Etienne Note: Please see my article: Understanding Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and Monopoly Seed Consolidation to understand why companies that make chemical warfare agents for the military (Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, and DuPont) are putting toxins like Glyphosate, Atrazine, rBGH, and Genetically Modified Organisms into food supply while buying up and monopolizing over 200+ seed companies so farmers will one day won’t be able to get anything but GMO seeds and/or terminator seeds.
Story at-a-glance
A highly influential 2000 glyphosate safety study long cited by regulators worldwide was retracted after evidence showed it was ghostwritten by Monsanto scientists and misrepresented as independent research
Internal company emails revealed Monsanto planned, wrote, and celebrated the paper as a strategic tool to defend Roundup and Roundup Ready crops during a crucial period of expiring patents
Despite ghostwriting being exposed in a 2017 litigation, the study continued shaping research, regulation, and public perception for years, accumulating more than 1,300 citations before a long-delayed retraction
The journal admitted the study relied on unpublished Monsanto data while ignoring existing toxicity research, showing how selective evidence can quietly shape policy for years
The glyphosate case reflects widespread unethical research across health and medicine, showing why you need to question consensus, examine incentives, and protect your health rather than trust the system blindly
For years, I have been sounding the alarm about glyphosate, the toxic herbicide that has infiltrated our food supply, our water, and our bodies. Meanwhile, regulatory authorities and chemical industry representatives have consistently dismissed these concerns, insisting that this ubiquitous weed killer poses no threat to human health and that the “scientific consensus” clearly demonstrates glyphosate’s safety. That consensus has just taken a major hit.
In a stunning development that vindicates what many of us have been saying for decades, one of the most influential studies used to justify glyphosate’s continued use has now been retracted by the very journal that published it. This study was among the most cited papers defending glyphosate safety, referenced hundreds of times in research papers, policy documents, and even Wikipedia entries that millions of people consult for health information.1
The retraction raises a deeply unsettling question that extends far beyond this single herbicide — How much of the “science” we’ve been told to trust is actually corrupted by corporate interests, and how many of the chemicals, drugs, and products declared “safe” are slowly poisoning us while hidden hands profit from the public’s ignorance?
The Smoking Gun Finally Emerges
The paper in question appeared in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology in April 2000 and was authored by three scientists presented as independent experts — Gary Williams of New York Medical College, Robert Kroes of the University of Utrecht, and Ian Munro of Cantox Health Sciences International. It reviewed glyphosate safety and quickly became a cornerstone reference for regulators assessing the herbicide’s health risks.2
•The paper delivered an unequivocal safety verdict that regulators relied on — The authors concluded glyphosate posed no risk to human health, including no cancer, reproductive, developmental, or endocrine harm in humans or animals. Regulatory agencies worldwide, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have cited this paper as evidence that glyphosate-based herbicides are safe for continued use.3
•Monsanto secretly authored the paper while outside scientists signed off — Internal company documents released during litigation in 2017 showed Monsanto scientists wrote the paper themselves, while the named academics served only as editors and signatories. In one particular email from 2015, William Heydens, a Monsanto scientist, suggested the company could “ghost-write” another paper using the same playbook.
“[W]e would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit and sign their names so to speak. Recall that is how we handled Williams, Kroes, and Munro, 2000,” he wrote.4
•Internal emails show deliberate manipulation of the scientific record — After the paper’s publication, Monsanto government affairs official Lisa Drake sent an email praising seven Monsanto employees for their “hard work over three years of data collection, writing, review, and relationship building with the papers’ authors.” She made clear why the ghostwritten paper mattered so much, saying:
“This human health publication on Roundup herbicide and its companion publication on ecotox and environmental fate will undoubtedly be regarded as ‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety. Our plan is now to utilize it both in the defense of Roundup and Roundup Ready crops worldwide and in our ability to competitively differentiate ourselves from generics.”5
•Executives treated the deception as a corporate success — One executive, Katherine Carr, even asked whether the team of people at Monsanto who worked on the Williams paper could receive Roundup polo shirts as a “token of appreciation for a job well done.”6
Hugh Grant, who was a senior Monsanto executive at the time and later became CEO and chairman, added his congratulations: “This is very good work, well done to the team, please keep me in the loop as you build the PR info to go with it.”7
•The timing aligned with major financial stakes for Monsanto — The late 1990s marked the launch of “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant seeds, designed to allow farmers to spray the herbicide directly onto food crops. Any health concerns about glyphosate could derail this lucrative new business line.
Meanwhile, Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate was expiring in 2000, meaning the company would soon face competition from generic manufacturers. They needed authoritative-sounding “independent” research to maintain market dominance and justify regulatory approval. The ghostwritten paper delivered exactly that.8
Even after internal emails exposed Monsanto’s role in drafting the paper, its influence did not fade. Instead, the study continued to shape regulatory conversations, citation networks, and public narratives for years after the deception was known. If you want a deeper look at how these distorted safety claims translate into real-world health risks, read “Roundup Weedkiller Linked to Multiple Cancers.”
Retraction Came 8 Years After Ghostwriting Was Exposed
According to an analysis by Alexander Kaurov, an astrophysicist at Victoria University of Wellington, and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, the ghostwritten paper ranked in the top 0.1% of most-cited articles on glyphosate. It has been cited more than 1,300 times according to Google Scholar, and over 600 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.9
•The journal acted only after Kaurov and Oreskes reported the issues to the journal — Martin van den Berg, the journal’s editor-in-chief, said that the researchers’ retraction request was the first time a complaint had been brought directly to his desk. He admitted the retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier.”10
•The deception runs even deeper than ghostwriting — According to the retraction notice, the paper based its safety conclusions solely on Monsanto-owned unpublished data, while ignoring multiple long-term toxicity and carcinogenicity studies that were already available by 1999.
“The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential.
The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, 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.
In their article the authors state that they are aware of other studies, that were unpublished and not available. However, the authors do not specify to what extent they tried to incorporate the findings of these (unpublished) studies. The reasons for this remain undisclosed but bring into question the broader objectivity of the conclusions presented.”11
•Retraction corrected the record but could not undo decades of impact — Kaurov and Oreskes emphasized that pulling the paper would not erase 25 years of regulatory and scientific influence. However, they argued it would send a clear and overdue signal that fraudulent authorship is unacceptable and that the scholarly record will be protected regardless of a paper’s age, citation count, or commercial value to a journal.12
•Bayer defended the paper by pointing to acknowledgments rather than authorship — Bayer, which purchased Monsanto in 2018, said the company believes Monsanto’s involvement was appropriately disclosed in the acknowledgments section, which thanked Monsanto toxicologists and scientists for significant contributions to exposure assessments and identified several Monsanto personnel as providing scientific support.
However, acknowledging someone for “scientific support” is not the same as disclosing that they ghostwrote the entire paper. The company’s statement then fell back on the familiar refrain:
“The consensus among regulatory bodies worldwide that have conducted their own independent assessments based on the weight of evidence is that glyphosate can be used safely as directed and is not carcinogenic.”13
A bill currently moving through Congress includes a quiet provision that would shield Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits over harms linked to Monsanto products. Learn more in “The Deadly Campaign to Shield All Pesticides from Legal Liability.”
•Is the “consensus” actually built on unethical research? — In an article by Chemical & Engineering News, Kaurov noted that there are more glyphosate papers widely known to be ghostwritten. Kaurov and Oreskes chose to highlight the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology study because it was the oldest one.
Kaurov says he’s surprised that no one else had contacted the journal asking them to pull the paper since the revelations of Monsanto’s involvement in drafting it emerged in 2017.14
•Experts say undisclosed corporate authorship was a broader pattern — Alexandra Maertens, a computational toxicologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also noted that several glyphosate manuscripts involved overlapping core authors and varying levels of Monsanto involvement. She stressed that these relationships should have been disclosed.15
•The EPA framed the issue as one of citation rather than influence — While acknowledging awareness of the retraction, the agency said it “has never relied on this specific article in developing any of its regulatory conclusions on glyphosate.” An EPA spokesperson said the agency has “extensively studied glyphosate, reviewing more than 6,000 studies across all disciplines” and that their current risk assessment uses “gold standard science.”16
However, the issue isn’t just whether the EPA directly cited this one paper in their final conclusions — it’s that this fraudulent study shaped the entire landscape of glyphosate research and regulatory discussions for a quarter century. When a paper this influential turns out to be ghostwritten industry propaganda, it calls into question the entire foundation of studies that came after it and were influenced by it.The Glyphosate Scandal Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
The pharmaceutical and chemical industries have turned scientific manipulation into standard operating procedure, and the glyphosate retraction merely exposes one thread in a vast web of deception that determines what drugs you’re prescribed, what chemicals end up in your food, and what your doctor believes to be true.
•Scientific misconduct now dominates drug and biomedical retractions — Back in 2012, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research investigated retractions in drug and biomedical literature and found that nearly 75% of retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, including data falsification or fabrication, questionable veracity, unethical author conduct, or plagiarism.
This represents a dramatic increase from a 1998 review, which found that 37% of scientific retractions between 1966 and 1997 were due to scientific misconduct. Even more alarming, data from Thomson Reuters shows that the number of scientific retractions has climbed more than 15-fold since 2001.17
•The pharmaceutical industry has a long track record of criminal misconduct — Nearly 20% of the top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s were drug companies. Jon Jureidini, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide who reviewed internal drug company documents as an expert witness, found serious misrepresentation of both drug effectiveness and safety. Published papers presented favorable outcomes while negative findings were omitted entirely.18
•Ghostwriting is a standard industry tactic, not an anomaly — In 2008, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of Mount Sinai School of Medicine uncovered extensive ghostwriting linked to Vioxx, the painkiller associated with more than 60,000 deaths before its withdrawal.
Ross found internal Merck documents and emails pertaining to about 96 journal publications, some of which were developed by the company’s marketing department, not its scientific department. In one case, a neurologist was listed as an author despite having died in a plane crash a year earlier.19
•Avandia provides another example of how fraudulent science kills — This diabetes medication hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug with $3.2 billion in annual revenue by 2006. A year later, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine linked Avandia to a 43% increased risk of heart attack and a 64% higher risk of cardiovascular death.20
Between 1999 and 2007, Avandia was estimated to have caused more than 80,000 unnecessary heart attacks. Later analysis of 56 clinical trials found that for every 37 to 52 patients treated for five years, one additional heart attack could be expected. The estimated deaths between 1999 and 2009 approach 48,000.21 GlaxoSmithKline concealed damaging safety data for over a decade to protect sales.
•Negative drug trials are systematically buried — Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, stated bluntly that “trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time.” Drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies that reach unfavorable conclusions are rarely published, creating a literature skewed toward apparent efficacy and safety that does not reflect the full body of evidence.22
•Most published research findings are statistically unreliable — In 2005, epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis demonstrated that fewer than 50% of published scientific findings are likely to be true. His analysis showed that for most study designs and research environments, false conclusions are more probable than true ones due to small sample sizes, poor methodology, researcher bias, and selective reporting.23
•Even landmark cancer studies often fail replication — Former drug company researcher Glenn Begley attempted to replicate 53 influential cancer studies published in top-tier journals and found that only six could be reproduced. Nearly 90% failed replication. These studies were foundational for drug development decisions.
As Begley explained, when enormous financial and clinical bets depend on these findings, the inability to reproduce them undermines the credibility of the entire research pipeline.24
•A recent case illustrates how pervasive the problem remains — In December 2025, the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute agreed to pay $15 million to settle claims that studies funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contained manipulated or duplicated images and data, prompting the retraction of at least six research papers and corrections to dozens more.
The settlement followed a whistleblower lawsuit and investigation into flawed data published between 2014 and 2020, showing that even top-tier research centers are not immune to compromised science.25
These cases show that the glyphosate retraction is not an outlier but a visible fracture in a system where distorted science routinely shapes medical decisions, regulatory policy, and public health outcomes.
Why Your Discernment Matters More Than Consensus
Ultimately, the take-home message here is that even if a chemical or a drug is “backed by science,” it’s not a guarantee that it’s safe, effective, or even honestly evaluated. You cannot blindly trust that the system is looking out for your health. Regulatory agencies, medical journals, and “expert consensus” can be vulnerable to corporate influence when profits are at stake, and history shows they are compromised far more often than most people realize.
•That does not mean you are powerless — It means responsibility has quietly shifted into your hands. Making sound health decisions today requires judgment, discernment, and a willingness to question authority rather than defer to it. No one else is ultimately accountable for your health or your family’s health, and industries built on selling products have little incentive to prioritize your long-term well-being over their bottom line.
This is why evaluating evidence means asking specific questions, like who funded the research, which data were included or excluded, and how the findings were later used in regulation or clinical practice. It also means favoring approaches that work with biology rather than attempting to override it.
•Healthy food starts with living soil — In food and agriculture, that means choosing foods grown through regenerative farming systems that work with soil biology, plant diversity, and ecosystem health. This approach doesn’t just reduce exposure to harmful herbicides; it restores nutrient density, improves resilience, and addresses root problems rather than masking them.
•The same principle applies to medicine — Many drugs are designed to suppress symptoms without addressing why those symptoms exist in the first place. Seek out practitioners who investigate root causes such as nutrition, environmental exposures, metabolic health, and toxic burden rather than defaulting to lifelong pharmaceutical management.
Your body has an extraordinary capacity to heal itself when properly supported with the right inputs rather than being indefinitely medicated for profit.
The retraction of the glyphosate paper will not undo decades of damage, but it does confirm an important message — the truth may be delayed, distorted, or suppressed, but it does surface. Waiting for institutions to correct themselves leaves you vulnerable. Protecting your health, as well as your family’s, requires vigilance, discernment, and the willingness to act before the system admits it was wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Glyphosate
Q: What is glyphosate?
A: Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide designed to kill plants by disrupting a metabolic pathway essential for growth. It’s used extensively in industrial agriculture, on crops engineered to tolerate it, and as a pre-harvest drying agent on certain grains.
Q: Where am I most likely to encounter glyphosate in my daily life?
A: You are most likely to encounter glyphosate through conventionally grown foods, such as corn, soy, and wheat. It can also appear in processed foods made from those crops and in environments where herbicides are routinely applied.
Q: If regulators say glyphosate is safe, why should I question that?
A: You should question regulatory claims because they have relied on a body of research that included undisclosed industry involvement and selective evidence. When a study that helped shape safety assessments is later retracted for ethical reasons, it weakens the confidence you can place in the conclusions drawn from that research.
Q: How can I reduce my glyphosate exposure?
A: You can reduce your exposure by choosing foods grown without routine herbicide use, prioritizing organic or regeneratively farmed options when possible, and minimizing highly processed foods made from herbicide-tolerant crops. These steps help lower your overall chemical burden while supporting farming systems that do not depend on glyphosate.
Q: Does unethical research affect other industries besides glyphosate?
A: Yes. The glyphosate case reflects a broader pattern across pharmaceuticals, chemical safety, and biomedical research. This means glyphosate is not an isolated case but a clear example of how compromised research can affect many areas of health when financial incentives override transparency.
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LD50 Values circa 1984: (the ratio of how much chemical it takes to kill 50% of the test animals. The higher the number the safer the chemical).
Caffiene 399
Glyphosate 23,000
Too bad animal testing wasn't as discredited back then as it is now...
We foresters were trained to trust glyphosate-based herbicides. Hundreds died from cancer. I doubt anyone has ever tried to calculate how many square miles of US forest land or private corporate tree plantations have been contaminated.
I met a forester who graduated from the UofMN School of Forestry exactly 10 years before me. He was taught the same curriculum and had most of the same professors. He had pancreatic cancer.
I explained the four big lies I spent 4 years and $15,000 to be taught by the UofMonsanto's School of Forestry. Glyphosate safety was one of them. Another was "the solution to pollution is dilution." Another was "multi-use doctrine" that forests and the natural world could be made to support every goal: preservation, resource extraction, recreation, and more, in a mutually compatible way. I can't remember the last one - but they all served the corporate agenda.
It was just a sop to try to keep the clear cutting going that everyone hated back then... and still hate today. There were even extensive discussions about creating "no rescue zones" in National Forests in the more remote areas. Which was sort of moot because folks who shun the parks and go into the National Forests (me) don't always tell people so they aren't going to get rescued. Back then we didn't have cell phones.