Surprise! Monsanto-Funded Research Finds Their Products Safe

Sayer Ji, Contributor
Activist Post

Increasingly, the front lines of the information warfare being perpetuated by corporations upon the people are moving into peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals. Once considered a place where rigorous, empirical science — i.e. the truth — is vindicated and publicly acknowledged, these journals, and the scientists who publish in them, are no longer capable of maintaining the once hard and fast illusion that they are immune to the corrupting influence of industry.

Corporations like Monsanto, whose GMO-agriculture inventions (Bt corn; Roundup herbicide) now threaten human and environmental health alike, have moved beyond the stage of simply denying or minimizing the science revealing the harm being done by their products (there is too much science now to maintain this strategy!); rather, they are now investing in the burgeoning, multi-billion dollar industry practice known as “check book” science: find willing researchers, research institutions, and journals to create and publish information favorable to the company writing the check, and you’re in business.

Case in point….
Monsanto-Funded “Research” Reveals Monsanto Products Are Safe

A review on glyphosate (Monsanto’s invention and key ingredient in their Roundup herbicide formulation) titled, “Developmental and reproductive outcomes in humans and animals after glyphosate exposure: a critical analysis,” was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health late last year which claimed the following:

[T]he available literature shows no solid evidence linking glyphosate exposure to adverse developmental or reproductive effects at environmentally realistic exposure concentrations.

The review authors included a thank you to Monsanto for funding their work:

The authors acknowledge the Monsanto company for funding and for providing its unpublished glyphosate and surfactant toxicity study reports.

Their report aimed to discredit the work of a French research group at the Institut Jaques Monod who published five articles indicating glyphosate’s wide-ranging potential for environmental and human harm.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In their newly published rebuttal titled, “LETTER TO THE EDITOR: TOXICITY OF ROUNDUP AND GLYPHOSATE,” the French research team pointed out several serious flaws in the Monsanto-friendly scientist’s criticism of their work.

The first major flaw was their total disregard for the scientific context within which their glyphosate research was performed, namely, the DNA-damaging and carcinogenic potential of the chemical.

The second flaw was the claim that their results were “not environmentally relevant” (repeated 5 times in the article), despite the fact that the French researchers were able to demonstrate toxicity in 100% of the individual cells at short exposure time below the usage concentration (20 mM) of the herbicide in present agricultural applications. They elaborated on this point further:

Therefore, regarding the considerable amount of glyphosate-based product sprayed worldwide, the concentration of Roundup in every single micro droplet is far above the threshold concentration that would activate the cell cycle checkpoint. (2) The effects we demonstrate were obtained by a short exposure time (minutes) of the cells to glyphosate-based products, and nothing excludes that prolonged exposure to lower doses may also have effects. Since glyphosate is commonly found present in drinking water in many countries, low doses with long exposure by ingestion are a fact. The consequences of this permanent long term exposure remain to be further investigated but cannot just be ignored.

In the interest of countervailing the mis- and disinformation, we are indexing research on the under-reported, adverse effects of glyphosate (the active ingredient which now includes 20 toxic properties associated with 30+ diseases or disease symptoms.

Notes:
[1] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., Boulben, S., Hureau, D., Durand, G., and Belle, R. 2002.
Pesticide Roundup provokes cell division dysfunction at the level of CDK1/cyclin
B activation. Chem. Res. Toxicol. 15: 326–31.
[2] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., Durand, G., and Belle, R. 2003. Embryonic cell cycle for risk
assessment of pesticides at the molecular level. Environnemental. Chemistry. letters. 1: 8–12.
[3] Marc, J., Belle, R., Morales, J., Cormier, P., and Mulner-Lorillon, O. 2004a. Formulated
glyphosate activates the DNA-response checkpoint of the cell cycle leading to the
prevention of G2/M transition. Toxicol. Sci. 82: 436–42.
[4] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., and Belle, R. 2004b. Glyphosate-based pesticides affect
cell cycle regulation. Biol. Cell. 96: 245–49.
[5] Marc, J., Le Breton, M., Cormier, P., Morales, J., Belle, R., and Mulner-Lorillon, O. 2005.
A glyphosate-based pesticide impinges on transcription. Toxicol. Appl. Pharmacol.
203:1–8.