"A newly revealed government memo identifies yet another compromised paper used to justify Roundup’s safety."
"The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.
The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week.
The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors."
Nate Halverson reports for Mother Jones June 23, 2026.
