One October evening in 2016,

an Arkansas farmer was sitting in his  pickup truck just outside his field,

and he was growing impatient.

Suddenly, another car pulled up  beside him, so the farmer got out.

Seconds later,

he was murdered.

The farmer's name was Mike Wallace.

He wasn't killed over money or land.

He was killed over a herbicide, a  chemical designed to destroy weeds.

This herbicide spread fear through rural  America, turning farmers against each other,

all because it belonged to a certain company.

This company's policies,

they pitted farmer against farmer,

and they could just send henchman to your door.

Even if you just had the  wrong seeds in your field,

they could send you to court and bankrupt you.

In effect, they had a farmland monopoly.

They owned more than 80% of the  seeds planted in the United States.

And to get this monopoly,  they played the legal system-

Colluding with corrupted EPA officials.

twisted scientific evidence.

Now appears to have been caught red-handed.

But the chemicals they were making

destroyed the health of  communities all over the world.

This is a video about Monsanto,

one of the biggest agricultural  companies in the world.

Our investigation is based on  publicly available documents,

recordings and third-party opinions.

All sources are linked in the description.

In 1942, a chemist named Franklin D. Jones

made an unusual enemy:

poison ivy.

See, his children had a very  violent reaction to the plant.

They would get intense rashes and swelling  when they brushed up against the ivy,

so Jones wanted a way to kill it.

He experimented by spraying the ivy with hormones,

chemicals that could regulate the plant's  

functions the same way they  do in humans and animals.

His hope was that one of these  hormones would cause it to die.

Unfortunately, many had no effect and  others only made the ivy grow better.

But then, one day, Jones noticed  that certain samples began to show  

autumn colors, much sooner than they should have.

He watched as the vibrant  hues turned to twisted shapes,

and then within days, these  plants shriveled up and died.

Jones checked the chemical he  sprayed them with, and surprisingly,

it was a growth hormone called 2,4-D.

It's an acid made up of a ring of six carbons and  

hydrogens called a benzene  ring, with an acid tail.

There are also two chlorine atoms in  the two and four positions of the ring,  

which is why it's called 2,4-D.

To keep things tidy, we don't have to  draw all these carbons and hydrogens,  

but keep in mind they're still there.

Jones realized this synthetic  hormone was incredibly potent.

Tiny amounts of it would still  encourage the ivy to grow,

but if he sprayed on a lot  of it, 2,4-D would trigger  

such uncontrollable and unsustainable growth

that the poison ivy would die in the process.

So effectively, he had plant cancer in a bottle.

I was just going to say plant cancer.

Right?

That's immediately where my brain went.

What was even more remarkable was  that it only targeted the ivy.

The grass around it was barely affected,  like it was resistant to 2,4-D.

So over the next two years, Jones performed  over a hundred different experiments

by pouring the herbicide onto  many different plant species.

And what he figured out was  that 2,4-D was really picky.

It killed broad-leaved weeds like  dandelions, chickweed, and poison ivy,

but it virtually ignored crops.

Wheat, corn, and barley were all mostly  

unaffected by 2,4-D because all  of these are species of grass.

To improve this pickiness further, Jones  also tested chemicals similar to 2,4-D.

He found that adding another  chlorine to the benzene ring,

transforming it to 2,4,5-T, left  grasses even more unscathed.

He was onto something huge.

Because up until then, farmers could  get rid of weeds one of two ways.

Either you spray them with  dangerous chemicals like arsenic

or you have to pull the weeds out manually.

Either way, you're at a loss.

But with 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, you could spray your  entire crop field, and only the weeds would die.

Jones had stumbled upon the first  practically viable selective herbicides,

so he was quick to patent them in  1945, just as the war was ending.

After the Allies victory, the patent secrecy  restrictions in most countries were lifted,

and it turned out that there were other  scientists, both in the US but also in the UK,  

who discovered these herbicides independently.

Soon, the world was blessed with  modern miracle weed killers,  

like Weedone and Weed-A-Bomb and Endo-Weed,

all formulations of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T herbicides.

This man is ready to kill weeds, because  he's going to do it the easy way.

These chemicals literally replaced the hoe,  

and everything from farm fields  to railroad tracks and sidewalks.

They're essentially what gave us that beautiful  green American lawn, just grass and nothing else.

Because with these herbicides, dad knew there  was no longer any excuse for a weedy lawn.

By the late 1940s, their herbicide business  had turned into a roughly $10 million industry,

and everyone wanted in, including one of  the biggest chemical companies at the time:

Monsanto.

One of Monsanto's main herbicide  factories was in Nitro, West Virginia,

where they pumped out almost  a ton of 2,4,5-T a day.

By 1949, Monsanto's business was  booming, when all of a sudden...

the plant exploded.

Over a hundred workers rushed out to see a  dark cloud rising 40 meters above the factory.

They watched as a black stinking powder  started raining down on their faces.

Within hours, many of these men fell ill.

First, they got headaches and nausea,  

but then their skin began to erupt  with bumps, pustules, and acne.

The lesions on some of the workers'  faces got so bad that Monsanto's  

on-site doctors had to peel off layers of  their skin in an attempt to remove them.

The doctors later noted that when these men are  in a closed room together, there is a strong odor.

They wrote, "We believe these men are excreting  a foreign chemical through their skins."

But neither the doctors nor anyone else  at Monsanto knew what the chemical was

because both 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D  were marketed as very safe.

See, when the herbicides were first getting  introduced, Jones, the original inventor,

even remarked that he knew people  who would accidentally drink or  

spray the herbicides onto themselves,  and they suffered no ill health effects.

They were fine.

And one of the doctors after him remarked that:

"I've personally taken one half a gram  of pure 2,4-D a day for three weeks.

You judge the results."

It was the '40s, so people were a bit crazy.

But yeah, it seemed pretty safe.

Back at Nitro, Monsanto analyzed all the other  ingredients they were using to make 2,4,5-T,

but they still couldn't find what was causing  their workers' skin to erupt in this way.

This is where their search seemingly stopped.

With no culprit, the conditions at  the plant stayed mostly the same,  

and Monsanto just offered their workers a choice:

either you'll keep on working with 2,4,5-T

or you can take the gate.

For many, this was no choice at all since  there were hardly any other jobs in town.

So, most of the workers stayed  with something inside the factory,  

poisoning them for years to come.

It wasn't until 1957, 8 years after the explosion,

that a German dermatologist, Karl Schulz,  

found himself treating patients with  similar-looking lesions and acne.

He wasn't surprised by the symptoms because  

many of these patients worked in  2,4,5-T factories around Hamburg.

But when Schulz would test these  ingredients from the instruction  

list on rabbit ears he had at the  lab, he would get no reactions.

And this puzzled him.

How do these ingredients do  nothing in his own tests,

but at the same time cause these painful  skin disorders inside 2,4,5-T factories?

Well, to make 2,4,5-T, you  start with tetrachlorobenzene,  

a benzene ring with four  chlorine atoms attached to it.

These chlorine atoms are very electronegative, so  they want to steal electrons from nearby atoms.

Luckily for them, the six  carbons in the benzene ring  

are all sharing their electrons in these  fuzzy donut-shaped clouds around the ring.

That's what this circle in the  diagram is meant to represent.

The chlorine atoms pull on this electron cloud,  bringing it closer to themselves, and as a result,

the carbons in the benzene ring  become slightly positively charged  

and the chlorine's slightly negatively charged.

Now, if you heat up tetrachlorobenzene  with sodium hydroxide,

one of the negative hydroxide ions will want to  

bind to one of the slightly positively  charged carbons in the benzene ring.

And to do that, it forces out the  chlorine atom, taking its place.

This creates trichlorophenol, or TCP, a  key ingredient in making the herbicide.

From here, if you keep the  reaction at 170 degrees Celsius,

you can add a series of chemicals to grow out  this oxygen tail into an acid, giving you 2,4,5-T.

On paper, this is all there is.

If you follow the exact steps here and control  the conditions, then none of these ingredients  

will explain the horrible face eruptions  that the Nitro workers were experiencing.

But Schulz wasn't satisfied with this.

Maybe the conditions aren't perfect.

Maybe there is something in this  process, some secret reaction  

that is contaminating the whole chemical supply.

Ideally, the industrial process  of transforming tetrachlorobenzene  

into 2,4,5-T should happen at 170 degrees Celsius.

But if the temperature gets any  higher, even just a few degrees higher,  

there is suddenly enough energy in the system  for two molecules of TCP to fuse together.

This creates a molecule commonly known as dioxin.

It forms only in trace amounts, so you  might expect to end up with roughly one  

or two molecules of dioxin for every  hundred thousand molecules of 2,4,5-T.

It seemed too small to be a problem.

Nevertheless, Schulz decided to test it.

He took some TCP, this time contaminated with  

trace amounts of dioxin, and  rubbed it into his own skin,

and he got the same acne as  the workers at the Nitro plant.

Once Schulz realized the threat here,  

he immediately contacted all the  big chemical producers in Germany,

and one of these German companies even  sent letters to both Monsanto and Dow,  

the other big herbicide producer in the US,

and they warned them that the acne-causing effects  

are stemming from pollution through  byproducts, referring to dioxin.

They even listed when exactly during the process  

the contamination was happening  and what to do to prevent it.

Yet, Monsanto denied ever getting these letters,  and Dow said they somehow misfiled them.

Regardless, it was obvious to  both companies that something  

in the production of 2,4,5-T  was poisoning their workers.

But Monsanto didn't warn  the public about the danger,

perhaps because the herbicides were  about to make them a whole lot of money.

In 1961, the president of South Vietnam was  at war with the newly founded Viet Cong.

This guerrilla force was set on overthrowing his  rule and uniting Vietnam under a communist regime.

The Viet Cong were masters of the jungle.

They laid deadly traps for their enemies  and ambushed them using underground tunnels.

South Vietnam was losing the war,  so the president faced a choice:  

either accept defeat in the jungle or destroy it.

He reached out to his allies,  the US, and asked them for help.

Soon, they came in flying with  thousands of barrels of herbicide.

This was the start of Operation Ranch Hand.

The US's herbicide of choice was Agent Orange,

a 50/50 split of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T supplied  by the US's biggest chemical manufacturers.

The largest supplier by volume was Monsanto.

Agent Orange ravaged through South  Vietnam destroying 20% of the jungles.

And civilians and soldiers on both sides  got sprayed with it too, mostly by accident.

The government assured them  that it is not toxic to humans,  

animals, or drinking water, but  Monsanto and Dow knew otherwise.

See during Ranch Hand, they secretly  exchanged information on their herbicides.

And in one of the letters,  Dow acknowledged that dioxin,  

which had been contaminating 2,4,5-T for years

was "the most toxic compound  they have ever experienced",

and that even trace amounts of  it caused incapacitating acne.

By 1965, it was obvious that both companies  understood what sort of threat dioxin was,

and yet there are no records  that Monsanto or Dow ever sent  

communication to the US government  warning them about the threat.

In fact, Dow's vice president reportedly said,

"If the government learns about this,  the whole industry will suffer."

As a result, the US sprayed South Vietnam  with 72 million liters of Agent Orange,

within which was just 80 liters of dioxin.

And even though that doesn't seem  like much, the damage was irreparable.

Civilians and soldiers on both sides  suffered from skin diseases and cancer.

Children were born with physical  and mental disabilities.

By some estimates, as many as three million  people suffered from the effects of Agent Orange.

This outraged the public.

In 1967, 5,000 scientists signed a petition to the  president condemning his use of the herbicides.

And Monsanto was under scrutiny too,  

because regulators were catching on  to the dioxin contained in 2,4,5-T.

The herbicide was about to be phased  out, compromising their bottom line.

Monsanto needed a miracle,  and they needed it fast.

Their idea was to replace  2,4,5-T with a safer herbicide.

But after nine years of research,  they weren't getting anywhere.

All of the scientists in  the Agricultural department  

referred to this new initiative as a dead area.

One of the last remaining scientists  on the project was John E. Franz,

and by early 1970, he was about to give it up too.

But before abandoning the project, Franz  decided to do one final set of experiments,

so he thought up 19 possible  assets that could maybe work  

as herbicides and decided to test them out.

He prepped the first herbicide,  but nothing happened.

The plant was completely fine,  and the herbicide had no activity.

Then he decided to test the second  herbicide, and he applied it to a plant.

It was 10 times more powerful than  any herbicide the team had ever seen.

And allegedly, it made the plants super...

It made the plants super nasty.

That was disgusting.

This miracle compound was glyphosate,

a phosphonic acid group on one end and a  carboxyl group on the other with a nitrogen,  

hydrogen, or amino group in between.

To make sure it was commercially feasible,  

Franz and his colleague set up  tests in these outdoor fields.

And as one of the scientists was  getting back to these test sites,  

he saw the results from the plane.

It was clear as day.

All he could do is write Eureka  across the performance report.

It was the best herbicide they'd ever seen.

What made it so great at killing plants?

Well, for plants to survive,  they use a chemical pathway,  

a series of reactions to create three important  amino acids, acids without which they die.

This process is known as the  Shikimate pathway because it  

starts with shikimic acid named  after the Japanese Shikimi flower.

During one of the steps, two acids, S3P and  PEP need to transform into a third compound,

but they can only do that with the  help of an enzyme called EPSPS,

which catalyzes the reaction and  helps the two molecules combine.

However, if glyphosate is  present during this reaction,  

it will begin to mimic PEP because  they have a very similar geometry.

And because of that, glyphosate actually binds  

first to EPSPS blocking it  from acting as a catalyst.

Now, the acids can't transform and the  whole Shikimate pathway is destroyed.

Without it, there are no amino  acids and the plant dies.

Crucially, the Shikimate pathway is unique  to plants and things like bacteria and fungi.

Humans and animals don't have it.

In fact, we have to eat foods that  contain these three amino acids.

But for Monsanto, this was good  news because they could market  

that glyphosate targets an enzyme found  in plants, but not in humans or pets.

After decades of toxic products, Monsanto  finally had one which they were sure was safe.

And research was also showing  that after you spray glyphosate,  

the microorganisms in the soil  break it down into safe byproducts.

It was biodegradable.

Glyphosate was perfect, so they wasted  no time in getting it on the market.

In 1974, Monsanto had a new hit herbicide...

Roundup.

Roundup is better.

It goes through the plant to  kill it, tops and rhizomes.

My roots hurt real bad.

Hank, Hank!

Roundup. No root, no weed, no problem.

Farmers loved it because unlike  2,4-D, glyphosate killed every weed,  

not just broad-leaved ones, but grassy too.

It allowed them to practice  something called no-till farming.

See, usually to get rid of weeds, you'd have to  plow up the entire field before planting anything,

and that would hurt the soil,  and it was also just a lot work.

But with Roundup, what you do is you  spray the whole field, everything dies,

and then you just plant directly into the residue.

It was easier, faster, and cheaper.

And Roundup was safe to use too.

They marketed it as safer than table  salt and safe enough to drink, basically.

Roundup can be used where kids and pets will  play and breaks down into natural materials.

By the late eighties, Monsanto  was selling seven million pounds  

of Roundup and making a billion dollars each year.

And they weren't going to share a  penny of that money with anyone.

See, with other herbicides,  like for example, Alachlor,  

which was moderately popular at the time,

you can tweak the molecule a bit here or there,  and you still get a very potent weed killer,

so if you patented a specific herbicide,  

your competitors could still use  hundreds of its close relatives,

which would still work perfectly well  without violating your patent rights.

But glyphosate was different,

if you were to modify the molecule in any way,  its herbicidal properties were completely gone,

so Monsanto could rest easy  knowing that until the year 2000,  

they would be the only ones able to sell it.

But there was a little problem with glyphosate.

See, unlike 2,4-D, which only killed  broadleaved weeds, Roundup kills everything.

I sprayed some of my own houseplants  here and well, you can see the results.

Chances are if it's green,  Roundup is going to kill it.

And this was a problem because farmers could  only really spray Roundup on their field twice,

either right before planting the  seeds or right after a harvest.

But for Monsanto, this  wasn't as much of a problem.

See, they thought if we could somehow make the  crops like soybean or corn resistant to Roundup,

well then farmers could spray it on  their field during the whole year,  

and it would keep killing the weeds,

but not the Roundup resistant crops.

Crops which Monsanto could sell them.

And as a result, they would  have a complete monopoly  

over both the herbicide and the seed supply.

Monsanto's idea was this,

if glyphosate blocks the EPSPS enzyme in plants  

then they could edit the plant's DNA so  that the cells just create more EPSPS.

If there's enough of the enzyme then  glyphosate can't block all of it,  

and so the plant can still survive.

They tried this out on  petunias, but it didn't work.

The flowers would survive a tiny amount of  Roundup, but a normal dose would still kill them.

Monsanto was kind of stumped, and  they didn't have time to rest,

because while glyphosate and Roundup were under  their patents, a Roundup resistant seed wasn't.

And their competitors knew this.

In 1985, a company called Calgene published  

a paper in nature showing that they made  tobacco slightly resistant to glyphosate.

The paper showed promise, but more importantly,  

it made it clear to Monsanto that  they were running out of time.

Their researchers were desperate calling  this patent race the "Manhattan Project".

And then one of the engineers had a genius idea.

Monsanto had a ton of these factories where  they were converting phosphate into glyphosate,

and they had a lot of sludge  leaching out of these factories,

so if there was anything living  around these factories in this sludge,  

there was a chance it was resistant to glyphosate.

The researchers went to one of these factories,  

scooped it out, and found a  strain of salmonella in there,

which was surprising to them because salmonella  usually relies on the Shikimate pathway,

but here it was thriving in glyphosate.

Monsanto's scientists isolated  the salmonella's genetic sequence,

and found that it had evolved a way to  mutate the shape of its EPSPS enzyme  

so that glyphosate couldn't bind to  it and block the Shikimate pathway.

The scientists took that salmonella  DNA and loaded it onto a gene gun,  

not this one here, but it's  actually surprisingly similar.

See, they placed thousands of these salmonella DNA  

strips onto microscopic gold  particles in the gene gun,

which they then fired into the plant tissue  all over, at 1,400 kilometers per hour.

The gold particles would bombard the plant cells,  and some of them would make it into the nucleus.

Here, the DNA detaches from the gold, and it  integrates itself into the plant's chromosomes.

Now, every time this cell divides,  it copies over the new EPSPS gene.

Monsanto scientists planted seeds with these genes  out in the field and sprayed them with Roundup,

but nothing happened. The soybean was resistant.

Monsanto made sure to act quickly soon  after they found even more potent bacteria,  

and they were able to make  other crop species immune too.

And by 1998, they had patents for glyphosate  resistant canola, corn, and cotton.

They called this lineup of  GMO seeds Roundup Ready.

These Roundup Ready seeds took  over the market in an instant.

Already by 2001, more than 70%  of all soybeans grown in the US  

were Monsanto's with Roundup making  them more than $2.5 billion a year.

It was the best-selling agricultural product ever.

And every farmer could join in on this  Roundup plus Roundup Ready revolution  

just by signing Monsanto's  Technology Use Agreement.

I've got one of these agreements from 2011  here, and I just wanted to read some terms.

The grower or the farmer who accepts and wants to  

use these seeds agrees to not save or clean  any crop produced from the seed for planting.

And the farmer also agrees not to supply the seed  produced from the seed to anyone for planting,

meaning you cannot save the seeds you  bought last year to plant this year,

and you also cannot share or  sell your seeds to anyone else.

Here's another one, the farmer agrees  to identify and allow Monsanto and its  

representatives access to the land  farmed by the grower or the farmer.

And this allows Monsanto to examine  and take samples of the crops,  

crop residue or the seeds located therein.

And here's a final one, the grower  accepts the terms of the following  

notice requirements by signing this agreement,

or by opening a bag of seeds.

So you're agreeing to these terms  even just by opening a bag of seeds.

If you thought that this contract was crazy,  

you should see the stuff that  we sign up to today online.

I have some terms and conditions  here from a social media website.

Here's what it says.

"We may collect biometric identifiers,  

and we may infer your attributes,  such as age range and gender."

So they're able to scan your face  and sell that data to advertisers.

And just in the last couple of  months, companies have been making  

these aggressive pushes to their terms and  conditions to try and get more of your data,

and they can use it to train AI models  or just sell it to data brokers.

And this doesn't just mean annoying  ads and spam emails and phone calls.

Law enforcement can buy your data,  and normal people can buy it too.

Even stuff like your location history.

And all of that is perfectly legal,

but luckily you can take steps to prevent it  with the help of today's sponsor, Incogni.

See, I started using Incogni in June.

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So if you are browsing online  and see a website with your data,  

even though it shouldn't have the data,

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To try it, go to incogni.com/veritasium,  and use the code Veritasium to get 60% off.

You can also use this QR code.

That's incogni.com/veritasium, or you can  also click the link in the description.

I want to thank Incogni for  sponsoring this part of the video,

and now back to farmers and the terms  and conditions they had to sign.

Well, couldn't farmers just decide not  to use Monsanto's seeds and herbicide?

The thing was, you have Roundup Ready  seeds and you spray them with Roundup,  

everything's going to be fine on your end.

But your neighbor doesn't  have Roundup Ready seeds,

so if your herbicide drifts over to your  neighbor's side, it's going to kill his plants.

So neighbors were concerned thinking  their crops were going to be lost,

so they got Roundup Ready as well, and soon  enough, Monsanto controlled the whole market.

And the control didn't end there.

As one seed grower from Ohio remembers it,  

Monsanto's salesman would tell  people they could either sign on,

or they'd all be out of business  within the next two years.

Monsanto was going to dominate  the entire seed industry,

and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

So hundreds of thousands of farmers  signed the deal, and it wasn't a good one.

One evening in late July of 2004,

an Indiana farmer named Dave Runyon was relaxing  at home when two men knocked on his door.

They led me to believe that they  were doing a survey for a magazine.

They wanted to know what kind of crops I planted.

They wanted to know what kind of herbicides I  used, the seed I bought and purchased and used.

Runyon wasn't interested, so  he decided to shut the door,  

when he heard one of the men  say, "I think he's guilty."

Runyon didn't know what they  meant, but a few months later,

he got a letter from Monsanto saying that he had  

seven days to turn over all of his  business records to the company.

He was shocked, because Runyon was one of the few  

farmers that never signed  a contract with Monsanto,

and yet here they were threatening  to sue him for patent infringement.

Apparently, someone had tipped Monsanto off that  Runyon had been replanting their seeds illegally,

and farmers all across the country  were getting the same types of letters.

Honestly, it's kind of hard to overstate  how much Monsanto tried to control farmers.

They sent private detectives and ex-cops  to inspect farms all over the US,

waving their terms and conditions of the contract  

into farmers' faces to let  them onto their property.

They hired plane and helicopter pilots to survey  

the farmlands from above  for signs of infringement.

The lawsuits, the threats.

How could people possibly stand up to them?

And they even had a company hotline,  

1-800-ROUNDUP, that farmers could  call to snitch on their neighbors.

It still exists.

1-800-ROUNDUP.

You're calling them now?

I think I got it right.

If you have information about the misuse of  seed or a compliance issue, please press three.

That phone number was in existence in the  same time that we're talking about there,  

where people could rat out their neighbor.

As Runyon himself puts it, "There is  much mistrust in the countryside today.

You never know who might report on you.

You could actually willfully plant unauthorized  

seed in somebody's land if  you want to destroy them."

Now, in 2010, Monsanto responded  to farmers' concerns about these  

investigations and released a commitment  statement regarding their patents.

They mentioned their pledge to  transparency and ethical behavior,

properly introducing themselves  with displayed identification,

and not exercising their patent rights when only  

trace amounts of their seed is  present in a farmer's field.

While Monsanto ultimately ended  up letting Runyon go, by 2013,  

they sued over 400 farmers,  raking in over $20 million.

Many of these farmers went bankrupt,  

and countless others settled with Monsanto  out of court even if they were innocent,

because they just couldn't risk the legal fees.

You know, they were actually  influencing radio stations at one point,

and the radio stations would  publicly say the name of the  

people who were saving Roundup seeds on air.

That sounds like a supervillain plot, really.

Yeah, well people actually started  calling them Mon-satan, so...

This culture of fear and paranoia  turned neighbors against each other,  

especially in communities where some farmers  didn't wish to use Monsanto's herbicide system.

One of those farmers was Mike Wallace.

See, Mike had a field of soybean here that  wasn't resistant to Monsanto's herbicide,

but his neighbor who was also growing  soybean did use Monsanto's system.

Now, to be clear, this herbicide  wasn't glyphosate itself, it was  

Monsanto's other herbicide product called Dicamba,

but it was still packaged in this  Roundup and Roundup Ready system.

Now, one day Mike noticed that some of  his soybean was dying, and he suspected  

it was the herbicide from the neighboring  farm drifting over, killing his soybean,

and he could tell this was the  case because the weeds underneath  

the neighbor's soybean were dying,  allegedly because of the herbicide.

And he believed this caused him around  a hundred thousand dollars in damages,  

but the neighbor denied that it was his fault.

Now, the tensions between the two farms grew,  

so Mike wanted to chat with one of the workers  from the farm to discuss the situation.

They met on a country field road near both  farms, and what happened next isn't really clear.

Things got sour quickly.

Allegedly, Mike grabbed the worker's arm, so  the worker pulled back and pulled out his gun,

"shooting Wallace until the gun was empty".

Similar kinds of tragedies were  happening all over the world.

Monsanto infiltrated farming communities in India,  Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and even Vietnam.

By the 2010s, they were an  almost untouchable monopoly.

Then out of the blue on March 20th  2015, an independent science panel  

called the International Agency  for Research on Cancer, or IARC,

came out with this,

a paper saying, "Glyphosate is  probably carcinogenic to humans."

The most popular weed killer  in the world may cause cancer.

IARC's classification of glyphosate  as a probable carcinogen.

damage to chromosomes and DNA in human cells.

This came as a shock to  everyone, especially Monsanto.

They don't know how IARC could  reach a conclusion such as this one.

See, other big health organizations, like the  US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA,

and even the World Health Organization, which  is actually the parent organization to IARC,

both claimed that glyphosate posed no  carcinogenic risk to humans and animals.

I think the IARC designation took  the public by such huge surprise,

because Monsanto had really done  such a good job for 40-plus years  

convincing the world that this  stuff was safer than table salt.

Monsanto was furious about this  ruling, so on the same day,  

they sent a scathing letter to  the World Health Organization

complaining how this classification  needs to be rectified immediately.

They claimed IARC chose to  disregard dozens of studies,

and that conclusions on  glyphosate must be non-biased,  

thorough, and based on quality science.

Soon after, five review papers came out bashing  

the IARC classification and  criticizing their decision.

So why would IARC disagree  with all the other agencies,  

and why would they ignore so many studies?

Well, this is exactly the question California  lawyer Brent Wisner wanted to answer.

Wisner had been looking into  Monsanto for a while now.

Allegedly, Roundup was causing  a decline in the bee population,  

so he thought he could make a case out of it.

But one day, one of Wisner's colleagues  told him that her cousin-in-law had been  

using Roundup on his farm for  as long as she could remember,

and then both he and his dog developed  non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, or NHL,  

a type of cancer targeting the lymphatic system,

and he died in late 2015.

He didn't stop using it until  he was too weak to do anything.

He didn't think there was any danger with Roundup.

See, the IARC paper that came out saying  glyphosate is a probable carcinogen  

actually pointed out that the strongest  evidence was for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

And reports of Roundup users getting diagnosed  with NHL were popping up more frequently.

This seemed like more than just a coincidence.

Wisner thought he had a case, but Monsanto was  a corporate giant he couldn't tackle alone,

so he teamed up with other lawyers,  

and also an investigative journalist who'd  been reporting on Monsanto for decades.

So there's a lot to write about.

I spent a lot of time at Monsanto headquarters.

It became pretty clear, "This company  really doesn't care about its customers."

Right, okay.

Together, this group of lawyers  started a lawsuit against Monsanto,  

and they forced them to hand  over their company documents.

Monsanto had to comply, and  so the lawyers got access to  

their internal emails, memos, and safety studies.

Saying one thing publicly and saying  something completely different internally.

The duplicity, the deception,  is just jaw-dropping, really.

In 1983, Monsanto submitted a glyphosate  

toxicology study to the EPA  to get it classified as safe,

but the data was showing that mice receiving  

higher doses of glyphosate were  developing rare kidney tumors.

The EPA was obviously worried with this,  

and they wanted to classify glyphosate  as a possible human carcinogen.

So they asked Monsanto to do more studies.

And Monsanto fought back against that.

"No, you just need to trust  what we're telling you.

You're reading the data  wrong," et cetera et cetera.

Monsanto wouldn't comply, and they  pushed back against the EPA until 1989,  

when the EPA suddenly changed its mind.

They said, "A repeat of the mouse oncogenicity  will not be required at this time."

And instead, in 1991, the EPA classified  

glyphosate as having evidence of  non-carcinogenicity for humans.

The cancer concern in mice was never made public,  

and this new classification  certainly helped push Roundup sales,

at least until more independent research came in.

See, one of the most influential research papers  on Roundup actually came out in the year 2000.

It was the Safety Evaluation and Risk  Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup  

and its Active Ingredient Glyphosate for Humans,

commonly just called Williams,  Kroes, and Munro after its authors.

This was the landmark paper on glyphosate safety,  

which concluded that Roundup herbicide  does not pose a health risk to humans.

This paper was cited over  1200 times, which is a lot.

And it was considered then by regulators  of the foundational research paper to say  

that glyphosate was safe, this independent paper.

Except the paper wasn't independent at all.

See, Monsanto's director of the  toxicology group, William Heydens,

was listed on the paper as someone  who provided scientific support.

So in a 2017 deposition, Wisner and his fellow  lawyers decided to ask Heydens about it.

Were your contributions in your view  to the Williams paper substantial?

No, they were not.

As I said, they were editorial,  just to make it easier to read.

But here's how Heydens referred to his  involvement in the paper internally.

"I have sprouted several new gray hairs  during the writing of this thing,"

or "I'll strangle Kroes or Williams  if they ask for any rewrites!!"

And much later, "We would be keeping  the cost down by us doing the writing  

and they would just edit and  sign their names, so to speak.

Recall that is how we handled  Williams Kroes and Munro."

And they celebrated when it was finally done.

You see in their internal documents,  

they talk about how this is going to be  our defense, glyphosate around the world.

The patterns of Monsanto's manipulation  were just popping up everywhere.

They tried to change glyphosate cancer  classifications at different agencies.

They seemingly colluded with corrupt EPA  officials to try and kill opposing research.

And they ghost-wrote safety studies.

By mid 2017, Wisner released all of  these internal documents to the public,  

now known as the Monsanto Papers.

People were furious.

Newly released docs show Monsanto executives  colluding with corrupted EPA officials.

Would try to influence media and science reports.

Monsanto appears to have been caught red-handed.

We have a paper trail that goes back to the 1980s.

Stakes for Monsanto are extremely high.

Soon, lawyers were overwhelmed  with calls from cancer patients  

who used Roundup and got diagnosed with NHL.

They wished to be included in the lawsuit.

By the end of the year, more than  3000 victims had signed onto the case.

But Monsanto tried to do everything  to dismantle these carcinogen claims.

You remember the five independent papers that  

came out bashing the IARC decision to  call glyphosate a probable carcinogen?

Well, the main review article  there was ghostwritten by Monsanto.

So you could see this paper getting edited  and changed by people who worked for Monsanto.

And it has been frustrating  to see journals basically  

at every step of the way declining to retract.

That paper is still online today,  and Monsanto went all the way to  

discredit anyone who is opposing their view

with something called their  'Let Nothing Go' Strategy.

Let Nothing Go is essentially  like, let nothing go.

Somebody tweets online, Roundup  causes cancer, you don't let that go.

You have an onslaught of  people responding to that.

They had whole training operations where  they would bring in nutritionists and  

academics and other people to train  them what to say and how to say it.

I do not believe that glyphosate in  Argentina is causing increases in cancer.

You can drink a whole quart  of it and it won't hurt you.

You want to drink some?

We have some here.

I'd be happy to actually.

But not really.

Not really?

I know it wouldn't hurt me.

I mean, if you say so, I have some glyphosate.

No, no, I'm not stupid.

But they very much became  an army that Monsanto could  

deploy when a news article came out, for instance.

Are we going to get some comments under this  video that are actually written by Monsanto?

I wouldn't be surprised.

But all of the confusion Monsanto tried  to create around glyphosate wasn't enough.

By the summer of 2018, the truth was out and over  11,000 plaintiffs filed lawsuits against Monsanto.

This was going to destroy them.

But unfortunately, Monsanto had an escape plan.

Just as the first lawsuit  against them was starting,

they signed an acquisition deal  with German chemical giant, Bayer.

Monsanto cashed in, the executives rode off into  the sunset, and Bayer was left holding the bag.

Why would Bayer buy Monsanto?

If it's so obvious that they have hundreds of  thousands of plaintiffs waiting for a verdict,

why would a company do something like that?

Well, I think that's the big question that  the investors are asking, or have asked.

Why in God's name did you do this?

Why did you do this?

I think it was Wall Street  Journal that had a headline,  

Worst Acquisition in History,  or something like that.

Bayer stock tanked immediately after the  acquisition, and things only got worse for them.

A few months later, the first case against  the Monsanto-Bayer company went to trial.

The plaintiff was Dewayne Lee Johnson,

who had developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after  accidentally getting doused with Roundup at work.

The jury faced with evidence from the  Monsanto Papers sided with Johnson,

awarding him $289 million in  damages, and Bayer had to pay up.

By 2025, Bayer had to settle  more than a hundred thousand  

cancer lawsuits for the damages  caused by Monsanto's Roundup,

amounting to over $10 billion in settlements.

Monsanto, which is now owned by  Germany's Bayer, denies any wrongdoing.

And they don't accept that Roundup could  have caused the plaintiffs' cancer.

So after all this publicity and scandal,  how dangerous is Roundup really?

My question has always been,

if it doesn't cause cancer and it's not dangerous  and there's no real risk to human health,

why in God's name would Monsanto have to spend  

millions and millions and millions of  dollars to create ghostwritten studies,

and hire PR companies to  ghostwrite articles online?

And why would you have to engage in so much  deception if you truly had a safe product, right?

Well, according to IARC, one of the biggest  concerns with glyphosate is genotoxicity.

Some studies have shown that if  you get overexposed to glyphosate,  

like many farmers would,

then the chemical might substantially  damage the DNA in your cells,  

which is a common mechanism of  action for many carcinogens.

And other studies have actually  pointed to the shikimate pathway.

Again, we don't use it, but  the bacteria in our gut do.

So if you ingest trace amounts of glyphosate,  

for example, through your food, it  could disrupt your gut's microbiome.

If you can disrupt the enzyme  in the microflora in your gut,  

the EPSP enzyme, the synthase, it  could have all sorts of effects.

Now, IARC never specified at what dose  glyphosate actually becomes dangerous.

Just that overall glyphosate  is a probable carcinogen.

And to put it into context, the other things  in the same classification category are  

eating red meat or high temperature  frying or pulling a night shift.

But these are lower than the number one  category, which is a certain carcinogen.

And here of course you have  alcohol and tobacco and sunlight.

And to give you context from our  previous episode on Forever Chemicals,

PFOA was a category one, so a certain carcinogen,

but PFOS is actually a category 2B, which is lower  than glyphosate at only a possible carcinogen.

From the data I've seen, glyphosate doesn't  seem to be a particularly potent carcinogen,

but high exposure to glyphosate  is certainly associated with a  

modest increase in your ability  to get certain types of cancers.

And people who have higher exposures  are clearly at higher risk.

Yeah.

However, the EPA and many other organizations  like the European Food Safety Authority still  

disagree with the IARC and claim that  glyphosate isn't a likely carcinogen.

But the courts in the United  States have repeatedly told  

the EPA that they're not doing a proper analysis,

they're not doing a proper assessment of  glyphosate, they're not following their own rules.

You said something like 50% of the  papers that were about glyphosate  

safety and research and toxicity  were probably industry funded.

Yeah, that's just a guess off the top of my head.

Honestly, it could be much higher than 50%.

I certainly do not think it's lower than that.

There's just always a desire by these  companies to control the science.

Today, Bayer still denies that  glyphosate is a carcinogen.

They would still tell you, they don't  think there's anything wrong with it.

Yeah.

When my book came out, Bayer reached  out to me, they sent me an email.

And it was really kind of quite strange.

It was like, "Congratulations.

We've read your book and we've learned  a lot." I think Bayer feels different.

And Bayer actually removed  glyphosate from commercial products.

So this bottle of Roundup here doesn't  even have glyphosate in it anymore.

Part of the reason for that must be  the public backlash and the lawsuits,  

but the other reason is that it  doesn't work that well anymore.

We overused glyphosate.

See, since the 1970s, more than 60 species  of weed have become resistant to glyphosate,  

just like that first salmonella  sample found near the factory.

What do they put in those Roundup  sprays, if not glyphosate?

Well, mostly full circle, so it's 2,4-D.

Isn't that crazy?

Well, you know, many people will probably go  

through life not being affected  in the slightest by glyphosate.

But others may develop cancer or other disease,

and that's why it's really important to  protect the most sensitive individuals.

I think another part of the problem here is how  

a company as big as Monsanto  can just infiltrate academia.

They have these big resources so they can just  push around scientists and manipulate results.

They create so much confusion, and  then they just avoid the punishment.

When you don't create firewalls between  the regulated and the regulators,

you have created distrust in science.

Inherently, science is  always going to be political.

It's never going to be disconnected  from the realities of the world,  

it's always socially constructed.

But we can do a lot of things to put  rules and regulations in place to try  

and make sure that there's a better sense of  independence and disconnection between this.

I want to shout out two books, Carey Gillam's 'The  Monsanto Papers' and Bart Elmore's 'Seed Money'.

They were both incredibly valuable  in researching this topic.

And I also want to shout out people  in the comments of our previous video  

on PFAS suggesting that we should cover Monsanto.

Thank you for suggesting that idea.

And thank you as always for watching.