The US E.P.A. Can No Longer Hide Behind Ghost Written Bogus Study on Glyphosate
The long‑standing regulatory confidence in glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, once rested heavily on a single review published in 2000 by Williams, Kroes, and Munro. For decades the paper was treated as an independent, authoritative synthesis of toxicology, repeatedly cited by the Environmental Protection Agency and international regulators as a foundation for the assertion that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic.”
That façade collapsed in 2025, when the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology formally retracted the article after new disclosures revealed that Monsanto employees substantially ghostwrote the manuscript, directed its conclusions, and concealed their financial involvement. The retraction, coming a full twenty-five years after publication, arrived in the midst of a wave of scientific, legal, and policy developments that together render the EPA’s continued reliance on the review indefensible.
The Williams et al. paper was central to EPA’s internal cancer classification documents, including the 2016 Glyphosate Issue Paper, which cited it as a key summary of toxicology studies in support of its “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” designation (EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0073). The paper was also repeatedly referenced in the 2017 Draft Human Health Risk Assessment and the 2020 Interim Registration Review Decision. EPA staff used the Williams paper to bolster claims that glyphosate had no oncogenic potential in rodents and minimal risk to humans, often citing its summary tables of Monsanto-conducted studies.