Round ‘Em Up! The 308th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 308th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss glyphosate, Roundup, Monsanto, and how science and the law are done. A benchmark scientific review paper from 2000, which established the safety of glyphosate for humans, has been retracted by the publisher, on the basis that a) the paper did not actually review the available evidence, b) the stated authors did not actually write (much of) the paper, and c) employees of Monsanto, which makes Roundup, cryptically contributed substanti...
I'm going to say with a certain degree of assuredness, 308 is not prime.
But it is the first of the new year.
So happy new year to everyone who's watching.
Yes, happy new year.
Indeed, I hope it is an excellent one.
I have concerns, but you know, that's sort of my nature, I guess.
Yes, it is.
Yes.
Yes, it is.
All right.
So we're going to talk about animal communication.
We're going to talk about the safety of the public relative to things like pesticides and things that have emerged on this front.
And we'll see where it goes from there.
And maybe some other things as well.
So yeah, welcome, everyone.
Here we are in the new year.
We will actually not be back next Wednesday, but we'll be back a short time after that.
It's a strange January for us.
Hopefully not too strange for everyone else.
Well, hopefully it's good strange.
Yeah, indeed.
So we've got a watch party going on at locals as always.
Please consider joining us there.
And we have the rent to pay right at the top of the hour with three carefully chosen sponsors that if you hear us reading ads, you know that we have carefully vetted the products or the services being offered.
In this case, it's three sets of products, all of which are awesome.
So without further ado, let us go forth and pay our rent.
Well, Sally Forth, whatever that means.
Yeah, our first sponsor this week is, you know it's Sally Forth.
I don't know why Sally has anything to do with it.
Our first sponsor, a foraging sally in, for instance, a tropical bird.
Oh.
I think it's the same.
It's the same word.
So a foraging sally.
Okay.
Let's just back up.
We're not doing ads at the moment.
This is not paid.
This is not paid content.
The flycatchers are not paid.
I'm going to tell the story on myself to allow you to, I don't know, save face or something.
Okay.
But I think it was our first field season as biologists.
We had already spent some time in the neotropics traveling together and exploring and actually doing some, and in Madagascar, ending up like helping on research projects.
But our first summer after our first year of grad school, we were in Costa Rica with a few other grad students and our professor, John Vandermeer, who had created a field course for us in the style of the Organization for Tropical Studies, which simply wasn't offering one that year.
And although we had both spent some time in tropical forests before, we didn't, there are literally tens of thousands of names to learn in any given forest, and no one knows all of them.
And we specifically didn't know the birds particularly well.
And so I was standing with Dr. Vandermeer at some point, and we were watching a bird who had gone forth from a branch and appeared to have been a hawking insectivore, had caught something in the air, an insect in the air, and then gone back.
And he said, that is a foraging sally.
I sort of dufully wrote it down in my Write in the Rain notebook and said, okay, that type of bird is called a foraging Sally.
And I don't know if I vocalized what I was doing, but he looked at me like I was just an idiot.
He said, no, not the bird.
The behavior, the behavior is a foraging sally in which you, the bird, sally's forth, forages, and goes back.
Therefore, when we sally forth, is it not the very same Sally?
I believe it is.
And it's not done so much anymore.
But back in the day, if you were to do it on a horse, it would be a Mustang, Sally.
I was trying to help you save face.
I think we're back.
Okay.
Back to the ads.
Yes.
Which we have not yet become.
Nope.
We are going to sally forth with the ads.
Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us as a sponsor.
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That's X-L-E-A-R, but pronounced CLEAR.
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That's again, Clear, X-L-E-A-R.
Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so often than traditional medical advances have.
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Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose.
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That's a xylitol with an X, hence CLEAR with an X. Xylitol is a five-carbon sugar alcohol.
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That's the R and the D in RNA and DNA, respectively.
Those are the backbone sugars of those informational molecules that make up all life that we know it on Earth.
While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like glucose and fructose.
Xylitol is known, xylitol, again, a five-carbon sugar alcohol.
Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues.
In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including, for instance, strep, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
So again, xylitol in our airways reduces the adhesion of many bacteria and viruses, perhaps all of them, we of course don't know that, but many, including strep, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, and makes it more difficult for them to adhere and make us sick.
Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening.
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If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to Brett's conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or Brett's conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, an osteopath and the inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses last May, May of 2025.
We recommend those conversations, and we highly recommend CLEAR as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses.
That's CLEAR, once again, X-L-E-A-R.
Get CLEAR online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer.
It's really widely available at this point.
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And start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.
Yes, and I will just say that the folks at CLEAR have been extremely supportive of the medical freedom movement.
They're good people in addition to making an excellent product.
And they have faced the most ridiculous opposition in including in the middle of the panic over SARS-CoV-2, though they demonstrated that it prevented adhesion and therefore caused you to be much less likely to come down with SARS-CoV-2, were forbidden from saying that publicly by the federal government.
They have now won their legal challenge.
And of course, you just heard Heather say this, which they are now allowed to say, but the evidence was there.
So even at a time when we were turning civilization upside down to prevent the spread of this disease, here you had a product that did prevent the spread of the disease and they were forbidden from saying it.
An amazing story.
It really is.
So again, clear nasal spray with xylitol.
It's a nasal spray just like, you know, if any of you have had, I was going to say inhalers.
That's not how inhalers work, is it?
I've never haven't used inhalers.
It's a nasal spray.
Just, you know, twice a day, morning and night.
Super simple, super fast.
And it seriously reduces the likelihood of when you're exposed, you're going to have those viruses or bacteria actually make you sick.
Yes, and they have a version for preventing you from getting sick and a version if you find yourself becoming sick, a rescue version.
I hope they will at some point come out with a version for dyslexics who do not properly understand how you spell this term.
If they just spelled it with a C, I'd know where to look for it, you know?
Yeah.
No, I agree.
Yeah.
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Wilk, I was going to say, but I don't eat raw wilts.
Oh, that does not sound good.
No, definitely not put them in smoothies.
Yep, not going to show up.
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Yeah, but so is just about anything.
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And why should that matter?
Hang in there, and we'll get to that point once we're done with the ads.
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We're in the cold season now.
Wow.
This is showing our northern hemisphere bias.
We are in the cold season.
So is the population distribution of the planet.
Excellent point.
All right.
If you're not in the cold season now, that's kind of on you.
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Actually, forest blue does not exist.
I checked.
What we call forest blue looks to the rest of us like Carhartt Orange.
Yeah.
It looks nice, though.
We'll agree to that much.
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Yeah.
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We're cooking with Caraway, and now Zach, our elder son, is two in his first college apartment.
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Gotta remember to stick with English.
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And in case anyone was concerned that you are limited to two egg omelets with caraway cookware, because there is one skillet we have of theirs that is, Brett has discovered, perfect for two egg omelets.
Our younger son Toby, whom we sent back to college yesterday, was regularly making 10 egg scrambles.
I don't know.
I don't know if people make 10 egg omelets, but he was making 10 egg scrambles because apparently we are told it is bulking season.
When he comes home, I'm going to teach him.
He'll stay at home, you know, for like three weeks.
I know.
But given some time to reflect, you know, hours, I think when he comes home, I should try to A, figure out whether a 10-egg omelet is possible, and B.
I think he actually prefers the scramble.
What does that matter?
If it's possible, it seems like it is a bar worth setting.
Not if it's not preferred.
I don't see what preferred has to do with it, frankly.
Anyway.
Use Caraway to make two egg omelets or 10 egg scrambles and anything in between.
There you go.
Yeah, there you go.
Shall we start with the glyphosate news?
Yeah, let's do that.
Yeah, let's do that.
Okay, so actually, I did not have queued up here, but the New York Times, we're going to show the papers, but of all places, the New York Times is covering and published, let's see, when is this?
This is January 2nd of this year.
A study is retracted, renewing concerns about the weed killer Roundup.
Problems with a 25-year-old landmark paper on the safety of Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, have led to calls for the EPA to reassess the widely used chemical.
So as it turns out, the main paper that has been used to point out and direct all naysayers and skeptics to the obvious safety of glyphosate is this one from 2020.
And if I can have my screen back for a moment so I can show the obvious safety concerns or lack of safety of glyphosate.
Anyway, you just skip to work.
Okay, so here is the paper in question published in 2000 in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.
At this point, I did not have it before.
I kind of thought I had, but I didn't.
So you can't get it.
I'm sure you can if you work hard and use Wayback Machine or something.
But at this point, all standardly available copies of the paper have retracted across every single page, which is kind of remarkable that these people are serious.
The paper was called, was titled from 2020, from 2000, Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment, the Herbicide Roundup and its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans.
Let's just share the abstract with the understanding, again, that this work is no longer being vouched for by the journal it's published in, nor has any other professional society or journal stepped in and said, well, actually, we're going to go ahead and unretract that paper now that that's exactly how it works.
I would just say retraction is a pretty extreme step.
Lots of papers that don't stand up to scrutiny never get retracted.
Exactly.
Just the literature builds on it.
And that is a natural process.
So retract it is pretty serious.
It's very serious.
And so we're just going to share the abstract from this paper from 25 years ago and then share the retraction notice itself.
Because there are several reasons for the retraction in this case, all of which are interesting and none of which strike me as that they should be particularly new or surprising, at least to the dark horse audience, because this story sort of has something for everyone with regard to what is wrong with science today.
Yes, in fact, the pesticide story is like right next door to the pharma story.
They are connected through Bobby Kennedy.
Okay, so again, abstract of this now retracted paper from 26 years ago that purported to conclude that glyphosate was safe.
Effective?
I don't know.
Safe for human health.
Reviews on the safety of glyphosate and Roundup herbicide that have been conducted by several regulatory agencies and scientific institutions worldwide have concluded that there is no indication of any human health concern.
Nevertheless, questions regarding their safety are periodically raised.
This review was undertaken to produce a current and comprehensive safety evaluation and risk assessment for humans.
It includes assessments of glyphosate, its major breakdown product, AMPA, its Roundup formulations, and the something surfactant used in Roundup formulations worldwide.
The studies evaluated in this review included the performed those performed for regulatory purposes, something, something, something.
I'm going to just skip a bunch of this because it's actually very hard to read with retraction listed written through it.
Multiple lifetime feeding studies have failed to demonstrate any tumorigenic potential for glyphosate.
Accordingly, it was concluded that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic.
Glyphosate, AMPA, and POEA were not teratogenic or developmentally toxic.
There were no effects on fertility or reproductive parameters in something generation reproduction studies.
On and on and on.
Again, really hard to read exactly what is being said here.
Skipping to the end of the abstract, acute risks were assessed by comparison of oral LD50 values to estimated maximum acute human exposure.
It was concluded that under present and expected conditions of use, Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans.
I will, the only thing else I'm going to share from the paper itself, again, retracted, published in 2000, long the sort of the gold standard for what people point to when they want to assure you that glyphosate is safe.
The herbicidal properties of glyphosate were discovered by Monsanto company scientists in 1970.
It is a non-selective herbicide that inhibits plant growth through interference with the production of essential aromatic amino acids by inhibition of the enzyme enopyruval shikamate, phosphate synthase, which is responsible for the biosynthesis of chorismate, an intermediate in phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan biosynthesis.
This pathway for biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids is not shared by members of the animal kingdom, making blockage of this pathway an effective inhibitor of amino acid biosynthesis exclusive to plants.
So right there at the very beginning of the introduction, we have one of the primary claims that is made often about glyphosate and about other herbicides.
That this only works on plants, reassure you, or in some cases with some herbicides, this only works on monocots, right?
This is only going to work on grasses or the opposite on dicots and not monocots.
So there's often these claims, like given the particular way that the molecular mechanism of action is, and given that we know, we're very, very sure that this doesn't exist in pick your clade, in this case animals, therefore it's totally safe in animals.
And it's true that we believe that it is true that this pathway for biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids is not shared by us.
For one thing, we know, for instance, that tryptophan is what we call an essential amino acid, essential amino acid being a list of amino acids that we cannot synthesize ourselves and therefore they are essential in our diet.
So that much is true, but the most obvious problem that pops out to me from this, and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this paper, having just been made aware of it a couple days ago, is that we're not just made of us.
We contain multitudes.
We have many, many.
In fact, we have so many species of, an abundance of individuals of bacteria, mostly the good bacteria that you will always hear about, in our guts and throughout our bodies.
And I have not found any evidence that we are confident that those bacteria don't have their pathways impaired by glyphosate.
In fact, I find some evidence that in fact they do.
So the human body itself may actually be able to do what it needs to do, even in the presence of this ridiculous herbicide.
But given that we aren't alone, like none of us is simply an individual that is only made up of mammal.
We're also made up of all these bacteria.
And if it's impairing the ability of our good bacteria to do what they do, then it's impairing our ability to do what we do.
So we sometimes talk about the textbook version of something.
A textbook, a literal textbook, generally presents a simplified version of biological function.
And the problem is often that the thing that you need to be concerned about isn't described in the textbook.
If you look at what the textbook says about the way vaccines work, it seems extremely elegant.
If you understand that there's a manufacturing process, that vaccines don't work the way the Jenner vaccine did, and that therefore other things have been introduced to compensate for the defects of modern vaccines, you understand that the story that the textbook tells isn't right.
And this strikes me as exactly like this.
I can imagine as if I was a bit more naive than I am, and I imagine I'm probably naive about a bunch still, but if I was a bit more naive than I am, I can imagine myself confidently saying, well, this is an elegant pesticide because what it does is it disrupts a pathway that's unique to plants.
We aren't plants.
And therefore, you should expect this pesticide to be effective when trying to control things in one kingdom without disrupting things in another.
Now, the track record of glyphosate is so appalling with respect to disrupting animals and environments that I know the textbook explanation is dead on arrival.
But the point is you can see how this paper is structured to lead you to what would be a comforting assessment if it were isolated from all of the things that aren't being said here.
Yes.
And in 1970, when glyphosate was discovered, invented, or when its herbicidal qualities were discovered, I think it had already been invented before then,
we did not have the kind of knowledge that we have now about the fact that all mammals contain multitudes, that we, in fact, are conglomerations of individuals that include many, many species of an abundance of individuals of bacteria.
But that doesn't make those people back then any less culpable because the idea that at any moment we know everything, we know everything we need to know, we know everything that there is to know can never be true.
So we always have to assume that there are ways that things can act in complex systems that we have not yet considered.
Therefore, claims that are meant to mollify, to calm, to sedate, to make you feel like this is just fine, don't worry about it, are very often covers for a hubris that is utterly unwarranted.
Yes, and we've discussed many times the distinction between highly complicated systems and complex systems.
And so the overarching problem here is that anytime you're taking, let's say, a pesticide, introducing it to a food crop, you are assuming that you understand all of the things that might be disrupted when the chances that you do are effectively effectively zero.
So, you know, What one would need to do is if you're going to introduce such a thing, you would need massive work on the tail end tracking the harms.
And most important of all, that work has to be done by people who don't have a conflict of interest so they can compare the well-being of populations that are exposed to this to populations that aren't and say, well, was there a health effect?
Rather than, you know, corporate goons who are going to arrive at a preordained conclusion because it's how they pay their mortgage.
Yes.
So speaking of conflict of interest, let's get to why this paper was retracted.
First off, let's just take a look at authorship, published in 2000 with three authors, which is a relatively small list of authors for a molecular paper, although it's a review paper.
So such papers often have fewer authors listed at New York Medical College, University of I don't know if that's going to be Utrecht, maybe because it's retracted.
Yeah, Utrecht.
And then Kantux Health Sciences International in Canada.
So we've got representatives, three scientists out of the United States, out of the Netherlands, and Canada authoring this paper.
And back in 2000, and then we have, fast forward to the retraction notice published just now in, again, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology for the paper that I was just showing you with that same authorship.
So why?
Let's just read some of their reasons for why.
This article has been retracted at the request of Handling co-editor-in-chief, Professor Martin Vanderberg, Denberg.
Excuse me.
Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors.
I, the Handling co-editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, reached out to the sole surviving author, Gary M. Williams, and sought explanation of the various concerns which have been listed in detail below.
We did not receive any response from Professor Williams.
Wow.
So two of the three authors are dead, and one of them is not responding to requests for explanation of a paper which presumably helped make his reputation because it is the paper that for 25 years has been pointed to as evidence that glyphosate is safe.
Hence, this article is formally retracted from the journal.
This decision has been made after careful consideration, etc., etc.
This retraction is based on several critical issues that are considered to undermine the academic integrity of this article and its conclusions.
One, carcinogenicity and genotoxicity assessments.
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.
Pause for a second.
That 2000 paper that has now been retracted was explicitly a review article.
It did not seek, it did not undertake any new experiments.
It did not seek, therefore, to generate any new data.
It was explicitly a review of existing data so that the public could, the public and the scientific community could know what it was that was actually known when taken in a collective form.
A review paper thus has as perhaps its primary necessary goal, that it actually successfully completely reviews all of the existing literature.
very first reason for the retraction here is that what they reviewed was unpublished Monsanto, which is the maker of glyphosate studies, and none of the actually published reviews that had already been published at the time of submission to the journal.
That right there means that this was not a review paper at all.
Yeah, it was an anti-review.
I will say good on the handling editor for retracting it, but this is a failure of the journal.
This is not something that came to light later.
This was a failure of the journal to recognize that this review article failed to review the literature in question.
Well, I mean, and this, yeah, this gets back to one of the problems of peer review, of course.
That back when, you know, back when we were professors, I was somewhat often asked to peer review articles, and I did so.
I took it as part of my responsibility to sort of the Academy, even though it is explicitly unremunerated and it takes a lot of work.
And there's sort of two approaches that editors can take when sending papers out for peer review.
They can send papers out to people who are doing work exactly in the domain where the research is being done, and thus they are very likely to know if anything has been missed.
For instance, oh, there are review papers out that you haven't reviewed here.
However, you end up with this circle jerk of scientists potentially who, okay, there's a community of call it 4, 40, maybe even 400 scientists, depending on what the field is, who are all working in the same area.
And if it becomes clear that one of them, yes, peer review is supposed to be anonymous, but almost always people can tell, if it becomes clear that one or a handful of scientists are actually being rigorous in their peer review and pointing out flaws and causing people's papers not to be accepted by the journals, then there is going to be retribution.
And so the problem with sending peer review, with sending papers out to peers within the same subdiscipline is that you have a game theoretic problem in which unless you can be assured that you are actually completely anonymous, and if the community is very small, how could you possibly be, honest review is taken as basically actionable for retribution.
Or you can send papers out to people sort of more broadly in the field, and then they're less likely to know that, oh, actually, there are reviews out there.
So again, it's unremunerated work.
There's a problem if you send it to people who are most likely to know if the review has been done well.
And then there are problems if you send it out to people who are less likely to feel beholden to the authors of the paper, but less likely, you know, what those people are likely to be able to do is assess the actual rigor of the work.
And in a review paper, that's going to be less interesting.
It's not going to be about experimental design and hypothesis generation and all of this.
It's going to be just about like, are the statistics done correctly?
Which is an important part of peer review, but it minimizes the role of the peer reviewers.
But even so, we're talking about a paper.
They've had a quarter century of feedback on this paper.
And to the extent an editor should have known that this was missing important literature.
It shouldn't have taken much to figure that out.
If they had made the mistake of publishing it and then discovered that because angry letters arriving at the journal, they should have quickly retracted it.
And so I, again, would point out something's wrong.
It should be no surprise.
Something is wrong in the state of toxicology.
And it's going to involve economic feedback loops almost certainly.
I would also point out one of the things that is inadvertently demonstrated here.
If Monsanto running studies couldn't find carcinogenicity and all sorts of people who were not at Monsanto found carcinogenicity, what does that tell you about Monsanto studies?
They're not science.
That's what it tells you.
Right.
That's right.
Okay, so there's a few more details about that first reason for retraction, but that's a big one, right?
Okay, they don't appear to have actually reviewed the literature in a paper whose sole job was to review the literature.
Should have been dead on arrival over that.
Yeah, exactly.
Two, second reason for retraction of this 25-year-old paper, lack of authorial independence.
Litigation in the United States revealed correspondence from Monsanto suggesting that the authors of the article were not solely responsible for writing its content.
It appears from that correspondence that employees of Monsanto may have contributed to the writing of the article without proper acknowledgement as co-authors.
This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented.
Now, I did not go and try to figure out when the litigation in the U.S. that revealed this was.
Presumably it wasn't right then.
It might be quite recently.
don't know.
But this points to direct conflict of interest with regard to what in every single scientific paper out there is explicitly expected to be stated.
That you have to state any conflicts with regard to finances or other work that you are doing or have done.
And if there are other people who have contributed to the work, they need to be explicitly either made authors or acknowledged.
And there is, if I remember correctly, at some point when I'm not on my screen here, I will look.
I think in the acknowledgements of the original paper, there's a vague, unspecified, unnamed mention of help from Monsanto employees.
By help, they mean they went ahead and gave us our conclusions and wrote most of it for us.
Well, I guess so.
Okay.
Third reason for the retraction of this 25-year-old paper, misrepresentation of contributions.
This is very similar to the last one.
The apparent contributions of Monsanto employees as co-writers to this article were not explicitly mentioned as such in the acknowledgements section.
This omission suggests that the authors may have misrepresented their unique roles and the collaborative nature of the work presented.
The failure to disclose the involvement of Monsanto personnel in the writing process compromises the academic independence of the presented findings and conclusions drawn in the article regarding carcinogenicity.
Four, questions of financial compensation.
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.
This raises significant ethical concerns and calls into question the apparent academic objectivity of the authors in this publication, which concerns and questions have not been answered.
Hold on, I just want to point out there's a whole range of games that can be played, and there are a whole range of countermeasures that have been deployed to try to prevent them.
Yes.
Do you have a conflict of interest?
You have to declare it.
What did all of the authors do on this paper?
You have to say.
How was the work funded?
How was the work funded?
Imagine all of the games you can play if you can have an author of the paper who is not named.
Somebody can write the paper.
Other people can claim they wrote the paper.
So let's say I have a product and I want a paper that says the product has awesome impacts on my health.
Well, I can write this fraudulent paper and then I can have other people, I can say, I don't even want to be an author.
You be an author.
It goes on your CV.
You get the credit.
They publish the thing.
Then I say, wow, my product.
Look, there's even scientific work that says it has awesome effects on your health.
But of course, it wasn't that.
And given the penny anni economy of academia, where low-authored papers add to your CV and add to your credibility as a scientist, even if they're crap papers and even if you didn't write them at all, people who are ethically compromised, which is to say most people, are likely to take someone up on that offer.
You want to slap your name on it and see if you can get it published?
Sure.
That's a deal that a lot of people will accept.
And, you know, there's a whole range of ways that you can contribute to a paper that wouldn't seem to an outsider like they were real contributions, but are.
So we have seen this proliferation because work has become more complicated.
We've seen the number of authors on technical papers go way up, but that's not entirely about the complexity.
It's also about it costs me, if I've got a paper with 10 authors, it costs me very little to give you the gift of being an author on this paper for a contribution that doesn't really warrant it.
And what will I get from you?
Maybe you'll smile on my paper, my next paper, and review.
So anyway, these incestuous networks develop and the countermeasures are manifestly inadequate.
They're inadequate.
They're too slow.
They're trying to keep up with a game that's evolving much more rapidly than the countermeasures are.
I have begun to see, not on these molecular biology papers that are authored by many dozens of people, but on papers that have many authors, something between, let me say, just like five and 12 or something.
Increasingly now, I will see a description of what each author's contribution was.
Historically, the last author on a multi-authored paper was basically the PI, the principal investigator of the lab.
He was the one, he usually was the one interested in the work in the first place, drove the experimental design at a broad level, wrote and received the federal grants.
But often, unfortunately, modern science, modern scientists, even the most honest and remarkable of them get trapped into more and more bureaucratic roles the more advanced they get.
Like field scientists don't get to go out in the field anymore.
Lab scientists don't get to spend time at the bench anymore.
What they've become is people seeking money from the federal government.
And so it's their postdocs and their graduate students who are doing the work.
And so you'll see, you know, on say a six-authored paper, you know, the first two authors maybe, you know, ran the first part of the experiment and did most of the writing.
And the third author did the stats and the fourth author, you know, did a bunch of the grant work because it was the undergraduate in the lab.
And then like the final author was the actual PI, you know, who without whom none of it would have happened, but didn't actually do any of the work involved.
Yeah, it's actually not be able to actually vouch for it.
It's a genuinely difficult question.
Somebody may have done foundational work.
They provide the environment in which the work gets done.
They didn't contribute to the experiment.
Is that a contribution or isn't it?
Right.
You know.
Yeah, this is not an easy problem.
It's not an easy problem to solve.
You could also, you know, let's say you have a case where you wanted to measure the length of microsatellites and you needed a primer to get the sequence measured.
Somebody may supply the primer who had nothing to do with your research question, but they made the primer without which the research couldn't be done.
It couldn't be done.
So is that worthy of a line in the acknowledgments or is that worthy of authorship?
Well, if you've got a four-person authored paper, it's probably not worthy of authorship.
If you've already got 20 authors on the things, slap it in there and let them add that line to their CV.
And this is why you have people, you know, early in mid-careers with, you know, hundreds of papers.
You know, I once asked a colleague about some work in a paper that they were an author on.
And I've reported this story before, but this is a particular story, but I have many others like it, and I know it's not unique.
This person said to me, I don't know what that means.
I said, what do you mean you don't know what that means?
You're an author on the paper.
He said, well, I didn't write that part.
I said, I don't, I don't care.
You're an author on the paper.
He said, well, it's not the part I was responsible for.
He felt no shame, no embarrassment at all about actually saying, not only am I like, did I not write that?
I don't know what it means.
Maybe I don't even agree with it.
Sure, it's in the paper that my name is on, but I wrote this little piece over here, which was also crap, by the way.
But, you know, like there's just no culpability.
So what is a paper?
You know, we're at a level where it raises questions about what is a scientific paper.
And if it doesn't hold together as a coherent mass, where at the very least, every single author can tell you what the hypothesis was and what work was done and how it was analyzed and what the results were and what that means in the context of what else is known in science, then I'm sorry, it shouldn't qualify.
Yes, it actually reminds me of the thing you sometimes say that nobody at the cocktail party would be proud of being illiterate, but people frequently proclaim pride over being enumerate.
In this case, you get this weird kind of pride inside of research science where people are basically evidencing that, yeah, I know how the game runs and I'm good at it.
And, you know, I didn't write that part of the paper.
And they don't realize that they're telling on themselves.
You're actually saying that you gave up on science a long time ago and you're just playing some stupid game.
Well, that's exactly it.
Hey, look at me.
I'm so good at the game of science.
Like, and clearly you don't care about actual science.
Like that, you know, you can get one.
Congratulations.
You're good at the game, but you're not good at the actual thing.
Yeah, and the game actually destroys the actual thing.
That's what gets people like you and me upset by this sort of behavior is it's not like that game continues and it's some separate thing.
It drenches the literature in things that masquerade as if they're informative when in fact in fact you don't even know what they are.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
So let's keep going through.
There's eight points of the reason that the co-whatever founding, I don't remember, the editor, the co-handling editor of currently of regulatory toxicology of pharmacology is retracting, has retracted the foundational 2000 paper, which supposedly established the safety of glyphosate in humans.
Number five, ambiguity in research findings.
This article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and Roundup.
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.
Specifically, the article asserts the absence of carcinogenicity associated with glyphosate or its technical formulation, Roundup.
It is unclear how much of the conclusions of the authors were influenced by external contributions of Monsanto without proper acknowledgements.
Again, related to the previous several, but a distinct point.
It also strikes me, though, as very weak T. At the point you know that Monsanto has written part of this paper and it's not acknowledged as having authorship.
The paper's a fraud.
Well, but that's what they've done here.
Right.
And this is one of eight points.
Right, but No, but he's saying we don't know which parts Monsanto wrote.
The real answer is Monsanto wrote parts of this paper, period, the end.
It's a fraud.
I disagree.
I think being careful, being as accurate and less important, but as precise as possible when you can be, especially when you're retracting, there's going to be major pushback to this retraction, I'm sure.
There's going to be explanations for why, okay, fine, you retracted that paper, but it was a good paper after all, right?
And so being very, very careful about what is and is not known is valuable.
Well, I don't want us to get lost in the weeds here, but what part of the paper would be acceptable for Monsanto to have written?
He's not saying that some part of it is.
Well, he's saying it's not clear which parts.
And I'm just saying this editor did not spot that this review failed to review the literature.
This is 26 years later.
This is not the editor who was involved in accepting this paper in 2000.
This is not, I took handling editor to be the person responsible for this paper.
Maybe if that's not the case.
I doubt it.
If it's not the case, then I take back my I would be shocked if there was still the same handling editor.
Well, I agree.
It's impressive if I don't think so.
I think so.
No.
But it hadn't even occurred to me that it could be, so I didn't look it up.
Six.
Sixth point in the reason for retraction of this paper from 2020, weight of evidence approach.
The authors employed a weight of evidence approach in their assessment of glyphosate's carcinogenicity and genotoxicity.
While this methodology is sound in principle, the potential biases introduced by undisclosed contributions from Monsanto employees and the exclusion of other existing long-term carcinogenesis studies may have skewed the interpretation of the data.
The author's critical analysis of both unpublished and published studies must therefore be viewed with caution.
You're going to object again to the cautious language may have skewed, viewed with caution.
This is how you know this.
This is how scientific papers are written.
Yeah, but this is the problem.
No, no, no, that is not the problem.
No.
Writing with clarity and conservatism and caution is not the problem.
But the problem is fraud.
No, no.
Exactly.
The problem is fraud.
And the point is that the caution belonged in the other direction.
The caution shouldn't be.
No, the caution belonged in 2000.
Right, exactly.
But that's having failed to execute.
You're holding the current retraction accountable for the same reason that a grudging acknowledgement.
I think this journal fell down on its obligation to the public and people died because of it.
So my feeling is this needs to be accurate.
And the way it needs to be accurate is to say Monsanto authored parts of this paper.
The authors failed to acknowledge literature that was relevant that Monsanto didn't author.
This paper was a fraud.
and that's how it should be stated and the problem is so you think that having more words makes this week You think you want a three-sentence retraction?
No.
Well, first of all, I would accept a three-sentence retraction.
But then there's no detail.
That's fine.
It's not a hope.
You can list all of these things, but I don't like hedging in there.
And the question is being careful is not hedging.
Saying we don't know which parts of this paper Monsanto authored.
If Monsanto was not an author on the paper, the fact that it authored any part of it is in and of itself invalidating of the entire thing.
And he doesn't say that that's not true.
He's just saying it's possible that the authors on the paper did write some of it.
We don't know.
But clearly Monsanto was involved in writing some of it, and that's unacceptable.
Well, look, we have a completely broken academic environment.
In my opinion, part of it has to do with the places that things hide, whether it's long authorship lists or caution that has been reversed.
And the fact is the public is entitled to understand how bad a failure this was.
And this was a catastrophic failure.
Mind you, a catastrophic failure like this can happen when human life and limb is not at stake.
But in this particular case, yes, human life and limb.
People die from this pesticide, and this journal has responsibility because it completely failed to do the job a journal is supposed to do, making sure that the papers it publishes are accurate.
And if they're not, retracting them quickly.
So the fact that this took a quarter of a century is I think we're learning why it took a quarter of a century in the cautious language of the retraction.
I don't think that's fair at all.
However, the only way that I think that that is a fair critique here is if this editor, Martin Vanderberg, was the handling editor back then and has been sort of sitting on growing evidence all along.
And a very quick AI look says, nope, he was not.
So I would be surprised at that duration at the same journal.
But I don't know what the word handling is doing there if he wasn't the one who handled this.
He's handling it now.
I mean, that's a term that shows up in journal editors.
That's not new to me.
It can mean different things in different contexts, but I'm not, that does not inherently come with a time stamp from before.
No, but I mean, look, again, we're in the weeds.
But if you think about the reason that I took handling to be important here is that the handling editor suggests one interpretation of it is that it was the editor who handled this paper.
Why is this editor in charge of this retraction rather than the editorial board?
Because he was the handling editor.
Maybe that's not, maybe it's not true.
That's not true.
But it is, well, it is an interpretation to that word.
The word is ambiguous.
Okay, but so I just allowed that there was one condition by which I would allow for what I think is a very ungenerous and frankly not helpful reaction that you're having.
And my first look suggests very strongly that that condition does not hold, that this editor was not the editor who accepted and shepherded this paper back in 2000.
And your position hasn't moved.
No, I allowed that there was one condition that would move my position, and it's not true.
And I think this is massively important.
This is going to get major pushback.
I'll bet that we do not see.
So one thing that is also true that is related in the New York Times article is that in 2026, the EPA's, I don't know if it's certification or whatever, of glyphosate as safe for use on food crops for humans is coming up for review.
So this comes at a critical moment.
Like the EPA needs to take this, not just into consideration, I just be like, oh, actually, we know nothing that says that this garbage is safe for humans and we need to radically change our recommendations for its use.
I would say get it off the market entirely.
But the timing is important.
It's powerful.
It is a full retraction.
You can see I can't even read the paper.
I couldn't even read all of the abstract because they've stamped retracted across the front of it.
I think asking for more, asking for it to have happened earlier, this is like you're like, why now?
Well, this is not.
This is not.
Look, I have one interest and one interest only in this, which is what happens now should be designed to make sure this kind of failure never happens again.
Yes.
And to the extent that the journal minimizes its responsibility, that is a problem.
What needs to happen is this needs to be so embarrassing to the journal.
The level of egregiousness of the failure here is so large.
This needs to be so embarrassing to the journal that no other journal would contemplate making an error like this, that other journals will think, oh, crap.
You know what?
We need to get it.
Again, I think you're misunderstanding what it looks like on the inside of peer review.
That the best journals, the ones that are actually trying to publish good science to other scientists, are overworked, overburdened.
They're asking unpaid academics to do a bunch of the work.
And most of the time, they don't get responses at all.
And so don't do this again.
Don't do what again?
Apparently, a bunch of what has been revealed that is the basis for this retraction came out through litigation that happened well after this was published.
Now, the one thing that I have read in this retraction that could have been known at the time, was presumably known by some people and was not caught by the editors and the peer reviewers of the journal in 2000 is that there were published studies that showed carcinogenicity and toxicity of glyphosate that were not included in the review.
That seems, you know, it seems obvious that that needed to be in a review.
But how do you guarantee that that is like without redoing the work?
Without every time a paper is going to be published, someone at the journal itself redoes the work to make sure that everything is as it is claimed.
Like it's, it is, it is a maybe intractable problem to guarantee that all the work is going to be excellent.
Okay, but let's take that.
Okay.
The work would have to be much greater than the available labor in order to get a proper study that would say this thing is safe enough to put it on food crops.
My point is, fine, if you can't do the work or if you can't review the work to make sure that this product is safe to be on food products, it shouldn't be.
But the journal isn't about safe on food products.
Like this is a this is a basic.
Oh, yes, it is.
It is playing a role in the process that arguably makes us safe.
And because it is not doing that role well, we are not safe.
So my point is whatever the problems are in the academy, whatever the level of overworkedness of the people involved, they don't have a right to do shoddy work when life and limb is on the on the line.
Frankly, they don't have a right to do shoddy work when only the future of science is on the line.
Even if we were talking about cosmology, if you don't have the labor to make sure the thing is done right most of the time, then you shouldn't have a journal.
And so I am incensed.
The problem then becomes worse.
There are already, by many measures, too many people with appropriate degrees trying to publish too many papers because the one metric, because the thing that's easy to count is how many papers do you have?
Yep.
And there aren't enough journals even now to publish all the papers that people want to publish.
I mean, we've talked about more chronic issues with regard to paper mills and fake people being put on papers.
And this problem is about to get way worse, right?
The papers are going to be generated entirely, not by humans.
And, you know, the work itself may be fabricated.
Right, but I think your question goes, first of all, I have said in many different places, I don't think you disagree with me, that the system is so broken it can't be fixed.
Here, we're getting to peer into a place where that brokenness resulted in humans getting cancers that they were assured would not be downstream of this product.
And do I think that, you know, the population of the Academy can be saved by reforming the system?
I don't.
I'm not particularly concerned about them because they haven't stood up against this fraud en masse as they should have.
So, no, I don't think you can rescue these journals.
I don't think you can rescue the faculty.
I don't think you can rescue this process.
Every time we peer into it, we see that this is its product.
A bunch of people solving their own little game theoretic problems about how they're going to get through their career results in other people dying of cancer who were told that the product that they were using was safe, and it's not acceptable.
Well, you're really going to like point seven.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, seven of eight of the reasons that the paper from 2020 has been retracted is historical context and influence.
The paper had a significant impact on regulatory decision-making regarding glyphosate in Roundup for decades.
Given its status as a cornerstone in the assessment of glyphosate 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.
Go off?
No, I mean, I think we've said it all.
Yes, I don't like this hedging voice.
And whoever you are who wrote this, you owed the public better.
You should have just said it straight.
We screwed up.
We published a paper we shouldn't have published.
We didn't retract it in a timely fashion.
And even if that timely fashion was as soon as discovery in court revealed that the paper wasn't what it pretended to be, it should have been retracted then.
And the fact that you're hedging, and at this point, you know, you want a pat on the back for retracting it?
No, this should people died.
I'm sorry.
They died, and that's on you.
Okay, so I don't see hedging in this retraction.
I disagree with you about that.
But let's just read the final point eight.
Conclusion.
In light of the aforementioned issues, the Handling co-editor-in-chief lost confidence in the results and conclusions of this article and believes that the retraction of this article is necessary to maintain the integrity of the journal.
The scientific concerns regarding a lack of carcinogenicity only derived from Monsanto studies.
Concerns regarding ghost authorships and potential conflicts of interest, none of which have been responded to, are sufficient to warrant this action.
Any of those points would have been sufficient to warrant this action.
Lack of using non-Monsanto data or ghost authorship.
Like either of those.
Yes.
Certainly a reason not to publish in the first place.
Although the ghost authorship, they had no way to know that at the time.
But any of these points would have been sufficient to retract.
We appreciate the understanding of the scientific community regarding this matter and remain committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity in published research in regulatory toxicology and pharmacology.
Yep.
Well, I'm glad he appreciates my understanding.
I'm part of the scientific community.
Oh, wait.
Oh, you're going to like the disclaimer.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
It comes with a disclaimer.
As Handling co-editor-in-chief, I emphasize that this retraction does not imply a stance on the ongoing debate regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate or Roundup, but originates from directly following the COPE guidelines, which he has to say that.
That has to be his position.
That has to be the journal's position because they haven't published counter evidence.
It certainly doesn't need to be stated.
It's obvious.
This paper should never have existed.
Okay.
We all can figure out what that means, right?
Most of us can't.
Those of us who need to figure out what that means can figure out what that means.
The added hedge is preposterous.
But anyway, I'm sure it was written from under his desk.
That's not fair.
No, it's fair.
That's totally not fair.
People died.
Here is a, it wasn't him.
No, but he is.
So you've got a paper co-authored by three people, co-authored, publicly co-authored by three people, apparently ghost-authored by like the entire staff of Monsanto.
Yep.
Okay.
Only one of those dudes is still living.
Only one of the publicly authored dudes is still living.
He's not responding to requests for like, what the hell did you do?
Obviously, the ghost authors are invisible to us.
There's no tracking them down, although maybe in litigation, maybe, you know, maybe those court documents reveal some stuff.
Those are the people who at whom you should be directing your ire.
Right.
No, no.
There's plenty to go around.
The fact is you had people submit a fraudulent paper and those people have done something utterly unforgivable in light of what the topic is, right?
These people have blood on their hands.
The journal failed to do the job of the journal.
I don't want the journal hedging about the failure to do the job of the journal.
It's all too common and it has had a horrifying impact on the way civilization functions, on the health of the public.
I just want people to take responsibility for their part entirely.
I have some sympathy for an editor who wasn't there at the point that this paper was published, who now has to clean up the mess.
But what I want them to do is say, here's where we screwed up.
I want them to do it without hedging.
And I think that that's a reasonable thing to do.
It's what you would do interpersonally if you had screwed up in some way and you were explaining to somebody else, I made an error, you wouldn't hedge.
And the hedging doesn't belong here anymore.
But interpersonally, like, I'm not responsible for the sins of my ancestors.
Okay.
So if I am now the editor at a journal, a job that I took, I don't know when, right?
But let's say 12 and a half years ago.
Okay.
Half again, 50% of the time since the paper was published.
It is my job to oversee the journal.
And when I find evidence that there has been fraud in the journal from well before my time, to work hard to get that fixed.
But it is not my personal responsibility to apologize for actions that were not mine.
I was not involved in accepting and accepting the paper, sending it out for peer review that turned out to be wildly insufficient for knowing things that no one knew at the time outside of Monsanto, which turned out to be released in court records years later.
So I don't know why this is signed by an individual editor.
If the journal made an error, the people who are running it aren't the people who were there.
It could have been done as the editorial staff.
I mean, he's written it in which like he's saying that he's now seeing these things.
Right.
So I get the form, but the question is, if this is, you know, a quarter century in the past, mistakes were made by a different staff.
They are now trying to correct it, resurrect the status of the journal in the public's mind.
That's all well and good.
I would do that by not hedging.
I don't, you know, the fact that he's not responsible for those errors is of little consequence.
It's, you know, yeah, if he had not hedged, then I would.
I guess I would let, I mean, I don't think, I think we're going to drive off the rest of our audience, but I want to know where you saw the hedge.
Let's take the one sentence I remember at this moment.
Okay.
The idea that we don't know which parts of the paper Monsanto wrote.
The fact that Monsanto wrote parts of the paper and was not acknowledged as an author makes this fraudulent.
In light of the consequences of being wrong about toxicology, it makes it dangerous.
The lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by Monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn.
Right.
Uncertainty about the integrity?
No, they conducted a fraud, and it's one thing to be defrauded.
It's another thing to hedge in the aftermath of it.
This should just simply have been retracted.
There's obviously ample reasons.
I disagree.
I think simply retracted without any of this, without our ability to see what went into it.
That would be ridiculous.
They can enumerate each of those things without the hedging.
This isn't hedging.
It creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn.
Creates uncertainty.
The conclusions drawn were fraudulent.
It creates uncertainty.
This was a fraudulent paper.
The next part, assuming you don't have further, you want to go here.
Well, but I think the whole thing connects.
Let us talk about what has happened in these trials in a general sense.
What trials?
The trials where Monsanto has been sued.
Court trials.
Legal trials.
The same ones that reveal.
I thought you were talking about randomized.
No, no, no, no.
Court trials.
So numerous people have sued Monsanto, which has now been purchased by Bayer.
Bayer, in this case, actually is a bit in the position of your editor, who apparently was not at the journal at the time this fraud was perpetrated on, but has inherited responsibility, legal responsibility.
Although they have plenty of sins in their past.
Wow, do they?
Oh, my God.
Wow, do they?
But nonetheless, Bayer made a mistake.
It purchased Monsanto, including all of their liabilities.
Wait, also, he's not my editor.
Go on.
All right.
Sorry.
Start over.
The court trials.
Okay.
What happens is, and the first one of the trials that was won was actually one.
He was not the only lawyer, but Bobby Kennedy was one of the lawyers on the initial trial in which a verdict against Monsanto for cancer caused by glyphosate was won by a guy named Dwayne Johnson.
Do we know when?
I do, but I've forgotten.
It was ballpark, like first decade of this, like right after this got published?
Yeah, could you look it up?
What do I look up, though?
I don't know.
Dwayne Johnson verdict against Monsanto.
But I want to make a point to you about what's going on here.
So the general pattern is this.
Individuals sue Monsanto for injury done by glyphosate.
Oftentimes, these are people who work with a lot of it in an agricultural context or their landscapers.
This is 2018.
2018.
So they sue.
Oh, wait.
So Dwayne Johnson isn't the lawyer.
He was the plaintiff.
Yes, the plaintiff.
Yeah.
Oh, I remember this.
Yes, non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
He got a ton of money from them.
Well, that's what I want to get to.
He got a ton of money.
I think something like $280 million.
$39.2 million.
This is, again, just first-past ChatGPT.
$39.2 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive debt.
Except, guess what?
The punitive portion was later reduced by the trial judge.
On appeal, the final award was significantly lowered.
$20 million to notary reductions to around $78.5 and later to about $20.5 after appellate decision.
Okay.
So the jury looked at this guy's terminal cancer and awarded him $280 million.
It was reduced later by two successive judgments to $20 million.
He is still alive, anyway.
He was given two years to live when he was first diagnosed.
He's significantly outlasted his prognosis.
But nonetheless, this pattern where a huge award is given by the jury in the aftermath of one of these cases and then it is later reduced has been the consistent pattern with judgments against Monsanto.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about why that is.
I want to hear that, but what do we know about whether or not that tends to be a pattern with very large punitive damage awards by trials, by jury trials that are later reassessed in appellate court?
That is exactly the pattern.
For all, across all.
Yeah.
Not just Monsanto.
Right.
So a jury of your peers hears about what some awful corporation did to you, awards you a huge amount of money because you're in a state that has punitive damages.
Not all of them do.
As you will remember, we were limited in our ability to sue the state when the Evergreen meltdown happened and happened to us because Washington does not have punitive damages.
Punitive damages are designed to punish the offending entity so that it will stop with the egregious behavior.
Now, I'm going to argue that we do them incorrectly and that there's a fix that needs to happen in order for the system to work, but I'll get to that in a minute.
The reason that these judgments get reduced is because of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Didn't see that coming?
Yep.
You want to put the 14th Amendment up?
So the 14th Amendment, for those who have forgotten me part of Reconstruction, and it was designed to protect slaves, former slaves.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state they reside.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You don't really see Monsanto in there, do you?
No, and I don't remember what you said about what part of the 14th Amendment is being used to justify the minimization of jury judgments.
It's the equal protection clause at the end.
Now, the reason that this, yeah, because it's preposterous.
Okay.
What's going on here is that corporations, you'll remember, are persons.
Corporate personhood.
A widely misunderstood property.
The reason that corporations are persons and they do need to be persons is to bind them.
You need to have the ability of a corporation to sign a contract and then to be able to enforce that contract against them.
So that personhood was designed to make them persons for purposes such as contracting and suing.
It was not designed to give them the protection that is granted to all citizens.
So what's going on here is that the courts have a kind of pseudo-sophistication in which they look at the ratio between compensatory damages and punitive damages, and they consider things above 9 to 1 to be excessive.
Now, this is insane.
Still doesn't get you to a reduction of more than an order of magnitude of total damages awarded um.
I can't get you there myself.
The ratio a ratio problem doesn't get you anywhere close to that reduction.
Well, the general property is reduction based on a skewed ratio of uh compensatory damages which are scaled to the harm that was done to you, um and the punitive damages.
Now let's talk about why.
So uh, hold on.
There are three things that um are taken to be uh reasons to reduce these verdicts.
One is the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant's contact.
Two is compensation uh, uh to civil criminal penalties for similar misconduct.
So they compare to other penalties and the ratio between compunitive and pensatory compensatory damages.
Here's the problem.
There is a general flaw in our legal structure, which is that penalties are scaled to the offense, not to the capacity of the individual or the corporation to endure the penalty.
So Bill Gates does not suffer the same fear of getting a speeding ticket that I do, because there's no speeding ticket you could give him that would make you know.
The amount of time that he has to sit there with his window rolled down is way more expensive to him than any ticket he could be given.
So there are no effective speeding tickets for Bill Gates, right?
In fact, the best thing you can do is draw out the process while you've got his window down.
That'll hurt him right, so a he doesn't drive himself.
The juries are responding to the evil done to these people.
Dwayne Johnson got Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from Glyphosate.
Having not been told that that was a possibility and in fact being assured that it wasn't right, the jury was incensed by this and gave him a big punitive award.
And then the court said, well, that big punitive award is out of scale.
The problem is, what you want punitive damages to do is to alter the future behavior of the offending entity.
Yeah, you want Monsanto to not just simply budget for lawsuits.
You want them to stop selling glyphosate because they know it gives people cancer.
Right, the award has to be large enough to do that.
So the jury's ire is actually right and the courts are wrong to be reducing these things, because what they do is they turn it into a cost of doing business.
But uh, i'm curious about the larger trend that you say is true, which is that across the board uh, you have large jury judgments being reduced in the appellate courts.
Yep, that is.
Uh, the big guys own the system, and my claim is that we need a wholesale rethink of this process.
Punitive damages are vitally important to the system doing what it's supposed to do when you.
It should not be a cost of doing business when you cause somebody cancer.
It should cause you to rethink whether or not you can afford to have your product on the market at all.
In order for that to be true, these things need to be scaled to the degree of evil and the size of the entity being punished.
Right, and what I mean I?
I remember us discovering uh, after our lives had blown up on us and everything had turned on us uh, that Washington didn't have punitive damages.
Perhaps being told by our lawyers, who were, you know, very good at what they did, but they're like, there's just not much we can do.
Yep um, I don't think that either of us looked into at the time, and maybe you know like, Why do the states vary so much with regard to the ability to enact punitive damages?
And I would have guessed that historically states that were tending to vote blue would be more likely to have punitive damages.
And so it was surprised to find that Washington State had none.
Yeah, I don't know what the history is.
It's bound to be interesting.
when its corporations were dealing with the fourteenth amendment should not apply this is not the founders gave corporations personhood to bind them not to enable them with the rights of a citizen Did the founders do that?
Yeah, they did.
Because there was some.
There was some interpretation more recently that got a lot of attention.
Oh, it was the Citizens United decisions in the 90s or something.
The corporation's right to free speech is like equivalent to that of an individual.
So it's preposterous.
In order to make the system work, A, you need to have punitive damages.
B, they need not to be scaled to the amount of harm.
I mean, you know, the harm to Monsanto needs to be large enough that they don't do harm to Dwayne Johnson in the way that they did.
So you need massive punitive damages.
Now, it may be that some of those punitive damages should not go to the person who was harmed, right?
To the extent that the court awards, I think part of the reason that we hiccup on this is that it's not obvious.
If you punish Monsanto at a level that makes it think twice about what it's doing, it's not obvious that that's relevant to what the person who was injured.
The person who was injured deserves some of those damages.
But in order, you know, if you're it's possible that those funds should go elsewhere.
In other words, the general harm that was done to the public, maybe it should go into a fund for other people who've been harmed, something like that.
I'm not arguing all of it.
Some of the punitive damages.
I don't, I think that's, I think you're asking for trouble.
Really?
I mean, you're effectively talking about socializing the damages.
No, what I'm talking about is the purpose of punitive damage is to punish.
And it's punitive versus what would be?
Compensatory.
Compensatory.
Compensated for harm.
Yeah, but I just, that the strong allergic reaction to socializing of funds that have been earned through trial, in this case, an actual trial, I feel like I don't think any good will come of it.
Well, that's possible.
But my feeling is if the court's purpose is to punish, it is not obvious that the best way to punish it is to transfer that wealth to the individual who was egregiously harmed.
In other words, if Dwayne Johnson is representative of a thousand people who never sued because they couldn't or because their case was less clear or whatever it was, then it's not obvious that the huge windfall, and mind you, he didn't get a huge windfall.
He got 20 million for his life being radically shortened.
But the huge windfall that has been scaled to the size of the thing that you need to punish, it's not obvious that that is relevant to the individual who's been harmed to a certain extent.
He deserves to be more than made well, I believe.
But the purpose to punish has to be maintained.
And it may be that the public is actually less enthusiastic about punitive damages because they see it as a windfall.
But I don't see any evidence that the public is not enthusiastic about punitive damages.
Because you report that jury trials keep on producing these big judgments.
And then it's the appellate courts that reduce them.
I do wonder how it is that a state like Washington has no punitive damages at all.
But I don't see any evidence that what you're saying is true.
And I think the idea of, yeah, we're going to let the guy who's obviously harmed go to court and take all of the risk, and then we're going to claw back some of that for unspecified others, like that just sounds like socialism at its stupidest.
No, I think actually the pattern is the one I'm describing.
And it makes sense because if you're in the jury box and the prosecuting attorneys are presenting you with the evidence that not only did Monsanto distribute a dangerous product, that it knew it was dangerous, that there was a discussion about whether or not the public needed a better warning and they decided against it.
If you have that evidence in front of you, it incenses you.
That's very different than the public at home reading whatever they're reading that hears that somebody got a, I forget what the judgment was for the hot coffee that got spilled in the drive-through window, but you're like, hey, wait a minute.
But then you look at the case and you're like, oh, actually, once you see the discussion where somebody knew that somebody was going to get scalded and decided that's fine, how bad could it possibly be?
You understand why these punitive damages are there in the first place.
but the public in general doesn't.
They hear these giant numbers and there's...
Well, I mean, so I don't know the legal system at all.
It's an entirely social construct.
It's an entirely human construct.
And so not being able to derive anything from first principles, I only know what I know and it's not much.
And you are proposing, you are noting a problem, which you say is widespread, not limited to things like the Monsanto judgments, in which juries of one's peers come down with large amounts of punitive damages and later on those get reduced substantially by appellate courts.
That is a problem that, you know, probably also the media follow-up on the reductions is much less than the original.
And so people don't even recognize that actually Monsanto wasn't really slapped, you know, hardly.
It was like a mosquito at their foreheads as opposed to a major problem.
So something, I have no idea what, is, you know, something is amiss there and how might you solve it?
I don't know.
I think you are proposing that there is another problem.
I don't yet see that there is that problem.
Maybe there is, that the public gets a little squirrely about the idea of large punitive damages delivered to individuals.
There's a problem that you see.
I don't know that there's a problem.
And you've proposed something of a solution that is kind of vague.
And I feel very concerned about the solution being proposed.
Okay.
I have proposed a solution.
It's not vague.
You're concerned about one nuance with the solution.
The solution is we have to fix the belief that the 14th Amendment protects corporations from egregious.
No, but the punitive damages scaled to the size of the entity that has engaged in this bad behavior.
And they have to not be protected by the 14th Amendment in this way.
That's illogical, right?
It was not designed to protect corporations in this way.
So we need large punitive damages, and we need corporations not to be immunized by the 14th Amendment because it's illogical.
And so the justification by the appellate courts comes back to the 14th Amendment each of these times?
Yeah, the Equal Protection Clause.
So that's just, well, I think the answer is it's obvious what this does when you have these massive judgments reduced on appeal.
What it does is it has Bayer, the owner of Monsanto, which has suffered substantial loss in its valuation after buying Monsanto because these judgments are mounting and it's looking for relief from the federal government, wants to be freed from responsibility.
It's still selling the stuff.
Right.
So here's my point.
You don't want that liability.
Stop creating new victims.
It's obvious.
And what do we know about the judgments that were ultimately handed down?
They weren't big enough.
You're still selling the stuff.
Yeah.
Right.
So they're probably still developing.
I don't know.
But my guess is that they're also still developing the round-up ready crops, which are the crops that are particularly resistant, which then use tons of the stuff, which puts the very people.
The idea of round-up ready means bring it on.
Yeah.
It means that you can afford to drench the crop in this stuff.
They're also developing this insane use where they use it to desiccate crops right before harvest, which means that people ingest a lot more of it.
So the point is the bad behavior continues unabated.
These judgments need to be bigger, not smaller, right?
Reducing them has left this behavior in place.
And so this does for me connect back to, you know, the journal, in my opinion, I know it's not yours, but in my opinion, covering its ass here, my feeling is this stuff's got to hurt way more if it's going to stop.
That's my point.
It's got to hurt way more.
The natural level at which it needs to hurt has to be more if we're going to get people to stand up and block bad papers or retract them quickly once they find out that they've been had, which is what we need in the public.
That's what we're owed.
Well, given that this particular Monsanto lawsuit that you've been talking about was from 2018, yes, that's some years ago.
But it's not, it's a small fraction of the time that has passed since this paper was published.
And I don't know when the rest of the reasons that the paper is being retracted came to be understood.
My guess is, and this is not how journals should work, but that it was no one's job once it had been accepted and published to go back and continue to relitigate, as it were, the paper.
And so only at the point that these big lawsuits started happening did anyone at the journal start to think, now, wait a minute.
I don't think that's true for the following reason.
Do we agree that I don't remember, was it eight enumerated reasons?
Yeah, only one of them was concluding.
Okay.
I think each of them was sufficient on its own.
Does that seem right to you?
Yeah, although, honestly, only one of them, I think I can go back, but only one of them was about the one that seems the most substantive and obvious to explain to anyone who, whether or not they have any background in academia, is this is a review paper.
Review papers review what's known.
Bingo.
Dude, how is this helpful?
This is what I'm saying is that if they never went back to it, let me just finish the thought.
Okay.
Go ahead.
I think that the only one of the eight points that is likely to have been knowable outside of the context of the court cases is that a review paper is expected, is required to review all that is known.
And in fact, it did not review all that was known.
And in fact, only reviewed that which was cryptically or not so cryptically out of Monsanto in the first place.
It was never a review paper in the first place.
That should have been caught in peer review.
That should have been caught by the editors in the first place, et cetera, et cetera.
Journals are not in the business of once they've decided to accept and publish a paper, continuing to go back and be like, now, did we make the right decision?
Like, that's not what, that's not what journals do.
Well, so I don't, I just, I don't, look, I am not pleased that this paper has sat for 25 years allowing actual grifters and fraudsters to poison an entire planet with this garbage.
Yep.
But I don't think that you can hold a journal to a standard of constantly reassessing everything that it has already published.
No.
That is an unreasonable standard.
No.
This was exactly my point.
I'm sorry I said bingo, but this is why I said it.
They will have known almost immediately that they screwed up and that this review paper was no such thing.
No, they will not have.
You don't think they got a slew of correspondence, people saying, hey, wait a minute, you missed these 16 papers?
This is a review article and it doesn't cover these 16 papers?
Hey, I don't think there were 16.
I think there were a couple.
And no, I don't, actually.
And, you know, if they did, then that's a different situation and we will never know.
Well, we don't know.
We don't know.
But I would say the contentiousness of the safety of glyphosate has been such, and they in fact mention in their concerns continue to have been raised.
I would bet that that was immediately called to their attention and that that is their responsibility as a journal.
The journal screwed up in this case.
We published a review that wasn't one that missed important evidence that everybody knew was in the literature.
So even though 2018 is the first judgment successful against Monsanto, it's not obvious that that's where the discovery would have happened because it wasn't the first trial against Monsanto.
But even if that were the case, we only find out.
But is discovery inherently a matter of public record?
I don't think so.
And then you have to have to know to make a FOIA request or whatever the appropriate request is in the first place.
Like there's just a lot of there's a lot of contingencies.
Well, I agree.
And we don't know that history.
You and I don't know it.
Presumably somebody does.
But the journal published a paper about toxicology of a product that was being used widely in the world.
That review article was not a review article.
I think they will have known that quickly.
But that's your opinion.
That's my guess.
Fine, but you can't like that's that that's not a basis on which to formulate the argument that they were being irresponsible.
It's contingent.
If I am right, that they will have known quickly that they published a review that was not a review.
They should have retracted it earlier.
Yes, I agree.
There's lots of stuff published that they can't go back and reinvestigate.
And the place to discover that is in future articles that say, you know, this experiment was done poorly.
Here's what it missed.
But a review article is different.
A review article that doesn't review and, you know, becomes the cited article is a hazard in its own right.
Yeah.
And, you know, among other things, I did not look at, so it's an Elsevier journal, which is the, you know, major academic publisher, but I did not look into anything about their history, you know, who, who has been known to support them.
You know, Elsevier is giant and predatory in its own different way.
But regulatory toxicology and pharmacology already sounds like it's, you know, it's not a basic science journal.
It's an applied science journal.
And we don't know.
We can guess, but I'm not prepared to claim that the journal has been grossly in gross negligence of what it should have been doing based on some suppositions about what they knew when.
Fair enough.
I would say that what we have learned about medical journals and the degree to which what is in them is thoroughly compromised by pharma, it's hard to see why this would be any different.
You know, there's a tremendous amount of money to be made in toxicology for obvious reasons.
People are putting stuff into the world and, you know, there's lots of reasons to want your competitor's product to look more dangerous than it is to make your product look safer.
So I wouldn't expect it's any purer than that.
On their site, and you can show my screen here, one interesting thing I find, and we've begun to talk about this a little bit privately.
I don't think we've said anything publicly, but it's amazing what becomes known and becomes a focus of human concern.
And so Ames and Scope is the page I'm at for the Elsevier journal, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which published this article establishing the safety of glyphosate in 2000 is now attracted at this year.
They describe what they are, and it's sort of, as you would expect, it's the applied journal science.
Here's the types of peer-reviewed articles published, original research articles, also news.
Regulatory toxicology and pharmacology, the last thing on the AIMS and Scope page is RTP tobacco policy.
Regulatory toxicology and pharmacology, as the journal serving developments for improvement of human health and environment, will not consider manuscripts that have been supported by tobacco companies.
Now, cool, I guess.
But, you know, nicotine's the enemy?
Like, I don't know that it's good for you.
I don't know that it's helping people.
You know, it might, but there's a lot.
That's where they're going to draw the line.
That's where they're drawing the line because somehow we all accepted, I think after, you know, court cases, really before you and I were conscious, or, you know, maybe you were conscious of them, but, you know, everyone came to accept that smoking is bad for you.
Yeah.
Smoking cigarettes is bad for you.
I don't even know to what degree that research is absolutely well vetted at this point.
But the idea that tobacco is the one, tobacco company is the one named type of company that cannot be involved in any way in papers that are submitted here.
Like if you say that you received funding from NIH and the DOD and the Bill Melana Gates Foundation, whatever it's called now, and Philip Morris, then you're out.
But if it was Merck and Monsanto and well, then it's okay.
It's actually funny.
And the Bill Melana Gates Foundation and the Welcome Fund or the Wellcome Trust, whatever it's called.
I have now forgotten.
You remember the film Thank You for Smoking?
In which that was the film in which I at least became aware that there was a Bobby Kennedy Jr.
I did not know that beforehand, but he is portrayed in the film as the sort of protagonist because of his work in this area.
Tobacco is the one corporate entity that just lost this battle.
Yeah.
Right.
And it's like, okay, fine.
Yeah, these things suck.
They're bad for you.
We admit it.
But you're hooked.
Right.
But the point is that's the one that they're going to forbid is bizarre given the number of things that are actually harmful.
And, you know, that's the one where it doesn't really matter because as you point out, we all accept it.
Right.
Right.
It doesn't matter what the toxicology says.
We all, right or wrong, accept the harms of this one particular product.
It's the harms that we don't yet accept, which are the ones that it's really important that this journal get right and their mom about it.
Yeah.
And, you know, and part of what they say here is that this is the journal serving developments for improvement of human health and environment, which, you know, means this retraction never should have been necessary.
Yep.
Right.
Because the paper never should have been published in the first place, because it was neither a review paper nor written by the people that were claimed as authors.
And it had direct and intensive contributions from the very company that makes the product that was supposedly being assessed.
Totally.
Yeah.
Now, we could stop there.
Or we could, we had a couple other things that we were thinking about doing.
We could save them both.
Actually, maybe we save them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other one we had planned for today will keep just as well.
And I'd be up to explore it next time.
All right.
I think that's.
All right.
That's the fiery episode of the Dark Horse podcast.
Let's see.
Let's see if I can find out what else we're going to.
Oh, so just a teaser for next time.
One of the next stories we're going to be talking about involves leopards, martial eagles, and pythons.
That's it.
That's all you get.
You know, you have to guess.
You don't have to guess.
You already know.
No, I already know.
Yeah.
It would be easy for me to guess.
It's unfair.
Yeah, and you're not a cheater.
Nope.
Nope.
I'm not.
Never have been.
Not interested.
Okay.
I don't even know what I'm supposed to do now because we sort of stopped all of a sudden.
Okay.
We will be back not next Wednesday, but a week from Saturday.
And then the following Wednesday with a couple more episodes of Dark Horse.
But there will be an Inside Rail episode publishing on the 11th, I believe.
And another one this month as well.
And gosh, I just feel like I'm forgetting to say all the things.
But, you know, a happy new year to everyone.
I hope, you know, we're already a week in.
We're at 152nd of the way through 2026.
Wow.
Already.
I'm still writing 2013 on my checks.
Okay, let me ask you a question.
No, actually I was gonna When was the last time you were to check it?
I think you actually have written.
Yeah, I've written a check.
It wasn't legible, but probably for a year at this point.
Yeah.
Now, the island that we live on actually requires checks more often of us because for better and for worse, we are still living 50 years behind technologically.
For better and worse.
For better and for worse, yes.
Mostly for better.
Yeah.
Although there's glyphosate on the islands.
Actually, it's forbidden on the islands.
There still is some, but.
Yeah, so this is not the time, but I think we've mentioned before it is apparently forbidden in the San Juan Islands, glyphosate, and there are state agencies encouraging and in fact employing it in order to kill some plants and encourage other plants so that an endangered lepidopteran can thrive.
And it's just so short-sighted.
And arguments with such people gets nowhere.
Maybe now it'll get somewhere.
Maybe now we can stop the application of glyphosate within African National Historical Park.
My God.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
This has been a long time coming.
And so as much as you and I disagree about the particular, you know, where to focus our dismay and anger, we are in absolute agreement that the retraction was necessary.
And we hope that the EPA pays close heed and changes its directives when it has to do so this year.
Good.
Yeah.
So, you have something else?
Nope.
All right.
Until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love.