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Comment by monochromatic | Hacker News Reader

Does Roundup actually hurt animals?

Which animals has it been tested on, and where are the studies? Chemistry is presumed dangerous until proven safe.

pubmed is your friend: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122/ is a good example. "Multiple lifetime feeding studies have failed to demonstrate any tumorigenic potential for glyphosate"

Roundup is about as safe is it comes - common vinegar is more toxic.

Well there's still a lot of back and forth on this from my understanding. Earlier this year some emails came to light from Monsanto regarding ghostwriting some research, aka they wrote an article and more or less had some scientists sign off on it as though they had done the research. They were also tipped off about the International Agency for Research on Cancer's determination for being a probable carcinogen so they were able to "prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication".

Relevant Times Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup...

There is always the Monsanto conspiracy... That group is very vocal, but hasn't done a very good job of getting real research past peer review (getting their "research" into newspapers is easy and they do that all the time). Monsanto is evil (source: a personal friend employed by Pioneer - about as biased as they get), but getting past peer review is hard, even when you are evil.

Yes, but you can't ignore that the study you mentioned above was done funded by Monsanto, they paid Intertek to do it. [1] "Ten of the 16 scientists on the Intertek panel have been consultants for Monsanto in the past and two others are former Monsanto employees, according to a roster published on Monsanto's website." Paired with the unsealed internal emails from earlier this year, it's at least enough to raise an eyebrow at.

Unfortunately I do not think that peer review is incorruptible either. It is certainly important and speaks more for credibility, but especially in a case like this where there is so much money involved, personally I'm still waiting to see more information. I mean those emails just came out a few months ago, who knows what else will be found at this point?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide-glyphos...

Everything's a chemical. I've never seen any persuasive evidence that this particular chemical does anything harmful to (say) mammals.

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