SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
monsanto
Journal Finally Retracts Roundup Cancer Study Reliant on Monsanto Research and Ghostwriting
"Now that much of the research finding glyphosate poses no cancer risk has been undermined, it is especially outrageous that the Trump administration is seeking to bolster Bayer's case," said one campaigner.
Dec 03, 2025
Just two days after President Donald Trump's administration sided with the maker of glyphosate-based Roundup over cancer victims in a US Supreme Court case, the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology retracted a landmark 25-year-old study on the pesticide's supposed safety, citing various ethical concerns involving Monsanto.
Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, maintains that the weedkiller can be used safely and is not carcinogenic. However, the company faces thousands of lawsuits from people who developed cancer after exposure to its glyphosate products. The retraction stems from the US litigation, which in 2017 revealed Monsanto correspondence about the study.
While Bayer told the New Lede's Carey Gillam that Monsanto's role in the 2000 study was adequately disclosed, the journal's editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, does not agree. He wrote in an explanation for the retraction that "the apparent contributions of Monsanto employees as cowriters to this article were not explicitly mentioned as such in the acknowledgments section."
"This article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and Roundup," he highlighted. "However, the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by Monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn."
Of the study's three named authors—Gary M. Williams, Ian Munro, and Robert Kroes—only Williams is still alive. Van den Berg wrote that he reached out seeking an "explanation for the various concerns," but "did not receive any response."
The paper is reliant on company research. As van den Berg detailed, "the article's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto," and "the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999."
"Further correspondence with Monsanto disclosed during litigation indicates that the authors may have received financial compensation from Monsanto for their work on this article, which was not disclosed as such in this publication," he noted.
"The paper had a significant impact on regulatory decision-making regarding glyphosate and Roundup for decades," he continued. "Given its status as a cornerstone in the assessment of glyphosate's safety, it is imperative that the integrity of this review article and its conclusions are not compromised. The concerns specified here necessitate this retraction to preserve the scientific integrity of the journal."
It took years, but finally that Roundup paper ghost-written by Monsanto has been retracted. The whole episode is indicative of a terrible rot that is active in corners of scientific publishing.www.lemonde.fr/en/environme...
[image or embed]
— Joe Rojas-Burke (@rojasburke.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Michael Hansen, senior scientist of advocacy at Consumer Reports, emphasized the years between the retraction and the release of documents exposing Monsanto's role in the study. "What took them so long to retract it?" he asked Stacy Malkan of US Right to Know. "The retraction should have happened right after the documents came out."
Van den Berg, who has been in his role since 2019, told Malkan and Le Monde's Stéphane Foucart that he began reviewing the paper after a September article from Alexander Kaurov of New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University.
Kaurov and Oreskes' article in the journal Environmental Science and Policy begins by stressing that "corporate ghostwriting is a form of scientific fraud" and goes on to examine the paper's influence—or as they put it, "how corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse."
The Netherlands-based van den Berg said that "it simply never ended [up] on my desk being at first primarily a US situation with litigation. The paper of Oreskes triggered it this summer and these authors made an official request and complaint."
He also told Malkan that "if you have more papers regarding Roundup published in RTP with possible problems, let me know."
Although Bayer on Wednesday pointed to the thousands of other studies on glyphosate and "the consensus among regulatory bodies worldwide," the retraction could affect both regulations and ongoing litigation. As Gillam reported:
Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public, said the retraction was "a long time coming."
Wisner said the Williams, Kroes, and Munro study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherry-picking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations."
"Faced with undisputed evidence concerning how this study was manufactured and then used, for over two decades, to protect glyphosate sales, the editor-in-chief... did the right thing," Wisner said. "While the damage done to the scientific discourse—and the people who were harmed by glyphosate—cannot be undone, it helps rejuvenate some confidence in the otherwise broken peer-review process that corporations have taken advantage of for decades. This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved. Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."
Le Monde's Foucart noted Wednesday that the retracted study "is cited around 40 times in the 2015 European expert report that led to the herbicide's reauthorization in 2017."
In the United States, Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity—who has been highly critical of the Trump administration's various decisions favoring the pesticide industry that contradict its so-called Make America Healthy Again promises—urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action in response to the retraction.
"The pesticide industry's decades of efforts to hijack the science and manipulate it to boost its profits is finally being exposed," he said in a statement. "The EPA must take immediate action to reassess its finding that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. That means rather than relying on Monsanto's confidential research of its own product, the agency needs to follow the gold standard of independent science established by the World Health Organization in its finding that glyphosate probably causes cancer."
He also pointed to the Monday briefing in which US Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the country's top court to hear a challenge to a verdict that awarded $1.25 million to a man who claimed Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
"Now that much of the research finding glyphosate poses no cancer risk has been undermined, it is especially outrageous that the Trump administration is seeking to bolster Bayer's case," Donley said. "Trump promised the American public his administration would protect Americans from dangerous chemicals and pesticides, but now it's throwing its full weight behind Bayer's desire to deny cancer victims their day in court. This is a massive betrayal of the public and an unabashed prioritization of corporate wealth over public health, plain and simple."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Progressives Blast MAHA Report That 'Echoes the Pesticide Industry's Talking Points'
One critic called the report "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Sep 09, 2025
Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration's Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.
According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a "cautious line" on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work "with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency's] pesticide robust review procedures."
As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it "reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto."
Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that "we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report," even as she praised other parts of it.
Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.
"The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag," said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. "Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated."
Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks "any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide" and called it "shameful but not surprising" that the report barely mentioned so-called "forever chemicals" contaminating drinking water "while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled."
Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report's section on pesticides.
"Laughably, the report calls the EPA's lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process 'robust,'" she said. "This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered "a few crumbs" to health advocates, but was mostly filled with "hollow rhetoric."
George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report's claims about the EPA having a "robust" procedure for approving pesticides.
"There is nothing 'robust' about EPA's regulation of pesticides," he said. "In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties."
Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy's past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.
"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," he commented. "Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they'd protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow."
Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as "grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Outrageous': New Roundup Is 45 Times More Toxic
"With the new formulations of Roundup, Bayer had the opportunity to make us safer, but it did the opposite," one expert said.
Oct 22, 2024
Facing tens of thousands of lawsuits after it acquired Monsanto, Bayer promised to remove cancer-linked glyphosate from its commercial Roundup weed killers by 2023. But an analysis published by Friends of the Earth on Tuesday reveals that the replacement is even more dangerous.
The environmental group found that many residential Roundup products still do contain glyphosate, and those that don't have replaced it with a chemical cocktail that is 45 times more toxic to human health following long-term exposure.
"With the new formulations of Roundup, Bayer had the opportunity to make us safer, but it did the opposite," Kendra Klein, deputy director of science for Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Bayer's willingness to deceive the public and disregard our health as it continues to cash in on the Roundup brand name is outrageous."
"In short, the new Roundup is not the old Roundup—it's worse."
Roundup weed killer was first commercially released by Monsanto 50 years ago. Since then, tens of thousands of people say they have come down with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma after repeated use of the product and its active ingredient glyphosate, which the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer says is "probably carcinogenic to humans." Despite the risk, it is so widely used that it has been found in 80% of a test of U.S. urine samples.
"The human toll of Roundup is enormous—tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and their health because of this toxic weed killer," Klein said.
In response to both legal challenges and popular pressure, Bayer announced in 2021 that it would remove glyphosate from residential Roundup sold in the U.S. within two years.
To track how well Bayer kept that promise, Friends of the Earth assessed the Roundup products for sale at Lowe's and Home Depot—the largest home and garden stores in the U.S.—between June and October of 2024.
It found that seven of the Roundup products for sale still contained glyphosate, while the eight that did not used chemicals "of dramatically greater concern."
Bayer has replaced glyphosate with a combination of four chemicals—fluazifop-P-butyl, triclopyr, diquat dibromide, and imazapic—the latter two of which are banned in the European Union. All four chemicals are even more dangerous to health than glyphosate on average following chronic exposure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) analysis of safety studies. The new ingredients have been linked to kidney and liver damage; reproductive, birth, and development problems; and allergic reactions or irritation that impact the eyes, skin, and respiratory system.
While all four are toxic, one stands out: Diquat dibromide is 200 times more toxic than glyphosate and is considered a "highly hazardous pesticide."
The new ingredients also pose a greater risk to the environment. They are, on average, more likely to threaten bees, birds, worms, and fish and other aquatic life. They are also less likely to break down in the environment, and therefore more likely to infiltrate groundwater and pollute rivers and drinking water.
"In short, the new Roundup is not the old Roundup—it's worse," Friends of the Earth concluded in the report.
The environmental group also criticized Bayer for not providing a warning to consumers about the altered ingredients, as well as lax federal law that does not require pesticide makers to alert shoppers when they change the ingredients of a known brand. While pesticide makers do have to list the active ingredients of a pesticide on the container, the average consumer may not be aware of the relative toxicity of these chemicals. A frequent Roundup user is also likely to assume that anything sold under that brand is similarly toxic to products they have used before.
"Drug companies are not allowed to replace the aspirin in a brand-name pain reliever with oxycontin or fentanyl, and for good reason," Friends of the Earth senior campaigner Sarah Starman said. "It is unconscionable that the Environmental Protection Agency allows this toxic sleight of hand and unethical that Bayer is exposing consumers to dramatically greater risks with no warning."
Friends of the Earth called on Bayer to develop safer chemicals and retire toxic brands like Roundup. At the very least, it urged the company to sell the new formulations under a different brand and warn buyers of the new products' health and environmental risks.
Home and garden retailers, the group argued, should also step up by removing all Roundup products from their stores and online catalogs, or at least selling them with clear warnings of the new risks; phase out toxic pesticides; and offer safer and more organic options.
Finally, the group called on the EPA to toughen its regulations by requiring ingredient-specific safety warnings on commercial pesticides, mandating that new formulations be sold under a new brand, and banning chemicals that harm human health and the environment from consumer products.
"Bayer, like other chemical companies, cannot be trusted to protect our health," Starman said. "We need serious reform at the EPA to ensure that the agency does its duty to protect people and the environment from dangerous pesticides."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular