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Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

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Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-gmos use pesticides, nearly all farming does, and usually more than GMO crops. Eg https://i0.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... From https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US. "We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock. If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, b…

> In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US.

While this may be causal, agriculture is incredibly complex, and I would hesitate to come to any conclusions about causality from this bit of data alone.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#142
post #78
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're sharing thoughts, I need to point out that once you hit your late 60s, you're more likely to get cancer, and your risk keeps going up [1]. Our food is loaded with chemicals that can make you sick or even cause cancer [2]. That age is also when people usually retire and are no longer "productive". Here's where I might lose you. In our country, illness is a way to make money [3]. If you're really sick and tryi…

The other aspect might be that people in their 60s also don't eat diets to replenish things that they've been losing since their 20's. Similarly to how so many people that died from covid tended toward very low vitamin D levels [ https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ] Most "medical" research tends to never focus on actual nutrition. Probably because that would reduce profits for those with…

Orrrr it could just be that high quality nutritional research is actually incredibly difficult due to the number of variables involved, especially when compared with an easily controlled single intervention study. Not saying there's no money involved, but it's much more complicated than that.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roundup isn’t glyphosate. It’s full of glyphosate, yes. But it’s not glyphosate. It also doesn’t always break down. Depends on if it binds with anything.

Seems like a distinction without a difference: " Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide and crop desiccant. It is used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with crops. Its herbicidal effectiveness was discovered by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970. Monsanto brought it to market for agricultural use in 1974 under the trade name Roundup. " https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

I think what they are meaning is that the chemical blend with glyphosate causes cancer even if pure glyphosate doesn't. I.e. an inactive ingredient or an interaction with an inactive ingredient is what causes the cancer.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-gmos use pesticides, nearly all farming does, and usually more than GMO crops. Eg https://i0.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... From https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US. "We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock. If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, b…

> 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle

I don't think this is true. Did you mean livestock?

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#145
post #44

The most dangerous surface in a farm is the farmer’s hat I was told. So they wear the hat in the sun, tilling the fields, but the reason the hat is dangerous is from spraying the fields. Pesticides and herbicides are downright scary chemicals, and we genetically modify crops to improve tolerance of these chemicals. And that is when I went all GMO free, not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified gen…

Round-Up Ready and Terminator Seeds are two of the sickest inventions that humans have ever dreamed up. The idea of engineering seed so that new seed which comes from its crop will not germinate is just beyond wicked and evil. But we've had that for something like a quarter century now. $332M seems like peanuts.

This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science.

Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes was so bad yields were impacted, it's a very narrow change to plants that makes farmers a lot of money. The vast majority of soybeans in the world are running Roundup-ready genes for a reason.

Terminator seeds sounded like a scary patent, but it was mostly useless. In corn, for instance, you'd never want to run it at all, as the seeds that are sold are almost perfect hybrids of 2 inbreds, which lose a whole lot of yield in the next generation without anyone really trying. There's no need for a gene when the next generation yields worse naturally.

If you want a sick situation with Bayer, forget Roundup, and look at what's been happening with Dicamba, the next generation of pesticide that GMOs are protected from. It's not a new pesticide, but it's very aggressive and it drifts: You spray a field, and many other fields around it are going to get hit. Supposedly Bayer is telling everyone that, on tests, the new formulations of it, when applied properly under the right weather conditions, there's no drift... but reality disagrees. Therefore, a whole lot of fields that aren't planting seeds protected from dicamba are getting wrecked by not-so-close that haven't mastered the really difficult ways to spray dicamba in the calmest of days. We aren't talking a pesticide that drifts 50 feet here, or 100, but people relatively far away that have their crops ruined. This is happening often enough that we'll see bans, while more and more generations of roundup GMO are going out of patent.

I am pretty sure that this one is what is scaring Bayer's lawyers, not Roundup.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#146
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSDS for Roundup is hilarious. It's completely safe, no known health effects, as long as you're wearing a full hazmat suite.

Here's the MSDS for Vitamin D: https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AAB2252406&p... It also recommends wearing all the standard protective equipment. Guess it's not safe to eat any Vitamin D, then, right? Or maybe it's the dose that makes the poison. (Fun fact: Vitamin D is more acutely toxic than glyphosate.)

Is there a way of telling from the MSDS or other sources that you actually need protective equipment when dealing with a particular chemical? I'm sure some of the stuff my partner deals with requires it, but suspect some of the other stuff she would be safer without the protective gear making her clumsier.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Round-Up Ready and Terminator Seeds are two of the sickest inventions that humans have ever dreamed up. The idea of engineering seed so that new seed which comes from its crop will not germinate is just beyond wicked and evil. But we've had that for something like a quarter century now. $332M seems like peanuts.

Wikipedia claims (not very current claims though) that terminator seeds are not commercially available? They are different than the common case of infertile hybrids, which have good reason to exist and the infertility (IIUIC, not a botanist) is a side effect.

There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile over just buying new seed.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#148
post #44

The most dangerous surface in a farm is the farmer’s hat I was told. So they wear the hat in the sun, tilling the fields, but the reason the hat is dangerous is from spraying the fields. Pesticides and herbicides are downright scary chemicals, and we genetically modify crops to improve tolerance of these chemicals. And that is when I went all GMO free, not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified gen…

Non-gmos use pesticides, nearly all farming does, and usually more than GMO crops. Eg https://i0.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... From https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

I don't know if what they're saying is true, but I don't think they're saying non-GMO plants don't use pesticides. They're saying GMO crops use even stronger pesticides, strong enough that it would kill the non-GMO variants of these plants. And they want to avoid the kind of pesticides in their salad that would kill a non-modified lettuce, or whatever plant.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#149
post #44

The most dangerous surface in a farm is the farmer’s hat I was told. So they wear the hat in the sun, tilling the fields, but the reason the hat is dangerous is from spraying the fields. Pesticides and herbicides are downright scary chemicals, and we genetically modify crops to improve tolerance of these chemicals. And that is when I went all GMO free, not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified gen…

> not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified genes, that’s plain stupid. So, it turns out this is not so stupid. I’m going to sound a little stupid, because this is not my field, but my sister is a plant molecular biologist. All her research/work is in plant DNA. Apparently it’s been recently discovered that the gene expression for the genetically modified plants was not as had been previously unde…

No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted.

The problem is assuming that any other change that happens is dangerous and untested. There's mutation all over the place in perfectly organic plants, just like with GMOs. There are also changes on gene expression from those changes, also like GMO. An overwhelming majority of changes either do nothing, or make the plant unviable at all. The practical risks of a change that does something, doesn't harm yields, and yet somehow makes the parts of the plant that a human eats somewhat toxic is a huge stretch. It's even less likely when one considers the actual regulatory processes that happen later. It might seem crazy, but people that work on GMOs tend to be uninterested in poisoning the public.

If I was afraid of poisoning due to mutation (which I am not), I'd be more afraid of what someone that has been crossing plans with some localized, ancestral wildtypes that have been planted just in some village for the last hundred years or something. They are more likely to be untested. But it's like the risk of getting hit by lighting for the 5th time this week.

I am far more likely to be poisoned by a detergent, or someone that has let bacteria run amok in their packing facility, and is somehow selling, say, premixed salads that land in my local supermarket.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when chemicals so awful they kill the crop, the crop’s genes need to be modified so that they don’t die and that chemical residue ends up all over our food system Fortunately, you are not a plant. These chemicals just need to not harm humans (and domestic animals). The fact that they did, in this case, is merely a safety failure. There is nothing which says that pesticides and herbicides must be harmful to huma…

Although we have seen very frequently that pesticides still affect some humans or animals. At this point, shouldn't we just reduce the possible points of failures instead of hoping the next miracle molecule doesn't kill us all twenty years later?

> Although we have seen very frequently that pesticides still affect some humans or animals.

“Pesticides” is a class that includes things intended affect animals (insecticides and rodenticides, for instance.)

> At this point, shouldn't we just reduce the possible points of failures instead of hoping the next miracle molecule doesn't kill us all twenty years later?

Probably not. We should probably improve our structures for evaluating, approving, and reevaluating once deployed agricultural chemicals of all types, but should we stop developing new technology in the field? No, we probably should not.

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