Controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference
usrtk.org
usrtk.org
Industry sponsorship is entirely normal for scientific conferences, they would not really be possible without it. This also isn't an issue usually, the sponsors get some advertisment on the conference and some space to represent themselves. If sponsors actually would affect the talk selection that certainly would be a very serious problem, but I didn't see any real evidence of that in the article.
"This face of Corteva Agriscience, ... that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organization ... "
and:
"However, during hundreds of sessions on these subjects, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids, a factor in one of the most controversial, high-profile areas of research in entomology."
The article discusses quite a few angles about neonics. Close to the conclusion it quotes a researcher from the Uni of Minnesota:
"I don’t think the scientific meetings are run by them or overrun by them," she said. ... "You donate money, you get a perk. . . . It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t."
So, an issue that even I (a civilian) have heard of fails to be mentioned at a massive conference that should be discussing it (int al). That conference has a major sponsor who also manufacturer's said "issue". Also it seems to be accepted that if you pay, you get perks.
I live in a UK county that is quite rural and there is a lot of farming here. It was also a testing ground for blasting badgers into the middle of next week 'cause bovine TB. Yay, go: Somerset (we also bring you the Glastonbury music festy and Chedder cheese and possibly "England" if you squint hard enough - that's a D Trump grade assertion!)
We can debate cause and effect but I suspect if I suggested you sniff a neonic, you might politely refuse on health grounds. They are not nice compounds and there is damn good evidence that neonics damage insects and may cause damage further up the food chain.
This conference should discuss all interested issues, regardless of sponsors. It didn't and you and I both know why not. There is no if or but.
At that "halfway" mark, the author describes employees of these companies gish-galloping conference presenters.
Then the author describes a couple of scientists in the ESA describing how neonic research isn't selected because it doesn't "add anything new." except the author then shows that neonic research and citations are both growing - the complete opposite of what several ESA people said.
These insecticide companies are getting to keep their cake (aggressively challenging neonic research as poorly supported) and eat it too (suppress representation of neonic research at their conferences because "it doesn't add anything new" and "is settled science.")
I suppose this needs to be expanded on. It could be that neonic research is growing, but that the papers being submitted aren't adding anything novel.
OP's point stands. Burying the lede after, essentially, a series of paragraphs that filters the readership to a particular political bent is bad writing.
There is a vocal minority that treats "corporation" as a dirty word. This sort of writing is fodder for them. It doesn't actually have to make a point, just point out that corporations exist. It's helps campaigns get out the vote and electeds' staffers filter out stupid feedback.
On the other side you have socialism, DEI and cisgender. You really don't have to make a point to get that section riled up, just mention the term. (One could literally start a speech to the respective crowds by repeating a single word, e.g. corporations or socialism, taking a dramatic pause, and get a strong response.)
And again, it's safe to toss out policy feedback that obsesses over these terms. (Both the far left and right also have a weird obsession with capitalising random words. I think it seems evocative of Enlightenment-era English?)
But of course, not all "natural" things are ideal.
Pervasive corporate influence over scientific communication and funding puts a really big thumb on the scale of which programs get pursued and which findings get acknowledged and explored.
It doesn't make sense to forbid corporate participation in research altogether (that would be bad too), but it's prudent to look at real-world examples in real research domains to see if important work contrary to moneyed interests is being stifled or misrepresented by way of these money+power dynamics.
The way it stands now is that it’s a nice tax write of the the company and a great way to play the heads I win tails you lose game.
What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
There are ways to do science that avoid this kind of corruption.
If a company wants to bring a pesticide to market. We would like them to bear the brunt of safety research costs before they launch. You might say that product safety is different from pure academic research.
We're just arguing semantics and incentives at that point. Like giving them a tax break for that research. Sure that sucks. But how else shall we make it happen.
I think this is a common confusion. You need impractical/naive research because that's how exploration gets done. If you heavily bias the search towards areas of the search space that you've already seen a lot then you've basically killed science and its ability to deliver useful results.
The honest answer is because there isn't enough funding through government and philanthropy.
You'll find a really odd opinion, that many people think engineering endeavors are significantly more important than research ones. When instead the truth is that both are two sides of the same coin. After all, research funds the next generation of engineering.
I think there's an unfortunate effect of this because there is quite a bit of science that is beholden to corporate... let's say "motivations"(?) rather than more free intellectual pursuit. Then the money that is more free is much more competitive and frankly people are metric hacking to get there (publish or perish paradigm is weird when you have to frequently publish novel works). The system was fine but the environment changes and eventually all metrics are hacked.
For personal values, I think it is quite important to fund research. From the very basic low level to even higher engineering research.[0] I'd actually be in favor of 5-10xing the federal science budget. I'd argue this should be primarily funded through federal grants, because people will take that research and go make things which will then be sold (world wide) and we'll tax through that. It's like venture capital if it was less risky but had a longer time frame for ROI.
The category of "General Science, Space, and Technology" accounts for 20.5 bn dollars[1]. The problem is, people understand this to be a big number and hear about these huge costs (often of projects that last decades!), but this is actually 0.4% of the 2024 budget! 64% of that (13.2bn) is going into space flight, research, and supporting activities. The other 7.3bn is going to the rest of science! To put this into perspective, we spend 8.4bn dollars on salaries and expenses for Social Security. The Navy gets 16bn for research, Army 11.5, Air Force 8.2, and another 14 on "Defense Wide" (so a total of ~50bn).
edit: To be clear, I'm not against corporate funding of science or even corporations working with academics for research. I think it can often work out great. But I think there needs to be some balance or academia gets captured by industry. I think we can think of some where this may have happened (or is in danger of), including domains closely related to the topics HN cares about the most.
[0] If you're unfamiliar, the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is a often referenced and useful (albeit vague) map to point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer
[side note] A fun thing I do is talk about the ultra wealthy's wealth in terms of "CERNs" instead of dollars. Because numbers in the billions are just unimaginable (I have a physics degree and work with numbers this large -- or the inverse -- and if you tell me you understand this more than an abstract concept, I'll call you a liar). But we can imagine a CERN (which is funded by several countries btw and not a significant part of any of those budgets. Despite being the largest if not most expensive physics experiment ever). Which is a (roughly) 10 billion dollar super project that took (roughly) 10 years to build and costs (roughly) 1 billion dollars a year to operate. This actually makes for a good comparison for people like billionaires because their money is so massive that it is often growing far faster than they can actually conceivably spend it. Maybe the best example of this is Mackenzie Scott who in 2019 got $35.6bn in Amazon stock when divorcing Bezos, has given away $14 billion (5.8 in 2020 alone!) AND Forbes has her at 34.9 billion in net worth (Amazon has done 30% better than VOO since 2019 for context. So, not counting her givings, it's the difference of about 5bn)
And for manipulating the scientific consensus, for rewarding scholars that agree with them, etc.
But who actually cares? I don't think anyone was saying that sponsoring scientific conferences wasn't useful for corporations. It's a straw man. The question is whether it's good for science and public health, specifically in the case of neonicotinoids.
> And they're the part of those scientific communities that has the spare money to be able to provide sponsorships.
The fewer challenges to what is currently profitable to them, the more spare money they have.
and restaurants throw out millions of tons of edible food every night but if you try to eat it you get arrested for stealing. your true crime was upsetting supply/demand. if people realized they could get free food at like 9pm every night then demand would plummet, so would prices, the restaurants would all go out of business. artificial scarcity is the business model of a huge section of the economy.
but then there is also all this attempt by companies to make new chemicals to grow food more efficiently. and the government wont stop that. its ok if you are more efficient just not TOO much more efficient. if you made a chemical that could drop the price of corn by 99% ... the government would probably have to stop that in order to support prices.
its like we have this weird machine where we have 5 different brake pedals and 5 different accelerators and different people are constantly trying to push all 10 of them.
the bees get caught in the middle.
EDITED: A suggested starting point https://eatforum.org/
A few years later the that big cancer lawsuit hit the news.
"One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans" in 2015. In 2017, California environmental regulators listed glyphosate as “known to the state to cause cancer.”"
That's not to mention the strong-arming, harassment, and threats towards researchers publishing papers that paint Monsanto and Bayer in a negative light. [1]
1. https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists...
It's also a damning piece of evidence in and of itself, at least stochastically speaking.
source?
>when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her scientific analysis of the harms of DDT, Monsanto engaged in targeted personal attacks to try to undermine her research
They said mean things, but calling it a "threat" seems like a stretch. Moreover after clicking through some of the links I still have no idea what they actually said aside from some well chosen quotes.
>In the lead up to IARC’s report, Monsanto rolled out an “an unprecedented and harsh strategy” to discredit experts, wrote Colorado School of Public Health Dean Jonathan Samet. Monsanto’s attacks, he said, amounted to an “attack on expert review” itself.
I skimmed the linked article and it doesn't offer specifics about what the "attacks" actually were.
>Journalists at France’s largest newspaper Le Monde, in their award-winning series about the Monsanto Papers, described the Monsanto-led attack on IARC as “an effort to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible.”
Skimming the linked source, it looks like the "attacks" in question are FOIA requests.
>Following that email exchange, GLP went on to publish dozens of articles critical of the cancer agency — many of them personal attacks on the scientists involved in the glyphosate review, and some of them written by former chemical industry lobbyists and climate science skeptics.
See first reply in this comment.
>Engaging climate science denialists
bad/questionable, not exactly "threatening"
>Another document reveals that Monsanto consultants drafted at least one letter calling for an investigation of the “flawed” IARC process — and designed to look like it was written by a member of Congress.
1. The process is arguably flawed, as other commenters have mentioned. I think it's fair game to criticize them for that
2. I looked at the linked document and I can't imagine how anyone thinks it "look like it was written by a member of Congress". Nowhere does it claim that it's written by a congressman, and the signature block just says "NAME"? Is this even a real letter that was sent to Dr. Collins, or a draft letter that they wanted an actual congressman to send?
Erin Brockovich: By the way, we had that water brought in specially for you folks. Came from a well in Hinkley. Ms. Sanchez: [Puts down the glass, without drinking] I think this meeting is over. Ed Masry: Damn right it is.
Would you personally spray Roundup directly on your skin?
Because if you've ever treated a large area of your plot with weed killer with a spray indicator, it's clear as day that stuff is getting all over you with the slightest breeze.
Critically, it appears the surfactants in Roundup are the nasty bit, not glyphosphate. To my knowledge, they don't permeate the skin. But if you're inhaling it, it's in your blood stream. It shouldn't be shocking that a chemical your body isn't used to designed to keep organic compounds apart messes with at least some of your biochemistry.
When I was a bench tech, back in the early eighties, we had gallon jugs of trichlor, all over the building. Each tech had a bottle at their bench.
We were explicitly told, by management, that it was completely harmless.
This is the real world, not a philosophical sandbox. I understand that a person's character should be ontologically castrated from their argument in a philosophical sandbox. But 99% of the time that a company does evil shit like this in the real world, they have very strong reason to do so. It's increasingly likely that Monsanto/Bayer don't want the scientific process to run its natural course. They feel the need to intervene. Why?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o...
Then why has Monsanto settled one hundred thousand claims and paid ten billion dollars in judgements against them and settlements?
Then why was a top official at the EPA emailing Monsanto executives saying he should "get a medal" if he was able to kill the CDC's study?
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/15/520250505/em...
That doesn't mean it's carcinogenic in a colloquial sense--we don't have evidence for that, again, beyond the carcinogenic capacity of commonly-eaten foods.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
As it is for red meat and hot drinks. These are low-magnitude high-significance effects.
Group 2A includes red meat and hot coffee [1].
To the extent glyphosphate is problematic, it's in being toxic [2], not carcinogenic. (Though again, we can speak similarly of barbecue [3].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A
This is a fair assessment based on the published scientific literature. But you have to take into account the fact that the owners of glyphosate have
1) surveilled, harassed, defamed, and threatened individual scientists and
2) paid millions of dollars to ethically dubious scientists to publish articles in favor of the safety of glyphosate
3) paid billions of dollars to victims of glyphosate exposure because they were found liable (or thought they would be) of causing them harm
Given those facts, I think it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f*cking bad for you and it's truly mind boggling that people feel the need to defend it.
It feels like everyone you talk to on the topic is a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union engaging in doublespeak. Clearly, the people harassing, threatening, surveilling, defaming, and bribing are the baddies. Clearly, they have something to hide.
Monsanto was absolutely shady. That doesn't change the biochemistry of glyphosphate.
> it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f-cking bad for you
Almost every industry has someone being shady. Concluding adversely from that is not reasonable. (It's literally ad hominem, concluding an argument by way of the speaker's character and motives.)
You said "Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans" and then provided sources. Your sources don't support that assertion beyond a very weak definition of causation, at which point we're back to it being similarly carcinogenic to widely-consumed foodstuffs.
I'll give you that one.
Right, a global conspiracy despite the repeated attempts by scientists who were being funded by interests opposite to Monsanto's trying to find evidence.
If you want a conspiracy, try this one: focus people on the provably-weak claims around carcinogenicity to distract from the stronger ones around toxicity.
It's not up for debate. It happened.
We know the threats, harassment, surveillance, and bribery happened. We know the specific people, the specific threats, the specific dollar amounts.
False equivalence and straw man [1][2]. You claimed "everyone who tried to publish was either threatened, harassed, surveilled, or bribed." You're trying to conclude that argument by showing some people were threatened, harassed, surveilled or bribed.
Going back to your first post, you made a claim and provided sources that don't support it. Now you're backing up into, essentially, "trust me." This isn't arguing in good faith.
> We know the threats, harassment, surveillance, and bribery happened. We know the specific people, the specific threats, the specific dollar amounts
Sure. These actions apply to plenty of things. That doesn't prove the inverse.
The bottom line is there is a multi-billion dollar pay-out for anyone who can show Roundup causes cancer. As a $50bn company, Monsanto has weight, but it's in the low tier among the heavyweights.
Hell, if someone has convincing research and is scared, hit me up. I'll indemnify you against civil claims, finance the litigation and even pay for personal security and countersurveillance (if they're caught illegally surveilling, it adds to the damages). In exchange, I want my costs back first plus 51% of the damages.
SIDE NOTE: Memkit looks cool.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: If we could magically determine the truthiness of all these statements and I had to bet money, I would take my side.
This is, in my opinion, a more-compelling statement than "Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans. It's well established at this point."
(Also, Roundup != glyphosphate. The nastiest bit in Roundup may be the surfactants [1].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethoxylated_tallow_amine#H...
If you ever have five hours to listen to someone geek out over esoteric history and regulatory state stuff, in a way that is presumably somewhat tangential to your political bents (presuming you have no strong opinions about strength training), this is a very good non-political source of information. JumpCrissCross gives the short version, but IARC's class 2 is probably not what you think it is. It's not just that it contains a whole lot of stuff I guarantee you ingest regularly without thinking about it. It's not meant to be an advisory to consumers at all. It's a recommendation to researchers about what sorts of compounds are worth putting further research into. The way the media reports about it is wrong and misleading to the people it scares.
I absolutely fucking hate the drinking roundup meme. Yeah sure, pure Glyphosate has an acute toxicity similar to that of table salt (in rodents). So if you’re a rodent you can drink a solution of it similar to what you could tolerate with a salt water solution. But this says nothing of long term effects and is not a realistic situation and is fucking stupid.
Glyphosate on its own is completely ineffective, it requires adjuvants in order to do its work, for the same reason you use dish soap when washing plates. You will never see pure glyphosate used unless you’re working in research where you’re intending to mix it with something. It’s like all that research that equivocates coffee with caffeine, but even worse.
Roundup is always glyphosate plus surfactants, in fact the water/surfactant mix will typically be the majority of the bottle. Not only will these surfactants strip the protective mucus from your gut, it’s help the gylphsate cross barriers it would never be able to on its own, where it causes all sorts of havoc.
If someone drinks undiluted roundup, they will die in a painful way, though that requires managing to get it down, which typically only happens in suicide attempts. A fully diluted solution intended for spraying is much, much safer, but still likely to make you very sick on ingestion or significant skin exposure like if you get drenched in it.
Any study on the short or long term safety of pure glyphosate is worse than worthless, it’s outright misleading because Glyphosate is not Roundup.
Bonus: most adjuvants (which often make up the majority of the chemicals we actually spray out) are exempted from the types of registration and safety trials we typically apply to pesticides. Only a few states are starting to make changes to that (California and Oregon or Washington I think, been a while since I’ve looked at it).
They even provided a detailed and rational explanation for why they hold this opinion.
On the list of things I worry about when it comes to acute chemical exposure (eye danger, lung danger, absorption through skin), the various kinds of Roundup and associated generic formulations is personally down at the bottom as "least concern" at all levels of exposure. If I had to be drenched in a pesticide, this is the one I would choose offhand. It'd still be bad, chemical concentrate is not a joke.
I cannot speak to it's potential long term effects like cancer, as I neither have the skill, time, or desire to search through and evaluate the mess of biased literature available. Given my religious use of PPE and the short 3 year period of applicating small plot trials, my current level of concern for it's potential cancer effects is also "least concern". What's actually going to kill me is a heart attack/stroke given my family history, so I spend my limited mental and physical energy on maintaining a healthy weight and exercise.
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/glyphosate-no-critical-ar...
Monsantos internal email correspondence was rather explicit on how they would rather reach out to their contacts and kill any study they did not approve of before it could become problematic.
Oh hey, look at that - the exact position of the insecticide industry...
...which does not explain why bee die-offs in various countries (at different times) have coincided with the introduction of neonic pesticides in that country.
Bees are certainly being killed by pesticides.
However, the claim is not about bees. It's about Earth's biodiversity in general. Pesticides are certainly a factor here, but pesticides are not why tuna are overfished, or why elm trees are being wiped out, or why domestic cats are killing songbirds, or why the Amazon rainforest is getting bulldozed, or why polar bears don't have enough ice to hunt seals, etc., etc.
>Several entomologists who organized panels in bee science for the conference said that they were surprised to hear that research about the effects of neonicotinoids on bees had all but vanished from the program.
but then also:
> they also said that the field has shifted to an approach that accounts for multiple stressors on individual bees and hives, rather than studies of individual factors, and that the research presented at the conference reflects that way of thinking.
This seems like a real nothing-burger of an article. Research interests ebb and flow. Science is as subject to fads as almost anything else, and conferences more than most things tend to reflect these fads.
Of course we spent millions on marketing and selling more was the target of our sales teams. The problem is more that the whole field faces immense pressure, stigma and lack if alternatives - making it unsexy for funding or to even talk about it. I would welcome more innovation in that space and a constructive discussion instead of feeding the stigma.. ps: I don’t work there anymore…
>Only four papers and posters that examined [the effects of neonicotinoids on bees] made it into the conference, out of nearly 100 papers, posters and symposia on bee science.
(Now it makes sense why the headline says all but vanished)
Specifically, this is referring to a conference of the Entomologist Society of America. "Entomology" being the study of all insects. Bees, ants, katydids, flies, etc. How much out of a sample of 100 papers/posts/symposia should insect scientists be presenting new research on neonicotinoids and bees? Should it be more or less than 4%? Should it be 30%? 50%? I don't know, how on earth would I know that?
Actual entomologists quoted: "I’ve never had a problem getting a neonic paper in a symposium", "For any given subject within entomology, what is covered in ESA conference programs reflects the ebb and flow of interest in it among the community and the focus of research being conducted in the field."
However, this writer knows it's a lot more than 4%. How does she know this? Well here's an extensive study of a (probably nefarious) corporate partnership program by the ESA that accounts for... 3 to 3.5 percent of the society’s total annual revenue, and here's some people who argue that corporations are too involved with science. You do the math!
The writer also repeats some variation of "pipeline to industry" six times in an attempt to horrify the reader. Why you should be surprised or angry that entomologists are by and large working regular jobs for private businesses after graduating, is also left as an exercise for the reader.
Including this particular anecdote is also pretty telling:
>Emily May, a pollinator conservation biologist who studies pesticides for the Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit group, recounted facing intimidation by agrochemical industry attendees after her talk.
>She spoke at the meeting about how government regulators focus on the effects of individual pesticides on pollinators without factoring in the cumulative effects of a range of chemicals.
>After she spoke, she said, five people from the audience stepped up and fired off highly technical questions, such as whether she had completed indexes of cumulative effects.
>“Questions came in with ‘Have you done indexes about toxicity?’ . . . They were just getting very technical in their specific pushback on approaches to looking at cumulative toxicity,” May said.
>“It was like my worst-case scenario, really. It made me nervous about the next conference I presented at, to be honest. It’s hard. People wanted to make me look bad.”
>The source of that onslaught of technical questions: Employees of agrochemical companies, May said.
Am I crazy to think that a conference is not where you get your ideas uncritically accepted, but challenged on a "specific" and "technical" level? Am I crazy for thinking that agrochemical industry stooges should probably be torn to shreds when up against a biologist who has done the research?
We don't need to close our eyes and pretend like there's nothing to fear from corporations. There was an entomologist quoted saying "I’m not going to deny that there is an uninterest, or a bias, to not talk about pesticides and bees", which isn't nothing, but this was clearly drawn out as a response to some kind of pointed question from the writer about the ESA and neonicotonoids.
I get that it gets clicks and eyeballs to play into certain narratives. Are we even slightly worried that if you rely on lazy and dishonest innuendo too much, everyone will become just as lazy and won't believe you when you finally break an important story that goes against their priors?