> the product is studied extensively by researchers
Which researchers and funded by whom? This is the line Monsanto brings out every time. It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
>It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
What makes you think a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better qualified to make conclusions on the available evidence than scientists?
Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions. Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.
If someone is not qualified as an expert on a given topic themselves, they have no rational basis for evaluating competing and mutually incompatible claims generated by two parties who are each qualified experts. The process devolves into mere sophistry.
>Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions.
That doesn't answer the question. What makes you think that a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better able to determine the truth from 2 conflicting teams of experts, than a team of experts versed in the relevant field?
>Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.
They seem to be uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, according to wikipedia.
>The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity. [...]
there's more but I'm not going to quote the whole paragraph
Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
> The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment toxicology review in 2013 found that with regard to positive correlations between exposure to glyphosate formulations and risk of various cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, "the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing".[11] A meta-analysis published in 2014 identified an increased risk of NHL in workers exposed to glyphosate formulations.[12] In March 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic in humans" (category 2A) based on epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in vitro studies.[8][13][14][15] In contrast, the European Food Safety Authority concluded in November 2015 that "the substance is unlikely to be genotoxic (i.e. damaging to DNA) or to pose a carcinogenic threat to humans", later clarifying that while carcinogenic glyphosate-containing formulations may exist, studies "that look solely at the active substance glyphosate do not show this effect."[16][17] In 2017, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen, a mutagen, toxic to reproduction, nor toxic to specific organs.[18]
Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the *European Chemicals Agency* over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.
> Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
I'm glad that you quoted the whole paragraph, but this seems to put a damper on your conclusion
>"the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing"
>Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the European Chemicals Agency over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.
Their conclusion is:
>the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen
I mean what do you want, 50 scientists saying one thing, 50 scientists saying another and have 50 more scientists making the final decision on what the "truth" is?
How is that any better, considering you just have more scientists that may randomly lean one way or another.
You have no evidence of that. More likely the plaintiff had their own scientific experts who were more persuasive, that's how all technical matters are adjudicated in courts.
Nonetheless, surely the point is well-made that just because 12 jurors or 1 judge decide that a presentation is more persuasive does not say anything about the truth value of the underlying science.
Just look at the junk science of the FBI crime labs - and that stuff is being measured at the higher "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.
Another factor that makes Monsanto/Bayer look really bad here is that they lost despite having basically an unlimited legal budget with a huge team of lawyers versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they still lost.
> no, their budget is capped at the amount that they're suing for. If you're getting sued for $1M there's no point in spending more than $1M on lawyers.
If it affects future worldwide business, they can spend more to protect overall business.
J&J is winning most of the cases in court, or having large verdicts overturned on appeal, but there are supposedly something like 38,000 cases out there and each one has an outside chance to end up being like the one they lost in Wisconsin state court which initially awarded over $4.69bn to 22 plaintiffs (reduced to $2.11bn on appeal).
Seriously, WTF is wrong with people... we repeatedly polluted whole world with harmful substances like lead that killed god knows how many people and damaged in some way everybody else with this kind of logic, yet people have the balls to come up with "innocent until proven guilty by 100 peer reviews" mantra for... MONSANTO
I don't believe, unlike many, that they are comically evil guys. Just playing a god for profit with stuff they probably understand only in lower 90 percentile range, especially second, third etc. order effects. And probably too over-invested in direction company took decades ago, so nobody looking at bonuses as drive will change its direction dramatically.
Choosing to blindly believe one side over blindly believing the other side is a dubious approach to these things. I care about environmental issues, and have no love for many aspects of Monsanto’s business and history, but your emotional appeal is extremely unconvincing.
> for Monsanto
GP isn’t making their comment “for Monsanto”, but for the sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue. You will continue to be shocked until you change your perspective on how we ought to evaluate nuanced issues. Especially when those issues have to do with global food production.
Nobody is "blindly believing" that RoundUp causes cancer. There have been numerous cancer cases. There have been studies directly linking RoundUp to cancer. The world's foremost experts on cancer classified RoundUp as a carcinogen. Monsanto has been caught numerous times falsifying studies and paying for studies to be done on only the active ingredient (leaving out the ingredients that make it permeate the cells).
> sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue
I don't disagree with you, I also don't think we should be using the product when the truth is as clouded as it is. So ban it until the truth comes out.
It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans. Similarly to tobacco companies Monsanto is subsidizing research that just happens to find no harms with RoundUp. I'm sure it's fine though, no big deal that trace amounts can be found in urine samples from 80% of Americans. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/weedkiller-g...
>It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans.
Glyphosate has been around for almost 5 decades. Wikipedia says "The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity"[1]. If you think this is not "conclusively" enough, how much longer/more evidence do you need? Is this a standard that we should apply to everything[2], or just chemicals made my evil multinational corporations? Maybe we should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?
But only when the advent of RounUp ready crops have we started spraying RoundUp directly onto food. Previously we only consumed RoundUp in trace amounts. It's extremely misleading to exclude the facts.
I appreciate the correction. That said, it doesn't affect the argument that much. At best it changes "almost 5 decades" to "almost 3 decades". I think it's reasonable to say that if people aren't willing to wait 5 decades to "prove conclusively that [thing] causes cancer", that they're not willing to wait 3 decades either. Let me re-ask the question from my prior comment: should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?
Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.
Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy. On top of that, have you seen, ever, a label on food stating that it contains ingredients on which Round up was used, how much etc?
Let's stop comparing apples to mortar bricks and have some factual discussions on such serious issues, not just random whataboutisms to divert topic.
>Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.
The people with EMI sensitivity and/or oppose 5G deployments beg to differ.
>Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy.
I have to take it at face value to a degree otherwise Monsanto can fire cannons of money at scientists and yell “the science isn’t settled!” until the end of humanity even if roundup really did cause cancer.
At the same time I think there is a limit to how bad roundup can be to have fought off criticism in EVERY country and remain on the market.
I keep getting called for jury selection and it keeps getting called off.
People have been talking shit about jurors for 2 millennia, one of the oldest plays in history was dedicated to talking about how awful jurors were, and yet they stick around. I still value them merely on the basis of their relative resistance to corrupt influences compared to scientific institutions.
Which researchers and funded by whom? This is the line Monsanto brings out every time. It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
And it's not just roundworms https://sites.psu.edu/soilmicrobiology/projects/glyphosate-i...
This chemical is bad news and the only reason it's legal is regulatory capture by Monsanto/Bayer.