Comment by pfdietz
6 hours ago
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
6 hours ago
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
If what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist.
There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid this.
There are, but there are also strong incentives for what amounts to fraud, on both sides. Glyphosate has become both highly politicized -- it's used as an argument against GMOs -- and subject to concerted and lucrative legal attack. At the same time, the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection.
Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...
> the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection
That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper published the same year that the patent expired.
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This was and probably still is true about tobacco. Personally, I choose to not smoke.
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When it comes to mechanistic speculation, absolutely.