The EPA Relied on an Influential Glyphosate Study Even After Learning Monsanto Was a “Ghost Writer”
Mother Jones illustration; Scott Olson/Getty; Sue Dorfman/ZUMA; Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. 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. 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.
- ▪Mother Jones illustration; Scott Olson/Getty; Sue Dorfman/ZUMA; Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs.
- ▪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.
- ▪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
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| Original publisher | Mother Jones |
| Canonical URL | https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/06/epa-roundup-glyphosate-monsanto-ghostwritten-herbicide-cancer-bayer/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:46:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-23T18:51:26.638Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-23T18:51:26.638Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | htAstN6_st6B |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Mother Jones illustration; Scott Olson/Getty; Sue Dorfman/ZUMA; Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. 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…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mother Jones.
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