Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?

""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""

I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.

So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.

One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation

It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.

I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...

Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.

Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans.

Is it killing gut bacteria?

There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.

One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.

A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.

[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]

I understand the valid reasons for pulling the study, but that does nothing to specifically address its claims or evidence.

IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.

We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.

The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.

We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.

It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.

However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines

[1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate