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Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

disinformationchronicle.substack.com

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Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#71

Post by 0fcb88 »

0fcb88 wrote: post #64
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point. Can you say more? How do we determine whether this is a "true" Cochrane Review? Thanks!

https://www.cochrane.org/about-us "Cochrane is an international network with headquarters in the UK, a registered not-for-profit organization, and a member of the UK National Council for Voluntary Organizations." Search 1. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search 2. type "glyphosate" 3. see the results. Cochrane Reviews : 0 Cochrane Protocols : 0 Trials : 14 Editorials : 0 Special Collections :0 Clinical Answers : 0

in the "Cochrane Trials"

1.) "Measurement of Agricultural and Dietary Glyphosate Exposure Among Pregnant Women" January 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

"Human exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) is increasing rapidly worldwide. Most existing studies on health effects of glyphosate have focused on occupational settings and cancer outcomes and few have examined this common exposure in relation to the health of pregnant women and newborns in the general population. We investigated associations between prenatal glyphosate exposure and length of gestation in The Infant Development and the Environment Study (TIDES), a multi-center US pregnancy cohort...........Our results indicate widespread exposure to glyphosate in the general population which may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation. Given the increasing exposure to GBHs and the public health burden of preterm delivery, larger confirmatory studies are needed, especially in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and newborns."

"Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#72

Post by cinntaile »

tptacek wrote: post #55
calibas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to an article about how Monsanto has undue influence on scientific studies, you posted a review paid for by Monsanto... > This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations.

Am I understanding your argument here to be that Cochrane Reviews are untrustworthy?

"We do not accept commercial or conflicted funding. This is vital for us to generate authoritative and reliable information, working freely, unconstrained by commercial and financial interests." If your research is sponsored by Monsanto, the producer of RoundUp, I would argue that is considered conflicted funding.

I went to https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search (redirected from their cochrane.org site) to search for this review and it wasn't there when I searched for "glyphosate". This is starting to look a lot like they're purposefully trying to mislead people into thinking this is an official Cochrane review, I am surprised Cochrane allows this.

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#73

Post by gcheong »

pstuart wrote: post #34
tptacek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because they believe in the promise of GMOs.

I'm pro-GMO in the sense of "woohoo, science!", but a lot of it seems to be about making herbicide/pesticide resistance and encouraging that seems like a bad idea. Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...

I'm not sure what you're thinking GMO technology should be used for. Pest control is a large part of successful agriculture. BT is used in organic farming as well (mentioned in your linked article) but instead of it being made by the plant itself as a GMO does, it's applied to the plant which means more of it needs to be applied overall. Pesticide resistance is nothing new, GMO or otherwise. That's the nature of nature and the reason 99.99% of the pesticides you consume are made naturally by the plant itself.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-...

https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#74

Post by pronlover723 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #6
fartcannon wrote: post #5

Why do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?

I ask the same thing about Facebook and Google employees, and people who work for "defense" contractors.

What is wrong with working for Facebook or Google?

I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...

For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#75

Post by whatshisface »

tptacek wrote: post #65
nickpeterson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just summarized the problem pretty well.

Could you maybe summarize it further, for those of us who don't know what you mean by this?

Inside life is great and people are nice, and all of the evil is generated at the boundary between the inside and the outside. On top of that, information about the evil is very much suppressed within the organization, so that the people working on it are even more ignorant about it than external bystanders. For example, take the oil industry in 2006: everyone inside it was inundated by detailed climate change denial, so that they were worse off (in terms of the accuracy of their beliefs) than relatively uninformed outsiders who vaguely recalled hearing something about how climate change was a problem.

(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#77

Post by moeris »

fartcannon wrote: post #5

Why do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?

This is like asking why census bureau employees work for the US government when they know the multiple genocides, wars, etc. it has perpetrated.

Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#78

Post by pronlover723 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #40
geotus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is unfairly villainized. It provides a service to advertisers, and it give away many billions of dollars of free online services every year. They’ve done literally nothing to harm you nor 99.9999% of people on earth.

Google is exactly villainized because of the many billions of dollars of free services they provide and use as a source of the data they funnel to the advertisers, while killing competition as a second order effect. Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.

Do you have some links of Google funneling data to advertisers?

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#79

Post by harry8 »

tptacek wrote: post #65
nickpeterson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just summarized the problem pretty well.

Could you maybe summarize it further, for those of us who don't know what you mean by this?

Agree or not all you like but I flat out don't believe you don't know what is meant.

1) Doesn't wish to discuss the ethics at all.

2) The working conditions are very good.

Re: Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

#80

Post by epgui »

tptacek wrote: post #23
diogenescynic wrote: post #2

Monsanto also pays shills to comment positively about pesticide use and try to brow beat anyone who is has a negative opinion their products. It's crazy how aggressive it is. Basically any thread on Twitter or Reddit the same users will defend Monsanto. You see the same thing about other controversial products, such as BPAs. It seems like some tactic they learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to just push as much doub…

I've defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I'm not carrying any water for them. I'm pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto's size. I'm sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I'm just calling actual issues…

+1

I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and/or unintelligent.

This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about).

Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.

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