Glyphosate or Monsanto's Roundup - A scientific and unbiased point of view

Keeping an open mind is paramount to any research. Personal biases are a researcher's worst nightmares. The scientific model is based on always questioning existing knowledge when new information about the subject comes out. The peer review is also a good guarantee of a scientific paper's acceptance. I am a computer programmer with a passion for science and I will dissect this subject for and with you, explore the basic beliefs and misconceptions about glyphosate. Since I didn't see enough information on Steemit on this subject and I have done a lot of reading on this subject over the last few years, I will summarize what I learned until now.

History

Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) or [(phosphonomethyl)amino]acetic acid is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide and crop desiccant. Being a phosponate, it is used to kill weeds, mostly broadleafs and other crop-competing grasses. The discovery was made by John E. Franz in 1970 and he was a Monsanto chemist. It was marketed in 1974, as Roundup and the patent expired in 2000. This means that anyone can market a product based on glyphosate and has access to the original studies. The generic glyphosate is produced by a large number of producers, with the larger players being Syngenta, DuPont, Aventis, Dow, and BASF .

How does it work?

Being a non selective, post emergence herbicide it is used to spray the crops. It is soluble in water and absorbed through the leaves and inhibits amino acid metabolism in the Shikimate pathway. The Shikimate pathway or shikimic acid pathway is a metabolic route only found in plants and not animals.

According to Wikipedia:

The shikimate pathway (shikimic acid pathway) is a seven step metabolic route used by bacteria, fungi, algae, some protozoan parasites and plants for the biosynthesis of folates and aromatic amino acids (phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan). This pathway is not found in animals, which require these amino acids, hence the products of this pathway represent essential amino acids that must be obtained from bacteria or plants (or animals which eat bacteria or plants) in the animal's diet.

Because the plant tissue is being deteriorated, the weed wilts and dies after a few days from the treatment.

Since it attacks the shikimic acid pathway and all plants have this characteristic, this means that the original crop is also being damaged. To prevent this, genetically modified versions of the crops are produced that are resistant to the desiccant. To assist the penetration of the herbicide in the plant's cell, most of the desiccants use additional surfactants to the mix. Some companies add more and some try to reduce the concentration of the surfactants. This is a per recipe concentration and might affect the results of the studies in different ways, as some of these surfactants are not analyzed individually.

Glyphosate in the European Union

Currently, in the EU, no GM herbicide resistant crops have been authorized for production, pending additional research. The ones waiting for approval are 10 GM varieties of maize, the others being for cotton, sugar beet and soybeans.

Good Monsanto - Bad Monsanto?

The bad Monsanto fame came from another Monsanto company, which was founded in 1901, namely Monsanto Chemical. It got bad reputation from being one of the companies that produced the famous Agent Orange ( a fast vegetation remover that was used in the Vietman jungles in order to prevent the Vietnamese from overrunning the American fighting positions). The main ingredient was Dioxin, which is classified as a poison now. It also sold DDT, a dairy cow growth hormone and Aspartame. The development of that company was badly affected by the bad press and the Monsanto Chemical was closed in the 80s and the company invested in bio genetics research to prevent further controversies regarding its products. Somehow it seems that they failed at doing that.

Source

But it didn't occur until Monsanto came to Europe in 1994, in the middle of the Mad Cow disease epidemic. Europeans had to educate themselves rapidly on the subject and were suspicious of genetically modified organisms. Monsanto was so sure that the people would realize their own misinformation that they ran a $1.6 million campaign saying: "Food biotechnology is a matter of opinions. Monsanto believes you should hear all of them." In the same ad there were the phone numbers of many NGO's, including Greenpeace.
This backfired on Monsanto, as the public believed the ad was insincere.

Another crucial moment in Monsanto's public image degradation was after acquiring Delta Pine and Land Company. They had patented a seed that could only propagate once. It was named "The Terminator" by the environmentalists since it couldn't be replanted or saved and could only be bought year after year.
Monsanto tried to use the business model of "dot com" by viewing its seeds as proprietary technology and wanted farmers to buy seeds as yearly subscriptions. By also setting up a hotline in which other farmers could tip off Monsanto to patent infringements, they paved they way to a massive public relations problem.

Over time this problem got bigger and bigger, with the Internet contributing to the fast spread and resistance increase, memes and disinformation websites caught on, monetizing people's fears for their own benefit.

Glyphosate in the US. What do farmers say

They are the ones buying it after all and using it to make a living. After its sale in 1970's, its use has gone close to a 10000% growth. Farmers also use higher dosage than before because of the emergence of the desiccant and Glyphosate resistant weeds. Many farmers view the Glyphosate based solution as a way to reduce the known problems associated to other herbicides: wind drift and other crop damage, reduced efficacy and documented health risks.

Environmental considerations

Before Glyphosate the farmers used another prevalent solution against weeds, called Atrazine, a highly toxic herbicide that would cause residues to build in the soil and affect its future cultivability.

Compared to Atrazine, Glyphosate does not make tillage mandatory or needed after a season or some seasons. Tillage is the biggest cause of topsoil erosion and was linked to reduced yield and field "exhaustion".

That being said, other reports say that glyphosate can bind to clays making it unbind at a later time when water is prevalent in the soil, contaminating the future crop yield if a non GM crop is subsequently used. (4) - See bottom of the article.

Source

Furthermore, the presence of glyphosate in the soil might damage the delicate balance of the bacteria and fungi that might lead to other unsurfaced plant diseases. (4) - See bottom of the article.

The earthworm population might also be affected as some Argentinean researcher found, causing DNA damage, and in some cases the earthworms were found to avoid the soils being treated. Their growth seemed to also have been reduce and the cocoon-hatching was delayed. (5)(6) - See bottom of the article.

Concerns over human health.

There are a lot of theories about how Glyphosate works and a lot of bad information out there, teeming with half-truths and misconceptions. I was even bombarded with requests from so called environmental agencies to vote on the ban of the product and Monsanto in particular. For the sake of science I will try to focus on the evidence found by big and relevant cohort studies or individual ones, but done according to the scientific method and formally published.

One of the bigger recent studies, published on 9 Nov. 2017 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute(part of the University of Oxford), found that there was no association between glyphosate "and any solid tumors or lymphoid malignancies overall, including non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and its subtypes" but they uncovered that there is a "not statistically significant evidence of increased risk of acute myeloid leukemia among the highest exposed group".

Source

This study took a closer look at 54251 farmers, of which 44932 (82.8%) used glyphosate. The cancer cases among those farmers were 5779 (79.3%). For the more passionate of you I paste, the study statistical findings, I hope Cheetah won't mind :

However, among applicators in the highest exposure quartile, there was an increased risk of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) compared with never users (RR = 2.44, 95% CI = 0.94 to 6.32, Ptrend = .11), though this association was not statistically significant. Results for AML were similar with a five-year (RRQuartile 4 = 2.32, 95% CI = 0.98 to 5.51, Ptrend = .07) and 20-year exposure lag (RRTertile 3 = 2.04, 95% CI = 1.05 to 3.97, Ptrend = .04).

What I did find interesting is that this study which everyone seems to point to is not about ingesting the product in very small amounts, it only considers exposure to extreme doses of it on the skin.

A big study done in 2001, by the Agricultural Health Study found no associations with glyphosate use and cancer.

Another study done in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans ", based on mechanistic evidence and positive associations for non Hodgkin Lymphoma in epidemiologic studies. But the next year, it turned the report around, after following up with another news report , saying that the pesticide is "unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure throught the diet":

However, it is notable that the only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level. Glyphosate has been extensively tested for genotoxic effects using a variety of tests in a wide range of organisms. The overall weight of evidence indicates that administration of glyphosate and its formulation products at doses as high as 2000 mg/kg body weight by the oral route, the route most relevant to human dietary exposure, was not associated with genotoxic effects in an overwhelming majority of studies conducted in mammals, a model considered to be appropriate for assessing genotoxic risks to humans. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures.

A dose of 2 grams per kg body of ingested glyphosate is a lot of glyphosate to ingest, by any standard. Using the median statistics from CDC ,for an adult of 185 lbs or 84 kg, this would mean an ingested dose of 186 grams or 5.92oz. It is unclear if this is the dose that should be at the test time in the body or if it is spread over a period of a few hours or days, maybe an epidemiologist might help me.

My personal thoughts on this

This article made me dig a lot more than I expected to and actually gave me a headache, but I am ready to sum up my conclusions on the matter:

Glyphosate is probably safe in the usual quantities that would be encountered in our daily diets

Glyphosate is a herbicide so, like every other herbicides, it's not ideal to be ingested

If you can afford to buy BIO or herbicide-free or from any other sort of proven source, go for it, the local farmers will appreciate it. It's what I also always do

The European Union is going to postpone the decision until the scientists reach a consensus. There are also political factors here but it's mainly because the EU knows that it is almost impossible to regulate the amount of Glyphosate used by each individual farmer once it's approved for use

There are a lot of bad sources of information out there, most of them have nothing in common with science and they don't understand the processes involved in the food industry or any industry for that matter

There are a lot of websites monetizing our fears of the unknown or our need to feel smarter than the others, by knowing something that's secret or hidden. For any website that I encountered in my research, I had to close many others providing no science study details, or other information source other than a bomb headline and then half-truths or even outright lies

The scientific world is usually confusing and the data being dissected is very detailed and faceted so it is hard to be exposed in a simple way for everyone to understand, although the authorities do this one way or another, their voices are easily silenced by other more vocal voices

Monsanto is only one of the many proponents of Glyphosate, but it receives 99% of all the criticism and boogeyman attribution. Also for a company that is seen as the devils incarnate, they seem to be doing an a horrible job at public relations :)

The world needs villains

A few months ago I read this article that included a quote I want to share with you:

“The whole debate has gotten so very, very polarized,” says Glenn Stone, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who has written extensively about GM. The less analytical and more emotional the conversation becomes, says Stone, the more the anti-GMO movement needs “bad guys” to “appeal to those parts of the brain that get excited and run on fury and outrage.” Monsanto has clearly become that bad guy in what he calls the “rhetorical death struggle” that is the GMO debate.

I hope to be able to gather support from other scientists and even though the hope to finally put this issue to rest is far from being possible, to at least get more exposure to this subject and the wonders of science in general.

Sources:
The text is mine after documenting from a huge number of websites, PDF's and sources, mostly in the last year or so, documentation that I did before I ever knew about Steemit.
Additional sources not referenced inline in the article, which I used to document and pulled some ideas from: 1 2 3 and some more I found referenced in what I said but I couldn't find them without a subscription. I could probably search more and eventually source them online if needed.

4 - Casabé N, Piola L, Fuchs J, Oneto ML, Pamparato L, Basack S, Giménez R, Massaro R, Papa JC & Kesten E. 2007: Ecotoxicological assessment of the effects of glyphosate and chlorpyrifos in an Argentine soya field. Journal of Soils and Sediments, 7: 232-239.

5- Springett AJ & Gray RAJ. 1992. Effect of repeated low doses of biocides on the earthworm

6 - Aporrectodea caliginosa in laboratory culture. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 24: 1739-1744. Yasmin S. and D’Souza D.,2007. “Effect of pesticides on the reproductive output of Eisenia fetida,” Bulletin of EnvironmentalContamination and Toxicology, 79:. 529–532