Imagine building a skyscraper on sand, then discovering decades later that the blueprints were forged by the very contractor who stood to profit from the collapse. For a quarter-century, that's precisely how global regulators treated the 2000 review paper by Gary Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro, a "landmark" analysis in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology that proclaimed glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, posed "no health risk to humans" from cancer. This wasn't just any study; it was the keystone in a vault of approvals, defences, and denials that allowed billions of pounds of the world's most widely used herbicide to be sprayed on crops, fields, parks, and playgrounds. The EPA waved it like a talisman. The WHO and FAO baked it into their assessments. Health Canada cited it as gospel. Farmers were told it was safer than soap.

Now, in a seismic but belated reckoning, the journal has yanked it, formally retracting the paper on December 4, 2025, after internal documents from U.S. litigation exposed it as a Monsanto-orchestrated mirage. The editor-in-chief's notice is a gut-punch of candour: undisclosed ghost-writing by Monsanto employees, cherry-picked data from the company's unpublished vaults, ignored red flags from independent carcinogenicity studies, and probable direct payments to the listed authors, all hidden behind a facade of academic independence. The sole surviving author, Gary Williams, stonewalled the investigation. Kroes and Munro, both deceased, can't defend it. The paper's integrity, the journal concludes, has "collapsed entirely."

This isn't a minor correction for a footnote error. It's the demolition of a pillar propping up an entire era of regulatory capture, a damning verdict on how corporate cash can hijack science, launder bias into "consensus," and poison policy for generations. And the human cost? Incalculable.

The Anatomy of the Deception: How Monsanto Built Its House of Cards

Let's dissect the rot, point by damning point, as laid bare in the retraction notice and the litigation trove known as the "Monsanto Papers."

First, the data was rotten at the root. The review's sweeping "no cancer risk" edict leaned almost exclusively on Monsanto's own unpublished studies, proprietary black-box experiments shielded from peer scrutiny. Worse, it brazenly sidelined a slew of long-term rodent studies available by 1999, many showing tumour signals in mice and rats after chronic exposure. These weren't fringe outliers; they were rigorous, multi-year toxicity tests from independent labs. Williams et al. didn't just omit them, they airbrushed them out of existence to craft an illusion of scientific harmony. As one Monsanto insider later admitted in emails, the goal was to produce a "reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety" that regulators couldn't ignore.

Then came the ghost-writing scandal, the smoking gun that lit the fuse. Court-released emails from 2015 onward revealed Monsanto toxicologists like William Heydens drafting entire sections, with the named authors serving as paid figureheads to "edit & sign their names." Heydens explicitly referenced the Williams paper as a blueprint for this sleight-of-hand: "Recall that is how we handled Williams Kroes and Munro 2000." No Monsanto names on the byline, no acknowledgments of their "significant contributions" — just a veneer of neutrality that let the company tout it as impartial gold-standard science. Bayer (Monsanto's current owner) now claims it was "appropriately cited" in vague thanks to "Monsanto scientists," but that's lipstick on a pig. The journal called it what it was: a "serious ethical concern" that shredded the paper's credibility.

Financial shadows loomed large too. The authors, Williams from New York Medical College, Kroes from Utrecht University, Munro from Cantox Health Sciences (a firm with deep industry ties), likely pocketed Monsanto cheques for their "independent" work, undisclosed as required by journal ethics. Munro, a former Health Canada official, even sat on WHO panels while consulting for agrochemical giants. This wasn't oversight; it was orchestration, creating the mirage of unbiased expertise while corporate hands pulled every string.

The endgame? Regulatory alchemy. This tainted tome didn't just gather dust, it shaped the world. EPA risk assessments, EU approvals, international joint evaluations, all leaned on its "weight of evidence" to greenlight glyphosate's endless expansion. For two decades, it drowned out dissent, labelling cancer links as "junk science" and arming lobbyists against lawsuits. Billions of pounds sprayed. Trillions of dollars in sales. And a global food chain laced with residues that independent science now ties to lymphomas, kidney tumours, and more.

The Mounting Human Toll: What the "All Clear" Cost Us

The retraction isn't happening in a vacuum; it's the coup de grâce to a narrative Monsanto fought tooth and nail to sustain. While the ghost paper peddled safety, real-world data screamed otherwise. The 2015 IARC classification of glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" (Group 2A) was based on the very public studies Williams et al. buried. Fast-forward to 2019: Lianne Zhang's meta-analysis pooled data from 65,000+ participants across six cohort studies, unearthing a 41% spike in non-Hodgkin lymphoma risk for those with high exposure, over 7,000 cases strong. That's not correlation; that's causation staring regulators in the face.

Recent animal work only sharpens the blade. Controlled studies now show glyphosate and Roundup formulations triggering aggressive, multi-organ cancers, even at "safe" doses below U.S. and EU limits. Rare tumours in kidneys, testes, and lymph nodes, fatal and fast. These aren't lab anomalies; they mirror patterns in farmworkers and homeowners who've spent lifetimes under the spray. Juries have already awarded billions in U.S. verdicts, with plaintiffs dying of the very lymphomas the paper swore wouldn't happen.

Monsanto's playbook, ghostwrite, suppress, litigate, didn't just delay truth; it enabled mass exposure. Millions of pounds approved on falsified foundations. Communities doused while executives cashed cheques. And Bayer? Their post-retraction shrug — "thousands of other studies," "global consensus"—reeks of the same denialism. The EPA echoes it, claiming no reliance on the paper despite its fingerprints everywhere. But as litigator Brent Wisner put it, this was "the quintessential example" of how companies "undermine the peer-review process through ghost-writing, cherry-picking, and biased interpretations."

Beyond the Paper: An Indictment of Science-for-Hire

We are no fan of retraction witch-hunts or ideological purges — science thrives on robust debate, not cancel mobs. But this? This was warranted, forensic, and overdue. The flaws weren't "politically motivated"; they were structural felonies against truth. It took eight years after the Monsanto Papers surfaced in 2017 trials for the journal to act, prodded by a 2025 analysis from researchers like Anna Kaurov and Naomi Oreskes. Why the delay? Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology isn't just any outlet, it's the house organ of an industry-friendly society with a "damning history" of cosiness with chemical giants. Retracting a sacred cow like this one? That's not housekeeping; that's housecleaning.

The bigger scandal is systemic. This paper's fall exposes how "regulatory science" became a euphemism for captured expertise, unpublished data as shields, ghost pens as proxies, conflicts as footnotes. Glyphosate's saga is tobacco redux, leaded gas reloaded: profit over people, until the bodies pile too high. Health Canada, still approving re-evaluations amid outcry, faces fresh calls to act. Globally, it's a siren: regulators must purge ghost studies from assessments, demand raw data transparency, and prioritise independent replication over industry oracles.

Justice Delayed: Reopening the Case for Accountability

The retraction is justice, but it's late, 25 years late. It won't un-spray the fields or un-disseminate the residues in our cereals and honey. It won't resurrect the farmworkers whose lymphomas bloomed under regulatory blind eyes. But it can ignite reckoning: fresh EPA reviews sans the tainted pillar, lawsuits armed with vindication, and a cultural shift where "Monsanto science" becomes synonymous with fraud.

This isn't anti-progress; it's pro-integrity. Science isn't a corporate press release, it's the slow grind toward truth, even when it topples empires. Monsanto's house of cards is down. The "all clear" was always a lie.

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/glyphosate-safety-study-ghostwritten