A review frequently cited by people asserting that an ingredient in the Roundup weed killer is not harmful has been retracted.
The Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, an Elsevier journal, said on Dec. 5 that it retracted the review, safety evaluation, and risk assessment of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, for humans. It cited guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics, or COPE, which include recommending retractions if unethical research practices or undisclosed conflicts of interest are discovered.
"This decision has been made after careful consideration of the COPE guidelines and thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the authorship and content of this article and in light of no response having been provided to address the findings," the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology said in a statement.
Gary Williams was, at the time the review was published in 2000, a pathologist at New York Medical College. Contact information for Williams could not be found, and the college did not return an inquiry.
Robert Kroes and Ian Munro, the other co-authors, are deceased.
Evidence emerged in 2017 from a court case that Monsanto employees worked with the authors of the review to produce it. In an internal February 2015 email, a Monsanto employee wrote that it would be expensive to involve experts from all major areas in a review and that it would be less costly to involve only certain experts and "we ghost-write" certain sections.
"We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak. Recall that is how we handled Williams Kroes & Munro, 2000," the employee wrote.
The journal had not taken action until this week, even as other journals, including Critical Reviews in Toxicology, attached expressions of concern to articles co-written by Williams because they said authors did not fully disclose the involvement of Monsanto employees and contractors in authoring the articles.
In its retraction notice, the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology said, "Litigation in the United States revealed correspondence from Monsanto suggesting that the authors of the article were not solely responsible for writing its content," and that the apparent contributions of Monsanto employees were not listed anywhere, including the acknowledgements section of the review.
It also said that the authors may have received payments from Monsanto, which was also not disclosed.
The Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology had been frequently cited in defending glyphosate, an ingredient in Roundup, including citations on Wikipedia, researchers said in a paper published in September. Since 2017, multiple juries have concluded that Roundup exposure has resulted in non-Hodgkin lymphoma in people. Bayer took over legal cases involving the matter after it purchased Monsanto in 2018, including a case that may be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.
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