Comment by jl6

Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already banned in the EU.

If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.

The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that

The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have a chemical that kills living things and you have a company who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.

Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.

Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?

Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.

This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.

Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.

The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.

I think it's quite the compliment - you should be flattered!

Unrelated:

I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".

This is a lot of words to make no real point to who it’s replying to.

This is all back to front.

There needs to be some kind of evaluation of products being safe to use before they're wildly used and even sprayed onto food.

For studies to prove that there is harm, there typically needs to be widespread use of it to make it easier to use population studies and certainly long-term studies. Simply relying on "there's no definitive proof that it's harmful to humans when used in a specific way" is naive and a sure-fire way to get large corporations to get away with harming people in the name of profits.

I would disagree with the claim/usage of “inert” if it was damaging to gut microbiome.

> affecting the gut microbiome

That is so vague it can apply to everything. Probably drinking a glass of water affects the gut microbiome.

Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it. It's a broad statement about research directions in glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical agricultural supplements are objects of concern, epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism.

I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".

> > Trust the science.

>> Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.

He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the science" when what they really mean is "trust these scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".

Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.

even a broken clock can be right every now and then

No the opposite. I trust Monsanto, they know this chemical better than anyone.

What is the probability that Monsanto has managed to pay everyone to say it safe.

Proving everyone else wrong is quite the incentive for a researcher. To me it's sound unlikely that no one else would jump on the opportunity of fame for proving that it's actually harmful. Money is something but that's not the primary motivator of researchers, otherwise they would be doing way more lucrative work with their intelligence.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma odds ratio 1.41-1.45 (AKA 41-45% higher relative risk): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31342895/

NHL odds ratio 2.26: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18623080/

Positive trend of NHL risk with exposure: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12937207/

7x risk of follicular lymphoma in those ever exposed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8082925/

Speaking of luddites, I've recently stumbled on posts that point out that the framing of "luddites" was intentionally misleading and that it was never being against technology but how it was wielded.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites...

Did they turn out to be right? Maybe, I'm not familiar with the research here, but no evidence for that has actually been posted. This study being untrustworthy doesn't make it prove its opposite instead.

It kills stuff...let's consider a poison that has killed the majority of life on Earth. I can't find any LD50 numbers for it but prolonged exposure to more than 30 kilopascals of it is considered unsafe. Oxygen.

[ On second thoughts, retracted ]

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