So yeah, not only does it cause cancer, it causes a wide range of diseases: literally any one that can be caused by protein misassembly in ways that the body can't easily clear the protein (or if it does, the glyphosate can end up being reused instead of flushed out of your body) can be linked to this.
So, in around 5 years, if they come out with a study that Autism is caused by, or greatly enhanced by, glyphosate exposure in utero
or during nursing (glyphosate concentrations are extremely high in breast milk in mothers exposed to the chemical), I will not be surprised whatsoever.
Paper 1: 'no cytotoxic effects at concentrations at or below 100 μM' -- A non trivial amount.
(Sorry don't have the full text for the others)
And your 'worst one of all' is a joke of a paper. Its a review and begs the question that glycophosphate is substituting an amino acid.
Its presupposition that
” Glyphosate is a glycine molecule with a
methyl-phosphonyl group bound to the nitrogen atom. As
an analogue of glycine, it can be expected to displace
glycine at random points in the protein synthesis process,
with unknown consequences.
Demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the specificity of the ribosomes and enzymes/proteins in general.
Of course they have no actual evidence - say isolating glycophosphate substituted proteins? Fairly easy to do as normal proteins do not contain phosphorous, or it could be via C13 labeling of the what would be the glycine residue.
To say nothing that its quoting studies dosing the equivalent (10mg+/kg) of having a person do literal shots of herbicide.
Everything (except e-caprolactam, go figure) causes cancer, and most everything will kill you if you have enough of it. Hell the IARC has glycophosphate in the same category as red meat and drinking beverages warmer than 65C. They've also classified cell phones as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans'. http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf
It is really worth emphasizing just how bad the last paper ("the worst of all") is. It does not contain a single piece of actual data, there are no experiments there, only wild hypotheses.
There isn't a single piece of evidence in that paper, the authors simply assume that glyphosate can subvert one of the most important mechanisms in the cell and change any protein that contains glycine.
What kills this hypothesis entirely is that glyphosate is a glycine with a modification on the amino group. That is the part of the amino acid that is used to make the connection to the previous one in a protein. This kind of modification makes it impossible for it to be incorporated into a protein by a peptide bond.
The journal also does not seem trustworthy, it doesn't seem to be indexed in Pubmed, which is a very, very bad sign. Why would a scientist publish in a journal that none of their colleagues could easily find? In this area of science, every journal worth reading (and some more) are indexed in Pubmed. It also seems to only publish ~3 papers per issue.
You seem confident that you know more than the authors of the papers referenced. Since you're obviously passionate about this topic, what are your qualifications and where do you do research? Have you studied this subject specifically and can you share any of your own research?
If you use Seneff's paper as proof of glyphosate's harmful effects, it probably means you have no idea how to distinguish good science from junk science.
Where was this in the comments from yesterday about the California glyphosate listing? Would have liked to have seen these articles there. Going to have to read them a bit more and then get back to you.
Ignoring the question as to whether or not "killing the study" was nefarious or not, this is a great lesson on what you should and shouldn't say in emails.
I remember getting training a long time ago from my employer. If you're discussing anything remotely controversial, pick up the phone or walk to the person's office. Don't put it in an email
Why? Because lawyers will find it and twist it however they want to make you look bad. Had a colleague annoy the hell out of you asking for something that didn't need to be done? Don't put "I deserve a medal for killing this study" in an email.
This is interesting because according to the article, he didn't write any emails about that. Some other guy said he said that in an email.
It'd be nice if someone could pull up an actual copy of the legal filings so we could all read about it, as we are hearing this fourth hand. We have an article referencing a legal filing referencing an email about what someone heard someone else say.
“If I can kill this I should get a medal,” Rowland told a Monsanto regulatory affairs manager who recounted the conversation in an email to his colleagues, according to a court filing made public Tuesday
> Ignoring the question as to whether or not "killing the study" was nefarious or not, this is a great lesson on what you should and shouldn't say in emails.
"Should" is an interesting word choice here. It seems to me that someone doing evil "should" stop doing it and report his guilt to the proper authorities. Not change his behavior to more effectively cover it up.
It never ceases to amaze me, how much controversy the name Monsanto stirs up.
The waters around this company are so murky, that it's less a question of whether the company operates an unregulated extrajudicial campaign against public awareness of their wares and activity, but rather, what's their spend on it, and how deep do they go?
Food security is frighteningly politicized, to the point of bald militarization (see: Canada's maple syrup). Almost nothing would surprise me.
Well that would be my favourite conspiracy ever, considering the people running it must be the most incompetent evil scheming overlords ever.
If they're running an "unregulated extrajudicial campaign against public awareness", it is a spectacular failure, considering Monsanto is among the most-hated companies on the planet. Can we somehow get them hired by Syria's government?
Maybe they simply don't give a damn, because they realize general population is not their target market, and so it doesn't matter what regular people think of them?
And yet as an agricultural company, almost every person on earth is touched by their products or intellectual property. Regular people don't care but 7 billion potential and unaware users of their products might...
Considering the huge number of TV reportage about how mosanto is evil and the tiny number of trials for defamation, I consider that anything sold by mosanto shall be avoided.
Does anyone have a link to the actual court filing so we can see the document they reference? Is this an email found during discovery or something else?
> “If I can kill this I should get a medal,” Rowland told a Monsanto regulatory affairs manager who recounted the conversation in an email to his colleagues, according to a court filing made public Tuesday
> The case is In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2741, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
His comment saying that got autokilled for duplicating his other comment linking to it.
Here's a quick transcription I made of the email:
===
Hey- cc'ing Jen
So...Jess called me out of the blue this morning:
"We have enough to sustain our conclusions. Don't need gene tox or epi. The only thing is the cheminova study with the sarcoma in mice- we have that study now and its conclusions are irrelevant (bc at limit dose...?) I am the chair of the CARC and my folks are running this process for glyphosate in reg review. I have called a CARC meeting in June..."
Also, Jess called to ask for a contact name at ATSDR. I passed on Jesslyn's email. He told me no coordination is going on and he wanted to establish some saying "If I can kill this I should get a medal". However, don't get your hopes up, I doubt EPA and Jess can kill this; but it's good to know they are going to actually make the effort now to coordinate due to our pressing and their shared concern that ATSDR is consistent in its conclusions w EPA.
Dan Jenkins
U.S. Agency Lead
Regulatory Affairs
Monsasnto Company
1300 I St., NW
Suite 450 East
Washington, DC 20005
Office: 202-383-2851
Cell: 571-732-6575
No problem, thank you for digging up the info. Yes, it will auto-kill identical comments no matter where they are and those with showdead will see [dupe] [dead]
I didn't want your info to get lost because getting the original source is far more interesting to me than a 4th hand account of what happened.
Makes sense that I couldn't find them on PACER too, turns out that discovery docs aren't posted publicly unless provided by one of the parties (in this case the plaintiffs supplied them).
The email series in question starts at page 99 of this PDF:
"Roundup" isn't just for farmers. I deployed around 35 x 5 ml of the stuff in 5l of water here, at home (UK) two days ago. I took care to only spray in the early evening after bees and most other insects had buggered off but probably some woodlice ("jiggers" I think, in en_US) might have suffered.
I threat the stuff as a nasty poison but had no idea that it might be carcinogenic.
Ah! I didn't know what either "jigger" or "woodlice" referred to until I read your comment. I actually always used to call them "pill bugs", although I'm not sure if that's something that others call or just a name I learned from my family.
What were you spraying Roundup for? Given that it might be carcinogenic, unless you're using it for something extremely important (a use case I'm struggling to come up with), it may be worth discontinuing usage.
No, I'm saying that the IARC group for all of those product is exactly the same.
The ones saying silly things are the one saying things like the oine you said disregarding any evidence.
If you're so afraid that glysophate might be carcinogen, you should be very afraid of roasted potatoes or red meat because they are in the same exactly group.
And please, can you tell me where I have said anything of eating glysophate?
You are irrationally focusing on just one aspect of toxicity -- an IARC group. That is one classification of things. There's nothing inherent in nature about IARC groups, and there are many other ways in which pesticides are more harmful to eat than normal food in addition to one potential classification of carcinogenicity. You are making ludicrous reductionist statements that are convincing no one beyond yourself. You are also completely ignoring issues of dosage.
Try this argument on for size: Both water and hydrochloric acid have a 0 flammability rating on the NFPA 704 scale, thus if you're willing to drink water you should be willing to drink hydrochloric acid.
> You are irrationally focusing on just one aspect of toxicity -- an IARC group.
Yes, the only agency that has stated that it might be carcinogenic, the thing you have talked about. Perhaps the irrationally focusing and changing goalposts is you, not me.
> and there are many other ways in which pesticides are more harmful to eat than normal food in addition to one potential classification of carcinogenicity.
And? You have talked about carcinogenic effects, not other things
> You are also completely ignoring issues of dosage.
Me? Tell that to the IARC, they are the ones that doesn't talk about dosages.
By the way, do you know the dosage?
> Do you see where this falls down?
Yes, talking about carcinogenic effects like you did, it is silly
The first post, remember, the one talking about carcinogenic effects was you, not me.
> What were you spraying Roundup for? Given that it might be carcinogenic, unless you're using it for something extremely important (a use case I'm struggling to come up with), it may be worth discontinuing usage.
And if you talk about toxicity, do you know the relative toxicity of Roundup versus other pesticides?
Perhaps you're advocating for substituting it by toher things more toxic
It's no surprise when corrupt regulators cozy with industry are ineffective. It's not that regulation is bad, it's the nuance of having sensible and effective authority, legislation and enforcement that is desperately needed to properly regulate chemicals as and how they are used in many industries.
This is almost as bad as Monsanto guy offered to drink glyphosate and then refused to drink it. https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
And safe is a relative term. something might be safe ingested in trace amounts, or with contact to the skin. But drinking a whole glass of it? that is a different story.
The poison is in the dose; the LD50 for glyphosate is in the neighborhood of 5 g / kg, which amounts to around a quarter liter of pure glyphosate for a 50kg subject. You want to stay orders of magnitude below the LD50, for obvious reasons.
"How much can you safely drink?" depends heavily on the concentration. A cup of pure, or even the most concentrated form the sell in stores, might do it. Or might not. Once you dilute it for application - usually gallons of water to the tablespoon of concentrate - a cup becomes significantly less threatening.
The problem with that approach is that it is just about acute lethality and does not consider long-term effects from prolonged exposure that are hard to measure.
Further it ignores interactions with other chemicals that are also in use, something that we know is pretty common from medications.
Especially with endocrine disruptors there is also the effect that several chemicals might work in the same direction, where a safe dose of one chemical might be harmless but safe doses of 10 chemicals combined might not be safe anymore.
NO, wrong again. They boldly claimed with a direct, verbatim quote "You can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you." and then refused to drink it when offered.
I don't think GP is distrusting m disagreeing with you; it sounds to me like they're saying "if your point is that it's safe in trace amounts but not for drinking a whole glass, you shouldn't be offering to drink a whole glass"
He wasn't offered, he claimed it was safe. If it had stopped there, it would just have been a huge turd of a hypocritical lie, as it turned out it's a lesson for those with eyes to see. It's not like he made an appointment to drink one in controlled circumstances either, so you got nothing with your attempt of an excuse for someone who also has nothing. And if that's too personal, then you're blaming me for your not imagining, say, someone seeing the hypothetical shorter version of the interview and, you know, having a pint of it for laughs. This shit to me is the little brother of murder and it's disgraceful to wriggle around it. He should be forced to drink it. That's what he bet on after all, to just say it and not have to do it. Multiply that by billions of people, theoretical victims in the future where this lie is never corrected, and you got yourself a lenient punishment. If you can't tell, this guy and similar peddlers make the hair on my neck stand up.
Glyphosate is only one ingredient of roundup. There are surfactants used in the formulation which are indeed lethal in large doses. Would you trust that the thing you are drinking is only glyphosate, the chemical in question, from some gotcha journalist? I hope not.
Yes and spokeperson implied RoundUp was safe and nontoxic to drink straight, which is obviously and demonstrably inadvisable. What level of low-level, continuous exposure is deemed safe (perhaps from long-term studies not funded by industry) is the billion dollar question.
PS to anyone in the know: How does RoundUp use compare to the US in Scandinavian countries where there are much stricter chemical residue and registers chemical controls?
I would obviously like to see more studies, but here is one from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization indicating that glyphosate seems to be safe when used as a pesticide:
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5693e.pdf (page 31 of the pdf)
They are one regulating body with jurisdiction in the US. There are other (less biased) research groups, and plenty of other countries with organizations equivalent to the EPA.
I actually agree with this. If, say, Canada or Europe or Australia banned it and banned importation of any goods exposed to it, Monsanto would be forced to seriously rethink their options.
This is the same rude statement, just made with more words.
Also, you have just no business at all saying that I have a "passion" for this issue simply because you happen to have read some comments I wrote about it on HN. Nor would it be any business of yours if I did. Mostly, what I have a passion for this week is not staring at a docker compose command that's taking 10 minutes to finish.
That's of course orthogonally rude to the core argument you're making.
Finally, the idea that having not responded to an earlier rude comment of yours on another thread I'm somehow conceding that your question is interesting is fallacious. It's a little rude, too, but it's rude in that way all of us who argue at each other on message boards tend to be, and pot, kettle, &c.
But the other two problems, you need to fix.
I edited this comment several times since submitting it with just that first sentence.
It's rarely ok to dig into someone's personal history. If they are an oncologist or a biologist and they want you to know, they'll volunteer that info.
It's more productive to ask "Do you have a source to support your claims?" rather than "Why are you speaking?"
HN allows points of view from all people, qualified or not. If their arguments are valid and persuasive, the ideas are usually accepted. If it's mistaken or naive, they're typically rejected. This doesn't happen all the time, and often you have to articulate ideas far more carefully than in the old days, but it works pretty well. And the cornerstone of this system is for anyone to be able to say anything.
I like that cornerstone. I'm also half Dutch and had an experience while living in Holland that made a big impression on me. A politician was giving a speech and there was a heckler in the crowd (something that was not common at the time, about 40 years ago). He ignored the first outburst, and the second, but after the third he turned to the guy and said "And your experience in making public policy is?" The guy had no answer and let the speech proceed.
So I agree with how Hacker News works, at least how you described it, that's been my experience as well and it's cool that you don't have to have a PhD in whatever to have an opinion about whatever. On the other hand, are we sure that there are not people here who are paid by Monsanto to push their agenda? I'm not saying that's the case here but I don't know. So I asked because it felt weird to me. I'll admit I was egged on a bit by some people who sent me private mail, they didn't want the down votes but they wanted to know as well. So I asked, down votes or no down votes, I'm not going to be defined by some pile of points (as much as I appreciate how they generally filter the content here pretty nicely).
On the personal history, is that really true? Because when I was talking about some stuff I've done here someone said I really ought to put my full name in my profile so people can go learn who I am and what I've done. So I did. I thought that was why you put your name in your profile. All I did was copy his name from his profile to duckduckgo and hit return. If doing that is a no-no that's news to me.
Please stop suggesting that people who write comments you don't agree with are shills. Not doing this isn't just a norm here: it's specifically not allowed. If you think you have evidence that I, or anyone else, is a shill, send it to "hn@ycombinator.com". They're very responsive.
What you may not do here is use insinuations about shillage as a rhetorical wedge in public HN threads.
I mean, if you're satisfying personal curiosity, then sure, dig away. But I think it crosses the line when you go gather information about someone and then post it online for all to see. tptacek doesn't try to hide anything about himself, but if you were to do this to me then I'd be pretty upset, for example. The main issue is that viewpoints from people of all backgrounds and credentials are welcome.
Regarding whether someone is being paid, two points:
1. Accusing someone of being a shill without any hard evidence is strictly against the rules. If you have evidence, it's usually best to send it to hn@ycombinator.com, who will take it seriously. But try not to waste their time with spurious or coincidental connections.
2. tptacek isn't being paid by Monsanto. (Contrary to belief, Matasano wasn't a Monsanto subsidiary.)
Can we stop with "accusing someone" thread? I did no such thing yet you appear to be accusing me of that. I clearly and repeatedly said "I don't know". That's not accusing someone of something.
And as for "posting it online for all to see", umm, it's right there in the search results. In the titles, you don't even have to click down one level. I didn't post that stuff, he did when he joined linkedin and all the other social/business stuff. The whole point of all that stuff is to advertise who you are and what you can do. All I did was say what his advertised career is and what his age is, something that any of us can get in 10 seconds. If that is crossing some line, that's a pretty arbitrary and pointless line. You are making it sound like I found his social security number and posted it and I did no such thing.
This all could have been a non issue if tptacek did what most people would have done and said "I'm a nerd and I like reading papers about this stuff" or "my background includes this stuff". But he didn't, and hasn't, and that still feels weird to me. People who are into stuff typically love talking about it and that includes talking about why they love it, how they learned it, who they learned it from, etc.
Something felt off. So I asked. If I, a software/hardware guy, was making claims that global warming isn't a thing someone would eventually ask how I knew that. This is exactly like that. And he hasn't answered that question. He could totally shut this whole thread down with a simple answer to a simple question. It's sort of strange he hasn't. I don't get it.
Whatever, I gotta go, my stupid puppy is trying to eat my chickens.
On the other hand, are we sure that there are not people here who are paid by Monsanto to push their agenda? I'm not saying that's the case here but I don't know.
Insinuating that someone is a paid shill isn't allowed on HN. I know it seems harmless, but it's been a recurring problematic theme for years.
The problem is that every time a shill insinuation comes up, there's almost no evidence. That leaves an unproductive conversation that goes nowhere but down.
I know how frustrating it is to be the target of downvotes and flags, but it's a reaction to a long history of similar types of comments leading in negative directions. It's kept HN discussions interesting, so typically it's an asset for the site.
What part of "I don't know" do you not understand? I never said that he was paid by Monsanto, I just asked about his background. Because he was making strong statements that suggested he knew what he was talking about. So I asked about his background. What is his knowledge base?
Which neither you, his buddy I'm guessing, or he, has answered. Why the heck not?
Whatever. I've taken this up with hn@ycombinator.com and I'm so done with this. I'm just about done with hackernews over this thread. It's disgusting that it has gone this far, this is not what learning from each other or seeking the truth looks like, I have no desire to keep going if hackernews is going to look like Fox News.
I came here to learn from the people here. This is not that. As my Dutch grandmother would say, you should be ashamed, you can do better.
I didn't mean to antagonize -- just the opposite. It wasn't a good idea to volunteer info without you asking about it, and I see now why that angered you.
I meant to address your questions directly and in detail, but apparently I missed the mark. The usual convention is to ignore threads like these, both to avoid misunderstandings like this and to keep off-topic threads short. I didn't want to just leave you wondering, hence the replies.
Keep in mind that regulatory agencies exist to protect corporations by giving them immunity from product liability lawsuits.
Just like California's labeling everything as a known carcinogen has nothing to do with protecting consumers but only serves the purposes of making corporations more immune from liability because they have duly warned you in compliance with the law that their products are harmful.
And the worst one of all: https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2016/Glyphosate_V_glycin...
So yeah, not only does it cause cancer, it causes a wide range of diseases: literally any one that can be caused by protein misassembly in ways that the body can't easily clear the protein (or if it does, the glyphosate can end up being reused instead of flushed out of your body) can be linked to this.
So, in around 5 years, if they come out with a study that Autism is caused by, or greatly enhanced by, glyphosate exposure in utero or during nursing (glyphosate concentrations are extremely high in breast milk in mothers exposed to the chemical), I will not be surprised whatsoever.