It is a real shame not to be able to trust "science" anymore. We'll have to come up with a new word for what we used to call science because I don't think corporations and media set on manipulating public opinion and laws will give it back.
> It is a real shame not to be able to trust "science" anymore. I agree. My brother (Aerospace Eng.) and I (Software Eng.) talk often about this with our Dad (Electrical Eng.). Given that big business and BIG money has now been proven to have hidden the truth about Monsanto Chemicals, sugar and many other things, how many other things in our would would big business pay billions or even trillions to cover up if they…
Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#22Of course they did. Anyone on the internet about a year - 2 years ago remembers every time you mentioned monsanto they would send shills in to defend them and call you a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.
It's been really frustrating trying to have any nuanced stance on GMOs with proponents doing the "durr all modern crops are genetically modified by human selection" and such. Like no shit, it is still possible to acknowledge that and believe that there are legitimate concerns about intellectual property, or with modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it. A lot of…
And I've never bought the characterization of breeding/selection as a form of GM. Breeding is selection of a pathetically tiny set of modifications, but GM is on a whole other level. With GM we can write arbitrary binary strings of code into any organism. That's simply not comparable with breeding -- the space of realizable phenotypes is orders of magnitude larger with GM.
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#23Most publicity about "cancer" and "Monsanto" is traceable back to an IARC report that the World Health Organization (IARC's parent) essentially retracted. The report itself concerned dozens of different pesticides and herbicides and mentioned glyphosate only in passing. The studies it referred to equivocated about any link between glyphosate and human cancer.
(I'm going from memory here and someone will probably correct me on this, which will be great!)
It would be surprising if glyphosate turned out to be toxic, because it straightforwardly targets a metabolic pathway that plants have and the entire kingdom of Animalia lacks.
California recently added glyphosate to its list of chemicals that it's required to alert consumers about. But of course, that list is long and includes substances that virtually nobody controls their own exposure to, such as acrylamide --- a known human carcinogen --- which is universally present in cooked foods.
Finally, and this is obvious, but we're reading articles on a plaintiff lawyer's website. That's fine, but you're clearly not going to get the whole story from them. For instance, the lawyers are happy to leave you with a headline about Monsanto trying to "retract a cancer study". But they're of course going to leave out the fact that the study in question was the Séralini study, of "Séralini affair" fame; you can look this up in Wikipedia to see what I'm referring to.
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#24It is a real shame not to be able to trust "science" anymore. We'll have to come up with a new word for what we used to call science because I don't think corporations and media set on manipulating public opinion and laws will give it back.
It's not like it was hard to figure out what was going on. On one hand you have scientists publishing letters of concern regarding glyphosate arguing for more studies to be done because of hints of carcinogenic properties. On the other hand you have a full blown shill campaign on Reddit and other website, being all like, "there is absolutely nothing to worry about, why do you hate science!". And lobbyists bullying th…
Depopulation is necessary and luckily it's also fairly easy.
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#25Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#26Uh... My grandpa used to use Roundup in order to kill weeds in his cultivation land.
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#27I don't know what Monsanto did or didn't do and don't have any particular rooting interest for Monsanto, but I think it's worth noting that the published science for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate (the "weed killer" we're talking about here) is extremely flimsy. Most publicity about "cancer" and "Monsanto" is traceable back to an IARC report that the World Health Organization (IARC's parent) essentially retracted.…
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#28I don't know what Monsanto did or didn't do and don't have any particular rooting interest for Monsanto, but I think it's worth noting that the published science for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate (the "weed killer" we're talking about here) is extremely flimsy. Most publicity about "cancer" and "Monsanto" is traceable back to an IARC report that the World Health Organization (IARC's parent) essentially retracted.…
My understanding is that the danger of glyphosate is one step removed from direct action on "human" cells, so bringing up metabolic pathways is a straw-man argument. The suspected danger is from disruption to the symbiosis of the entire human system, including the ~10x bacterial cells for every human cell that can be killed by glyphosate. https://www.nature.com/articles/npjbiofilms20163 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p…
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I think a good portion of those 'shills' were organic (no pun intended). To this day, a lot of the popular "anti-monsanto", "anti-gmo" groups (e.g. David Avocado Wolfe) are pretty nutjob and have a large community of people who dislike them.
>lot of the popular "anti-monsanto", "anti-gmo" groups (e.g. David Avocado Wolfe) are pretty nutjob It's worth noting that having such groups is a commonly used counter intelligence tactic: create a loud and incoherent pseudo-strawman opposition to distract from those who are actually asking legitimate questions. An effective astroturf campaign calls for both pro-x and anti-x shills.
See flat earth as an obvious example of this.
Re: Monsanto leaks suggest it tried to ‘kill’ cancer research about weed killer
#30Of course they did. Anyone on the internet about a year - 2 years ago remembers every time you mentioned monsanto they would send shills in to defend them and call you a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.
It's been really frustrating trying to have any nuanced stance on GMOs with proponents doing the "durr all modern crops are genetically modified by human selection" and such. Like no shit, it is still possible to acknowledge that and believe that there are legitimate concerns about intellectual property, or with modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it. A lot of…
>modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it
This is purely speculation at this point. I recognise the ecological harms of massive monoculture enabled by GM but again, opponents seems fixated on unproven health effects and miss the bigger picture.