process, for example a SCOTUS who formerly worked for them refusing to recuse himself from relevant cases, infiltration and takeover of the top positions at the FDA and other regulatory capture issues, and the stifling of free speech through their massive propaganda machine, which includes online.
As a military person, I came to find out they were the ones who had been responsible for agent orange in Vietnam. Something many of my friends and family have directly had to deal with. (to be fair, it was a different business than the current Monsanto, the same in name only)
I learned they were one of the main sources of lobbying to allow patenting of organtic material (so they could patent genes in their gmos), that they created the BT killer strain of seeds designed to prevent farmers from saving their seeds, (incidentally Monsanto gmo seed business has been tied to large numbers of farmer suicides in India), and have brought legal action against farmers who saved their seeds. They have participated in farm mergers in aquisitions to the point that almost no farm is truly a family farm anymore, and they have been involved in illegal waste dumping more than once.
Once I learned all these things, I quit the job on principle. As luck would have it, the good ol rich guy who "would always take care of his people" subsequently, a year later, sold the company and fired half the staff... and now the local "community", despite protests from many of the farmers, decided to give Monsanto a 5.8 million dollar tax break to built a state of the art facility because it will "bring jobs".
To top it all off, our anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws seem to be completely dead and ignored, because the Bayer Monsanto $66bn merger seems to be full steam ahead at the moment.
They have created a sitution that requires more chemicals, causes more nitrogen runoff, have drastically reduced seed diversity (therefore setting up a massive crop failure potential across many crops), and continue to ignore GMO warnings.
Having sysadmined in a bigag company with a genetics department, and at a genetics company, my primary issues with GMO's is that there is a lack of rigourous scientific testing, especially over longer time frames. It wasn't uncommon to see a new GMO go from testing to prod within a year! That's not enough time to truly understand the implications of those kinds of products. Not to mention, as the article suggests, that they have artifically affected the actual science to be in their favor regardless of the real results.
If there ever is ecocide, Monsanto will be the primary hand to have caused it. I am willing to bet roundup will be the new agent orange. And finally, for your viewing pleasure:
This is the real story - Monsanto interfering with our ability to find out what is safe. But I'm sure needless endangerment of the health of ~tens of thousands of farmers will carry a stiff prison sentence for all involved...