The following are important links Jeffrey talks about in the video above:
Transcription: Jeffrey’s Take: How Monsanto/Bayer Corrupts Science to Lie to Shareholders
Hi, my name is Jeffrey Smith. I’m the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology. For 25 years, I’ve been exposing the lies and cover-ups of Monsanto. We all know that they hid liabilities when they were purchased by Bayer, and that has come back to bite Bayer. Bayer is hiding liabilities on their recently disclosed financial statements, and they do so by ignoring science or failing to conduct scientific experiments. For example, in the real world, chemistry and biology operating systems there are interactions; there are synergies, but in Bayer’s world, the isolated ingredient is all they need to focus on. Roundup has a lot of active ingredients. They pretend it’s only glyphosate. Roundup can be 125 times more toxic than glyphosate alone, so, their estimate of the risk and their estimate of the liability is a fraction of what it is in the real world.
(01:10):
They ignore reproductive biology, epigenetics, and inherited traits. Dr. Michael Skinner injected rats–pregnant rats–with glyphosate and found that the great-grandchildren suffered the most: 90% had serious diseases. How does that happen? He showed that, too, in a separate published, peer-reviewed study last year. A change in the sperm passed on from generation-to-generation initiated by the Roundup, caused dramatic health changes and deaths in the great-grandchildren. So, if you think that the price tag for Roundup is great this generation, imagine if it’s causing the same problems in future generations. Bayer is investing in CRISPR and gene-editing technologies, even though it knows from a recent published study that regulatory elements, epigenetic changes, done on mice were inherited for at least 10 more generations and that CRISPR is not predictable and safe. Some of the things that can be passed on are dangerous side effects. Bayer is investing in sprays made from RNA interference components.
(02:31):
That too, is inheritable. And for years, Bayer has been investing in genetically engineered crops, which of course reproduce and can contaminate and have contaminated and have cost Bayer and Monsanto money. In addition to ignoring these points in biology, they ignore modern medical science, which points to two foundational aspects of human health: leaky gut and the human microbiome. Alessio Fasano, a Harvard professor, published an article last year, which said all disease begins in the leaky gut. Did you know that glyphosate can promote leaky gut in humans? Think of the liabilities. If you can track glyphosate as the cause of the leaky gut that could lead to any one of those diseases, that is significant for health, and financially. The microbiome is considered foundational for health. It is considered by some experts that 80% of chronic diseases start by a dysfunction in the ecosystem of our microbiome.
(03:42):
Two studies on glyphosate and Roundup show that the human and animal gut microbiomes are damaged in exactly the ways that could promote disease. Bayer is reeling from just non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma links to glyphosate. Think about all the dozens of diseases that may yet to be linked because of just these two actions of Roundup and glyphosate. When we think about valuing new technologies, for example Joyn Bio, where there was a hundred-million-dollar investment, I think that the liability should be far more than that, because consider the cost of what could go wrong when this joint venture introduces a genetically engineered microbe for soil remediation. We know that microbes can travel around the world. They can enter ecosystems that they were never intended to. They swap genetic material with those ecosystems, and they can disrupt, damage, or even collapse ecosystems. Some of those ecosystems are inside us.
(04:54):
You release a microbe in a field–it may end up in our gut bacteria, causing problems. Think of the liability, especially when there is no way to recall a genetically engineered microbe from the gene pool. It survives as long as the species does. That is an unlimited liability, entirely ignored in Bayer’s spreadsheets. This is the way that they hide the liabilities, by pretending that their science is true, corporate science, not real science–Petri dish isolation and not real world examples. We should not be convinced and tricked by these numbers. And we should act accordingly and demand that they use real science and verify their statements with actual experiments.
Thank you.