(Reuters) — Monsanto employees ghostwrote scientific reports that U.S. regulators relied on to determine that a chemical in Roundup does not cause cancer, farmers and others suing the company claimed in court filings.
The documents, which were made public March 14, are part of a mass litigation in federal court in San Francisco claiming Monsanto failed to warn that exposure to Roundup could cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer.
The company has denied that the product causes cancer.
Plaintiffs claim that Monsanto’s toxicology manager ghostwrote parts of a scientific report in 2013 that was published under the names of several academic scientists and that his boss ghostwrote parts of another in 2000.
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The Environmental Protection Agency used both reports to determine that glyphosate, a chemical in Roundup, was safe, they said.
They cited an email from a Monsanto executive proposing to ghostwrite parts of the 2013 report, saying, “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing,” while researchers “would just edit and sign their names, so to speak.”
In an email, a Monsanto spokesperson denied that company scientists ghostwrote the 2000 report but did not directly address the 2013 report.
She said the ghostwriting allegations were based on “cherry-picking” one email out of 10 million pages of documents.
Another filing focused on Jess Rowland, a former deputy director at the EPA who chaired a committee on cancer risk and who plaintiffs say worked with Monsanto to suppress glyphosate studies.
The filing includes an email from a Monsanto employee recounting how Rowland told him he “should get a medal” if he could “kill” a study of glyphosate at the Department of Health and Human Services.
