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Comment by shapiromatron | Hacker News Reader

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408444.2016.12...

> The Expert Panel Members recruitment and evaluation of the data was organized and conducted by Intertek Scientific & Regulatory Consultancy (Intertek). The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company. Funding for this evaluation was provided to Intertek by the Monsanto Company which is a primary producer of glyphosate and products containing this active ingredient. Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel's manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.

Seems misleading.

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What exactly is misleading? The next line explains further

> Monsanto’s internal emails tell a different story. The correspondence shows the company’s chief of regulatory science, William Heydens, and other Monsanto scientists were heavily involved in organizing, reviewing, and editing drafts submitted by the outside experts. At one point, Heydens even vetoed explicit requests by some of the panelists to tone down what one of them wrote was the review’s “inflammatory” criticisms of IARC.

Ahh, sorry, yes. I was just pointing out what was actually written in declarations is different than what was reported by the bloomberg story.

It's worth bearing in mind, whatever the process failures here may have been, that IARC is not above criticism. Their assessment of glyphosate as a human carcinogen is not well established by the literature, and was made in passing in a report (which covered tens of other herbicides and pesticides) that the WHO, their parent organization, has effectively disavowed.

The same source made hay out of Monsanto's efforts to push back against a study trying to establish a link between cancer and glyphosate. They neglect to mention that the study was Séralini's, and that it was famously criticized and eventually retracted.

I think that's exactly the point that's missing in the thread. Monsanto has money, but nobody has a monopoly on science--scientific proof is reproducible. There is plenty of stuff funded by people against Monsanto's interests (including competing chemical companies). So while this certainly does raise some questions, it doesn't seem to change any conclusions. I tried to read this as though the issue was climate change and see what I thought. I don't think this changes the scientific consensus even if indicates need for better disclosure practices.

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