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cancer
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 As van den Berg detailed, "the article's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto," and "the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the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...
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— 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."
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Groups Warn Trump Executive Orders Would Spike Cancers Caused by Exposure to Nuclear Radiation
A letter implored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power."
Nov 14, 2025
A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people's "suffering as the price of nuclear expansion," said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.
More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC's Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.
"NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level," reads the letter.
In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC "roundly rejected" a petition "to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year."
The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.
"Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.
"Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls "face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood."
Despite the risks to some of the country's most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of "the basis of the NRC regulation," reads Friday's letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.
The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump's executive orders calls for "an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not 'count' or be considered as to have not occurred."
The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are "based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer," reads the letter. "The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure."
Trump's orders "would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model," it adds.
The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on "Reference Man"—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.
“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies," reads the letter. "Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that "radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
The groups emphasized that "executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act."
Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, "should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests."
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Lancet Study Warns Cancer Deaths Could Surge Nearly 75% by 2050
One researcher called the projections "an impending disaster" for low-income nations.
Sep 25, 2025
An ominous new study in the Lancet medical journal projects that deaths from cancer will surge over the next two-and-a-half decades, with lower-income countries set to be the hardest hit.
The study, which was released on Wednesday, estimates that there will be 18.6 million cancer deaths and 30.5 million cancer cases in 2030. The estimated number of cancer deaths would represent a nearly 75% increase from the estimated 10.4 million cancer deaths in 2023.
The study explains that the forecasted death increases "are greater in low-income and middle-income countries" than in wealthy nations, and that most of the projected increases are likely to come from an older population, not a rise in the lethality of cancer overall.
All the same, the study warns that the total increase in cancer cases and deaths will put a strain on global health systems.
"Effectively and sustainably addressing cancer burden globally will require comprehensive national and international efforts that consider health systems and context in the development and implementation of cancer-control strategies across the continuum of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment," the study says.
Meghnath Dhimal, chief research officer at the Nepal Health Research Council, who worked on the study, told Euronews that the projections showed "an impending disaster" for low-income nations. Dhimal also said that these nations needed to do more to improve their citizens' access to cancer screenings and treatments to prevent their systems from potentially being overwhelmed.
"There are cost-effective interventions for cancer in countries at all stages of development," he said.
Dr. Theo Vos, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who helped author the study, told Euronews that the incidence of cancer could be significantly reduced by lowering tobacco use, unsafe sex, obesity, and high blood sugar, among other factors.
"There are tremendous opportunities for countries to target these risk factors, potentially preventing cases of cancer and saving lives," Vos explained.
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