Journal Retracts Unethical Glyphosate Safety Study 25 Years Later

• The paper delivered an unequivocal safety verdict that regulators relied on — The authors concluded glyphosate posed no risk to human health, including no cancer, reproductive, developmental, or endocrine harm in humans or animals. Regulatory agencies worldwide, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have cited this paper as evidence that glyphosate-based herbicides are safe for continued use.³

• Monsanto secretly authored the paper while outside scientists signed off — Internal company documents released during litigation in 2017 showed Monsanto scientists wrote the paper themselves, while the named academics served only as editors and signatories. In one particular email from 2015, William Heydens, a Monsanto scientist, suggested the company could “ghost-write” another paper using the same playbook.

“(W)e would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit and sign their names so to speak. Recall that is how we handled Williams, Kroes, and Munro, 2000,” he wrote.⁴

• Internal emails show deliberate manipulation of the scientific record — After the paper’s publication, Monsanto government affairs official Lisa Drake sent an email praising seven Monsanto employees for their “hard work over three years of data collection, writing, review, and relationship building with the papers’ authors.” She made clear why the ghostwritten paper mattered so much, saying:

“This human health publication on Roundup herbicide and its companion publication on ecotox and environmental fate will undoubtedly be regarded as ‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety. Our plan is now to utilize it both in the defense of Roundup and Roundup Ready crops worldwide and in our ability to competitively differentiate ourselves from generics.”⁵

• Executives treated the deception as a corporate success — One executive, Katherine Carr, even asked whether the team of people at Monsanto who worked on the Williams paper could receive Roundup polo shirts as a “token of appreciation for a job well done.”⁶

Hugh Grant, who was a senior Monsanto executive at the time and later became CEO and chairman, added his congratulations: “This is very good work, well done to the team, please keep me in the loop as you build the PR info to go with it.”⁷

• The timing aligned with major financial stakes for Monsanto — The late 1990s marked the launch of “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant seeds, designed to allow farmers to spray the herbicide directly onto food crops. Any health concerns about glyphosate could derail this lucrative new business line.

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate was expiring in 2000, meaning the company would soon face competition from generic manufacturers. They needed authoritative-sounding “independent” research to maintain market dominance and justify regulatory approval. The ghostwritten paper delivered exactly that.⁸

• The journal acted only after Kaurov and Oreskes reported the issues to the journal — Martin van den Berg, the journal’s editor-in-chief, said that the researchers’ retraction request was the first time a complaint had been brought directly to his desk. He admitted the retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier.”¹⁰

• The deception runs even deeper than ghostwriting — According to the retraction notice, the paper based its safety conclusions solely on Monsanto-owned unpublished data, while ignoring multiple long-term toxicity and carcinogenicity studies that were already available by 1999.

“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.

In their article the authors state that they are aware of other studies, that were unpublished and not available. However, the authors do not specify to what extent they tried to incorporate the findings of these (unpublished) studies. The reasons for this remain undisclosed but bring into question the broader objectivity of the conclusions presented.”¹¹

• Retraction corrected the record but could not undo decades of impact — Kaurov and Oreskes emphasized that pulling the paper would not erase 25 years of regulatory and scientific influence. However, they argued it would send a clear and overdue signal that fraudulent authorship is unacceptable and that the scholarly record will be protected regardless of a paper’s age, citation count, or commercial value to a journal.¹²

• Bayer defended the paper by pointing to acknowledgments rather than authorship — Bayer, which purchased Monsanto in 2018, said the company believes Monsanto’s involvement was appropriately disclosed in the acknowledgments section, which thanked Monsanto toxicologists and scientists for significant contributions to exposure assessments and identified several Monsanto personnel as providing scientific support.

However, acknowledging someone for “scientific support” is not the same as disclosing that they ghostwrote the entire paper. The company’s statement then fell back on the familiar refrain:

“The consensus among regulatory bodies worldwide that have conducted their own independent assessments based on the weight of evidence is that glyphosate can be used safely as directed and is not carcinogenic.”¹³

A bill currently moving through Congress includes a quiet provision that would shield Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits over harms linked to Monsanto products. Learn more in “The Deadly Campaign to Shield All Pesticides from Legal Liability.”

• Is the “consensus” actually built on unethical research? — In an article by Chemical & Engineering News, Kaurov noted that there are more glyphosate papers widely known to be ghostwritten. Kaurov and Oreskes chose to highlight the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology study because it was the oldest one.

Kaurov says he’s surprised that no one else had contacted the journal asking them to pull the paper since the revelations of Monsanto’s involvement in drafting it emerged in 2017.¹⁴

• Experts say undisclosed corporate authorship was a broader pattern — Alexandra Maertens, a computational toxicologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also noted that several glyphosate manuscripts involved overlapping core authors and varying levels of Monsanto involvement. She stressed that these relationships should have been disclosed.¹⁵

• The EPA framed the issue as one of citation rather than influence — While acknowledging awareness of the retraction, the agency said it “has never relied on this specific article in developing any of its regulatory conclusions on glyphosate.” An EPA spokesperson said the agency has “extensively studied glyphosate, reviewing more than 6,000 studies across all disciplines” and that their current risk assessment uses “gold standard science.”¹⁶

• Scientific misconduct now dominates drug and biomedical retractions — Back in 2012, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research investigated retractions in drug and biomedical literature and found that nearly 75% of retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, including data falsification or fabrication, questionable veracity, unethical author conduct, or plagiarism.

This represents a dramatic increase from a 1998 review, which found that 37% of scientific retractions between 1966 and 1997 were due to scientific misconduct. Even more alarming, data from Thomson Reuters shows that the number of scientific retractions has climbed more than 15-fold since 2001.¹⁷

• The pharmaceutical industry has a long track record of criminal misconduct — Nearly 20% of the top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s were drug companies. Jon Jureidini, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide who reviewed internal drug company documents as an expert witness, found serious misrepresentation of both drug effectiveness and safety. Published papers presented favorable outcomes while negative findings were omitted entirely.¹⁸

• Ghostwriting is a standard industry tactic, not an anomaly — In 2008, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of Mount Sinai School of Medicine uncovered extensive ghostwriting linked to Vioxx, the painkiller associated with more than 60,000 deaths before its withdrawal.

Ross found internal Merck documents and emails pertaining to about 96 journal publications, some of which were developed by the company’s marketing department, not its scientific department. In one case, a neurologist was listed as an author despite having died in a plane crash a year earlier.¹⁹

• Avandia provides another example of how fraudulent science kills — This diabetes medication hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug with $3.2 billion in annual revenue by 2006. A year later, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine linked Avandia to a 43% increased risk of heart attack and a 64% higher risk of cardiovascular death.²⁰

Between 1999 and 2007, Avandia was estimated to have caused more than 80,000 unnecessary heart attacks. Later analysis of 56 clinical trials found that for every 37 to 52 patients treated for five years, one additional heart attack could be expected. The estimated deaths between 1999 and 2009 approach 48,000.²¹ GlaxoSmithKline concealed damaging safety data for over a decade to protect sales.

• Negative drug trials are systematically buried — Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, stated bluntly that “trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time.” Drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies that reach unfavorable conclusions are rarely published, creating a literature skewed toward apparent efficacy and safety that does not reflect the full body of evidence.²²

• Most published research findings are statistically unreliable — In 2005, epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis demonstrated that fewer than 50% of published scientific findings are likely to be true. His analysis showed that for most study designs and research environments, false conclusions are more probable than true ones due to small sample sizes, poor methodology, researcher bias, and selective reporting.²³

• Even landmark cancer studies often fail replication — Former drug company researcher Glenn Begley attempted to replicate 53 influential cancer studies published in top-tier journals and found that only six could be reproduced. Nearly 90% failed replication. These studies were foundational for drug development decisions.

As Begley explained, when enormous financial and clinical bets depend on these findings, the inability to reproduce them undermines the credibility of the entire research pipeline.²⁴

• A recent case illustrates how pervasive the problem remains — In December 2025, the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute agreed to pay $15 million to settle claims that studies funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contained manipulated or duplicated images and data, prompting the retraction of at least six research papers and corrections to dozens more.

The settlement followed a whistleblower lawsuit and investigation into flawed data published between 2014 and 2020, showing that even top-tier research centers are not immune to compromised science.²⁵

• That does not mean you are powerless — It means responsibility has quietly shifted into your hands. Making sound health decisions today requires judgment, discernment, and a willingness to question authority rather than defer to it. No one else is ultimately accountable for your health or your family’s health, and industries built on selling products have little incentive to prioritize your long-term well-being over their bottom line.

This is why evaluating evidence means asking specific questions, like who funded the research, which data were included or excluded, and how the findings were later used in regulation or clinical practice. It also means favoring approaches that work with biology rather than attempting to override it.

• Healthy food starts with living soil — In food and agriculture, that means choosing foods grown through regenerative farming systems that work with soil biology, plant diversity, and ecosystem health. This approach doesn’t just reduce exposure to harmful herbicides; it restores nutrient density, improves resilience, and addresses root problems rather than masking them.

• The same principle applies to medicine — Many drugs are designed to suppress symptoms without addressing why those symptoms exist in the first place. Seek out practitioners who investigate root causes such as nutrition, environmental exposures, metabolic health, and toxic burden rather than defaulting to lifelong pharmaceutical management.

Your body has an extraordinary capacity to heal itself when properly supported with the right inputs rather than being indefinitely medicated for profit.