The Monsanto Papers by Gilles-Éric Seralini

Author:Gilles-Éric Seralini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510767645
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

“A PAIN IN THE ASS”

In which we discover that I’m not the only object of Monsanto’s kindly attention, or their pain in the ass. Reporters, international agencies, scientific experts, government officials—we’re all in the same boat. Meanwhile the company continues to coddle their suppliers of hidden poisons.

“A pain in the ass.” This is how Carey Gillam, who heads up US Right to Know, is described in the Monsanto Papers. She is a reputable journalist who used to work at Reuters. With her colleague Gary Ruskin, she played a key role in obtaining, sharing, and analyzing Monsanto’s secret documents. Leemon McHenry from Baum Hedlund did the same. Now the company was pulling out all the stops to destroy her reputation.1 Internal communications showed that she got the employees all riled up, and that they spoke about her with profanities. The tough and determined investigator defended herself by publishing more and more stories, like the one about the Welsh scientist James Parry.

Just as in the game of three-card monte, the industry didn’t always win, and at this point companies were frantically talking to one another, trying everything they could and throwing tens of millions of dollars at the problem.2 We were not the only ones celebrating. You may recall James Parry of the University of Wales quoted at the beginning of this book. He is one of the world’s top toxicologists. Monsanto managed to get him under contract, but in 1999 the researcher discovered the mutagenic effects of Roundup, and the company buried his report (MONGLY01314233-270). Any findings under this type of contract were legally the property of the funders. Should the recipient disclose any confidential information without the express permission of their financier, they could say goodbye to their funding and fear legal repercussions.

As they struck out with Parry, who discovered as we did the toxicity of the product, the company sought to align itself with someone with fewer “final intentions” (MONGLY00878595-97), despite the fact that Parry was considered an objective top researcher. William Heydens, the other major “psycho-toxicologist” for Monsanto (aka Bill, whose actual degree was in psychology), decided in the end that it wasn’t worth redoing or prolonging these revealing studies (Monsanto picked and chose the results that suited them, the ones about non-mutagenic glyphosate, while conveniently leaving Roundup out of it on the grounds that it would require too much time and money [sic] MONGLY03734971), nor to do any further studies to challenge Parry’s position. This very same Heydens, however, wrote in 2015 that “the surfactants within the formulations […] play a role in the promotion of tumors” (MONGLY01183933). He knew. So it was the return of the repressed. The old problem of the formulants had resurfaced. A new deployment of energy and money was needed to bury it once again.

In 2010, as Parry’s studies were falling by the wayside, we demonstrated the very same thing: glyphosate-based herbicides with formulants are mutagenic. Our study, however, was done in 2009, and on human cells. Our first attempt at publication failed, much to the delight of the company of shadows.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.