Trial by jury is so badly equipped to answer complicated questions like does Roundup/glyphosate cause cancer, and did it specifically cause this cancer.
Juries are equipped to answer whether a person not so different from the jurors is guilty of a crime not so far removed from the jurors' experience. They are not equipped to resolve factual questions about things like this (or patent cases -- another crazy one we see on HN).
Jury == random number generator. Maybe they get it right, but only by chance.
The jury is not answering that question. The jury is just there to evaluate the credibility of the competing experts who have offered opinions on that question. If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions. Luckily, lay people are qualified to make those judgments. Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial. They are far from "random number generators": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628507/
> If this claim is valid, an ideal study would be to compare the judgments of medical doctors to the verdicts rendered by juries. A study by Taragin et al. [31] did just that. The study utilized data from the closed claim files of a medical liability insurer. The insurers had medical doctors closely examine the medical records in cases involving claims of medical negligence to determine if medical negligence had occurred. Tarragin et al. [31] compared these judgments with verdicts rendered by juries if the case went to trial. The jury verdicts tended to be consistent with the medical judgments. Moreover, the study found that verdicts were not related to the severity of the injury suffered by the plaintiff, an indication that juries were not basing their judgment out of mere sympathy for a seriously injured patient. Farber and White [13] also compared jury verdicts to hospital records bearing on negligence. Those authors found that the jury verdicts favored the hospital in all cases that the hospital had rated as not-negligent.
The billion-dollar punitive damages verdict, moreover, is not crazy considering that the point of punitive damages is to deter similar conduct in the future. If you look at what folks here on HN--presumably quite knowledgeable about the subject matter--were saying about how much Facebook should be fined to deter conduct like that which led to the Cambridge Analytica issues, the numbers were likewise in the billions of dollars.
> Luckily, lay people are qualified to make those judgments. Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial.
Having been through a jury trial for patent infringement, I saw nothing of the sort. My company was defending, and the plaintiffs dismissed every juror who had anything more than a high school degree. They were incapable of understanding any nuance in the engineering or math, and so they sided for the home team (the plaintiffs managed to get jurisdiction in their home town).
If you like, call it sour grapes because my company was on the losing side, but I think the majority of jurors are completely unequipped to understand basic science, mathematics, engineering, software, medicine, or technology.
I'm not sure how much the rules vary, but in our case there were 18 candidate jurors and both sides were allowed to dismiss 3 without cause or justification. Additionally, if either side could argue there was a cause, additional jurors could be dismissed (requiring new jurors to be summoned), but that didn't happen. The plaintiffs removed the 3 with any college at all.
That could be a representative sample of the area the trial was held in. Trial by jury of your peers means that some juries will be composed of mostly and sometimes even all "peers" with less formal education that most would think appropriate for the subject matter being discussed.
>The jury is just there to evaluate the credibility of the competing experts who have offered opinions on that question.
It's not clear that they're competent to do this, either.
>If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions.
Not necessarily. It just calls into question whether the system works well in this class of cases.
>Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial.
Have you seen something even remotely comparable to the case being discussed here?
I was part of one growing up, the jurors definitely were not just judging based on emotions or lack of facts. They end up voting on a series of yes/no questions that ultimately narrow down the decision. End of the day the judge is still in charge and if he doesn't like the result it will get tossed. We went through the process twice - winning both times no less.
>Just because they happened to make the right choice doesn't make them competent.
So let me get this right...you don’t think a jury can comprehend and understand the facts being presented to them through experts, yet without hearing any facts or experts you can confirm these juries “made the right choice”?
As I said before there will be educated people in this thread who down play a juries ability to make a accurate finding of fact and yet be all to happy to make their own findings without any knowledge of the facts of a given case or expert testimony, just as you did.
>So let me get this right...you don’t think a jury can comprehend and understand the facts being presented to them through experts, yet without hearing any facts or experts you can confirm these juries “made the right choice”?
Yes. It's possible to make a good decision through a flawed process.
I think we would need to develop a system that restricts the potential jurors to those who are qualified without restricting it so much that they are drawn from a small set of gatekeepers who can easily be corrupted.
Perhaps both lawyers could be allowed to negotiate requirements for the jurors (e.g. they must have a technical background, at least half must have college degrees, etc.). Or perhaps each lawyer negotiates requirements for some of the jurors with the judge.
Another approach would be to make changes to the legal system. For example:
Make it illegal for a lawyer to present evidence that they know to be scientifically or technologically unsound or to present a witness that they know to be unqualified.
Make it perjury for an expert witness to knowingly present scientifically unsound statements or to comment on something that they are unqualified for.
Make unsound science valid grounds for overturning or appealing a case.
Require statements to be backed by data that meets statistical requirements.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure these wouldn't be a perfect solution, but perhaps they would help.
District courts already exercise extensive control over what and how scientific evidence gets presented to a jury. Before trial, experts submit reports detailing their opinion (these can be hundreds of pages with supporting appendices). There is then a period of expert discovery, where the experts are deposed for a day or more each and grilled by the other side’s lawyer. Then there are “Daubert motions,” where each side asks the judge to exclude parts of the other expert’s testimony. Excluding testimony based on unsound and unreliable methods is the key focus of the Daubert motions. This is a process that takes months, and involves hundreds of pages of additional briefing, plus usually oral argument to the judge. And those decisions are then reviewable on appeal. Appellate courts routinely throw out jury verdicts because expert testimony was based on unreliable methods. By the time the case gets to the jury, the expert evidence has been vetted and the jury is presented with a very controlled picture of each side’s argument.
The issue is, experts genuinely don’t agree on much of anything. Is salt bad for your blood pressure? Many medical doctors would say yes, many would say no. There is almost no subject where you can’t find highly qualified experts that have conflicting opinions.
I'm curious why you think it allows for more corruption than the US system. Something I find compelling about the German system is that the primary point is not to decide guilt or innocence of the accused, but to determine the truth. (See https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ilj/vol34/iss2/5/).
> But in the US, plea bargaining essentially is our criminal justice system.
Plea bargaining in the US is, in my opinion, a corrupt practice.
> I'm curious why you think it allows for more corruption than the US system.
I didn't make that claim in the big picture, I was talking specifically about the the role of jurors in terms of evaluating the credibility of expert testimony.
My concern with the idea of "professional jurors" is that they represent an easy target for corruption in the form of coercion, bribery, etc. How can you ensure that a professional juror is actually impartial and fair? If jurors are always coming from the same pool of people, won't they develop relationships with prosecutors and the like that may influence their impartiality?
The only counter suggestion I've ever seen are expert panels that remove decisions from The People and move it up the ladder of control and power, where the elites and bureaucrats can ideally be more easily paid off by companies like Bayer to rule in their favor. The elites love choke points that amplify their control over society, always under the guise that they know best (inevitably resulting in vast, systemic corruption that is nearly impossible to stop).
Panels and government oversight boards are just another easy target for lobbying (in all of its various flavors). As though the US system doesn't have enough of those corruption points in place now. There are an enormous number of jury cases in the US every year however, and bribery is rare.
If you replace traditional juries with expert panels, it's guaranteed that the system will be designed - by those that benefit from all other forms of lobbying - to have holes in it that allow forms of legal lobbying and influence, whether direct or indirect.
I'll take juries of The People in all regards, and without exception, over the extraordinarily dangerous, anti-democratic risks involved in shifting the system toward elitist expert panels. We already have enough of that shit dominating our country as it is. I choose the less perfect system - if that's indeed the choice - that retains power in the people broadly, keeping a critically important piece of the justice system mass-involved - something we're all part of.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your points but who exactly are “the elites”? Elite thinkers? Elite earners? Elite influencers? Elite who, and elite by what criteria?
I disagree with the outcome of this case and leaving scientific decisions in the hands of people who may not have the cogitative skills to make the best assessments is an issue and would like see a solution. That being said, the moral hazards you point out do appear to be a much larger potential issue and I agree the risks of "expert panels" probably aren't worth it. We need some sort of redress to non biased citizens.
Perhaps civil trials with monetary rewards are a different matter than criminal trials though, not sure. Anyway, your point is good.
That is interesting, but the study you cite concerns medical malpractice lawsuits. Determining that a doctor was negligent in such lawsuits no doubt involves difficult issues, but issues perhaps far less complex than those at play in the Roundup lawsuits, where, as the parent comment said, the jury must decide "does glyphosate cause cancer, and did it specifically cause this cancer."
> the Roundup lawsuits, where, as the parent comment said, the jury must decide "does glyphosate cause cancer, and did it specifically cause this cancer."
The system isn't set up to answer or ask the question "did it specifically cause this cancer", because that question is known to be unanswerable.
Isn't it the case that the standard of proof here is 'via a preponderance of the evidence' (it is more likely than not) rather than the criminal trial 'beyond a reasonable doubt'?
- The age-adjusted baseline rate of a particular type of cancer is, say, 1%.
- An age-adjusted 2.5% of people in an afflicted community have been diagnosed with this type of cancer. This is a huge increase above baseline.
- By implication, of people in the community with a diagnosis of this type of cancer, 40% of them would have cancer anyway for reasons unrelated to whatever is being sued over, and 60% of them got it "because" of whatever the problem is.
It isn't possible to make any distinction between those groups at the level of an individual case. There's no difference in the cancer.
McGhee v National Coal Board is probably the most instructive case on the matter. It brought a 'material increase in risk' test to apply to the causation step of analysis. The case has been widely cited and has had international impact.
Your jurisdiction might deal with things differently, but this case has had international adoption, as the framework deals with scientific uncertainty fairly elegantly.
> The system isn't set up to answer or ask the question "did it specifically cause this cancer", because that question is known to be unanswerable.
I'm curious how you draw this conclusion. While many substances may not, with 100% reproduction rates, cause a particular response there can be a majority that happens when excessive or improper exposure happens. If you're saying the question is unanswerable because it's not 100% guaranteed you'll get cancer, but say 67% chance then that's proof it did cause cancer in the subset. In this case it appears there has been suppressed study data which points directly to the outcome which brings into question, for the jury, the morality of the organization selling the product which are likely influencing reference points for a jury.
The problem case is where the experts also can't answer the question the court is concerned about.
Did a certain specific person get cancer due to exposure to a chemical? Typically you can only assert that their risk of cancer increased, which makes the answer essentially unknowable.
Which is not to say that they shouldn't be held liable for this sort of thing, but a bunch of jury trials for individual cases probably isn't a great way to do it.
> The billion-dollar punitive damages verdict, moreover, is not crazy considering that the point of punitive damages is to deter similar conduct in the future. [..] here on HN [..] were saying about how much Facebook should be fined [..] were likewise in the billions of dollars.
Billions of dollars, yes. In cases of government vs company. Or a class action. But I don't think HN or anyone reasonable was ever in favor of billion dollar judgments in matters that ten thousands of also effected claimants trying to get the same.
Is there any requirement for people to be given equal punitive damages?
For compensation damages it makes sense that similar cases get similar amounts, but for punitive it might well be that the first one gets it all, and then the court can consider punishment delivered for the underlying offense.
> The jury is just there to evaluate the credibility of the competing experts who have offered opinions on that question. If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions.
Isn’t that the point being made?
Frankly I don’t see how juries can possibly be expected to weigh two expert opinions espousing statistical whatever’s. I can force a statistical argument either way, and if you don’t have both a background in the area and time to dig through assumptions you’re gonna have a hard time knowing if I’m right.
Punitive damages to deter similar conduct have less effect when the company has just been sold to Bayer. Bayer is not a saint, but it seems it will have to pay for all the evil of mosanto.
>The billion-dollar punitive damages verdict, moreover, is not crazy considering that the point of punitive damages is to deter similar conduct in the future
I think most would be ok with this reasoning behind punitive damages, as long as lawyers representing victims cannot collect more than, say 1.2 mln $USD (or some large multiple of a minimal wage).
Otherwise, the obscene punitive damages are transferred as insurance cost, baked into pharma costs, and covered exclusively by US consumers.
>> If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions.
That it does, but that doesn't in turn mean that lay people are equipped to evaluate such credibility. I can't help but browse social media, watch the news, or interact with people in my town without questioning the general ability to evaluate credibility.
If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institution
Gee. Who would have thought that giving an equal voice to people on both sides of the bell curve would lead to any other outcome than what we're seeing?
(Answer: a lot of smart people thought that. Were they right?)
In the specific context of evaluating whether or not juries do a good job of making decisions in medical-malpractices cases (which is different from this article about glyphosate I think??), I'm confused about your interpretation of these two findings:
> The insurers had medical doctors closely examine the medical records in cases involving claims of medical negligence to determine if medical negligence had occurred. Tarragin et al. [31] compared these judgments with verdicts rendered by juries if the case went to trial. The jury verdicts tended to be consistent with the medical judgments.
> Those authors found that the jury verdicts favored the hospital in all cases that the hospital had rated as not-negligent.
Would those articles' findings also be consistent with the following hypotheses?
(1) Physicians tend to give their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, applying empathy and excusing neglect in borderline cases of negligence.
(2) Hospitals tend to issue findings of negligence which protect their employees, preferring to retain staff with otherwise positive job performance in borderline cases of negligence.
(3) Juries tend to trust the opinions of hospitals and doctors who say that other doctors were not negligent, more than they tend to trust experts who say the opposite.
>Jury == random number generator. Maybe they get it right, but only by chance.
They may be laymen on the subject, but they heard the evidence and expert testimony...that makes them more knowledgeable about the facts than anyone in this thread, and yet you’ll see many educated people here with opinions without any facts (beyond newspaper articles).
And while they may be better equipped to make a finding of fact of a criminal case (did person x do y), but often it’s still just a chance they get it right, plus those criminal cases have a much higher standard than a civil case.
So it’s important to keep in mind what is being asked of the jury here. They aren’t asking if roundup cause cancer, not even asking did roundup cause cancer beyond a reasonable doubt, but simply based on the expert testimony and facts presented is it more likely than not (>50% chance) Roundup caused cancer.
It's almost impossible to determine credibility in a field that you know nothing about. Any sufficiently complicated question can be argued using facts on both sides, and a non-expert will have no idea how much weight each fact should have. For example anyone in software could argue why using the cloud for anything is a horrible idea. And remember that jurors are not allowed to do research at home, and expert witnesses cannot directly debate the topics.
> a non-expert will have no idea how much weight each fact should have
In theory, that is the purpose of the lawyer(s) -- to try to ground the technical expertise in a way that the jury (and often the judge!) can understand and assign value/import/trustworthiness/credibility to the testimony and exhibits they are given.
Juries combine those expert testimonies with documents from discovery to try to piece together the real story. In this case they were likely trying to determine if the company new it was dangerous, if they knew it caused cancer, if they tried to cover it up, etc.
> The jury is in no position to determine which claim is more correct.
Society determines what is correct or wrong. A jury is a random selection of society. Anyone who wants provide a good to a society must follow principles set by the society.
And maybe Society gets things wrong right? We dont torture people to get confessions anymore (in most western countries at least) so surely our standards evolve over time. We are not at the Apex of everything yet.
Not 'wrong', just wrong. There is such a thing as an objective truth (for a given question), and you can be relatively closer to or farther from it than the next guy (or next 8 billion guys).
Facts in a society are what that society deems or 'proven to be as truth'. Most facts are indeed a fact because a large amount of people (in the respective field) agree that it is a 'fact' ('irrefutable truth' as seen by that society or group).
I think this is one reason we have juries. They represent popular justice.
Justice is supposed to serve the people, it is not a rule-based programming language, there is a human element behind it. That's why we have magistrates, who make sure the rules are properly applied, and juries, who make sure the decision matches what the people want.
So in this case, magistrates decided that what Bayer did was punishable and the people, represented by the jury, decided that Bayer are assholes and definitely deserve it. I don't agree but it is, I think, an important component of a democratic justice system.
Of course, Bayer will appeal. So maybe this time, science will prevail. I hope so.
Can't speak to every ingredient in roundup, but basically every US and European health or AG agency say glyphosate does not cause cancer. One of the UN agencies agrees.
Could an additive cause cancer? Maybe, but it's pretty hard to argue that Bayer intentionally used an easily replacible carcinogenic surfectants to be evil.
I guess they’re saying that there’s, on balance, no good evidence to suggest that (especially proper use of) Roundup causes cancer. Because that’s the prevailing expert opinion, backed up by decades of studies.
The scientific opinion is that is insufficient evidence to either exclude or include it as a cancer cause but most studies show some increase. This is the main reason for only extending the permit in the EU for 5 years instead of indefinitely.
It is also grade 2A by the WHO, which basically means it may cause cancer in humans.
> The scientific opinion is that is insufficient evidence to either exclude or include it as a cancer cause but most studies show some increase.
No, this is patently false. Out of all expert consortia, only IARC (= WHO) has reached this conclusion, and it was universally criticised for both the way they report risks (which is highly misleading), and the fact that their publication in turn suppressed contradictory results. All other relevant expert consortia state that the evidence does not support the conclusion of glyphosate and/or Roundup being carcinogenic when used correctly, despite the existence of decades worth of data which should show carcinogenicity, if it had an appreciable effect. “Most studies”, especially high-quality ones, show absolutely no effect.
No direct evidence as far as I know (definitely none for glyphosate, possibly for Roundup) but that’s why Monsanto/Bayer publishes precise usage instructions, and such risk would be based on dosage and wearing of appropriate PPE (= e.g. gloves). In other words: Any risk would be hardly unavoidable.
That's what I expect a person who has never been on a jury would say.
Once upon a time, I sat on a jury. A man whose job was to clean the interior storage holds of massive ships was driving a work vehicle and hit by a truck full of joyriding kids on a highway surrounded by cane fields. The kids didn't see him, he didn't see them.
He filed a claim with his employer's insurance agency. His employer sided with the insurance agency and tried to offer him a pittance for pain, suffering, medical costs, and rehabilitation. The man had a high school education and worked hard for his employer for 3 decades, doing backbreaking work. To do this work, you had to put on a hazmat suit and climb up and down 100+ feet of ladder, lugging your cleaning equipment and cleaning lines with you, then stand around with your hands above your head spraying chemicals for hours to clean one of these vessels.
The injuries he suffered were debilitating. The insurance company set some private investigators out, looking for evidence that he was lying about his impairment. The best they could come up with was that he washed his car. They tried to make it seem like he was faking, but the timestamp evidence showed that it took the man over 2 hours to wash his car and that he had to take multiple breaks because of his pain. Their expert witness testified that he could have done the work of spraying the vessel. What he couldn't have done is make the climb. They had to fuse his vertebrae and put pins in his hip and knee.
His employer testified that they would have promoted him to foreman, but cross examination showed that a foreman was expected to examine the vessel, which was impossible for him because he couldn't safely make the climb, pain or not, and even if he could, he wouldn't have been able to safely board the ship.
He was making good money for someone without an education, $60K or so a year. At 50, he had expected to work for another 15 years. The insurance company decided that his pain, suffering, loss of wages, loss of benefits, and loss of employment was worth $180k. His insurance policy called for full compensation for lost wages.
We ruled in his favor for $1.3M, to be shared by the employer for being lying sacks of crap after 30 years of service, and his insurance company for not honoring their contract. THAT was equitable. Pain, suffering, lost wages, the bullshit he was put through during the legal process, and loss of ability to enjoy physical activity in the future. They all matter.
Tell me again how we were badly equipped to answer complicated questions.
Jury selection filters for people who vote, have long-term residence in a single location, have jobs that at least modestly allow jury service, and who actually show up to jury duty.
To make a sweeping generalization, those things all correlate with intelligence.
Anecdotally, the people I've met at jury selection in downtown Oakland, CA are not a representative sample of who you see outside the building.
Except it clearly didn’t work in this case since the jury reached a conclusion that is fundamentally at odds with the conclusion reached by experts worldwide.
I’m baffled by how this is discussed on here as “well, maybe the jury was right”. We know that the jury wasn’t right.
… and the IARC monograph on Roundup, in turn, has been dismissed universally by experts as both flawed and misleading. Amongst other things, they arbitrarily excluded high-quality studies that showed no evidence of carcinogenicity, and included at least one study claiming to show an effect but in reality failed to do so (it didn’t show dose dependence, which means the result is not statistically robust but rather a random fluke). The scientific consensus is completely on Monsanto’s side in this debate. Pretending otherwise is simply dishonest, there’s no other word for it.
If that is the case then it shouldn't be a problem to ask IARC to make a new monograph. That this doesn't happen tells me that the case isn't as simple here as you say.
What are the chances that 12 randomly selected members of the public are better at understanding biological mechanisms, judging statistical models and weighing evidence than people who have been studying these things for decades?
One group has an interest in making a living by working for multi-billion dollar corporations.
The other group is just the general public, who won't make a single penny from dedicating their lives to understanding the facts as they are presented.
The vast majority of experts in this field are not affiliated with Monsanto and don’t make a dime from it. They are the “general public”, except well informed, and have studied years to understand the relevant (complex) background to make an informed assessment. Non-experts may be dedicated but they simply don’t match years or even decades of rigorous studying on the subject.
This “all experts are in the pockets of big X corporation” is inaccurate and insulting. It’s just getting really tiring.
Yes, of course maybe all the experts are wrong, and the jury of lay people was right. But even if this unlikely case occurred here, do you really want to build legal cases and policy on such a fluke?
You haven't given any evidence to back up your claim. What in particular makes you believe the jury in this case wasn't equipped to answer the questions asked of them?
No doubt it's complicated, but to play devil's advocate, if a company can't demonstrate to a lay person that a chemical isn't dangerous and how to use it safely, then perhaps they shouldn't sell the chemical to the general public, and maybe should even be punished for doing so.
>given any evidence to back up your claim. What in particular makes you believe the jury in this case wasn't equipped to answer the questions asked of them?
Given the staggering consensus on glyphosates safety-- the outcome of the case would make me say that.
I didn't agree or disagree with, I simply asked the OP to explain their reasoning.
And I also disagree that the burden of proof would be on the "other side". The status quo is trial by jury. That will never change if nobody wants to explain why they think it's bad or what would work better.
I believe the burden of proof response was in relation to the statement, "if a company can't demonstrate to a lay person that a chemical isn't dangerous".
That would be asking them to "prove a negative" (really, it's proving a universal claim, not a negative claim, but 'negative' is the popular tagline). This cannot ever be done. All you can do is show that there is no credible evidence that it is dangerous. At the point, the burden of proof lies with the the claim that it is, in fact, dangerous.
> Trial by jury is so badly equipped to answer complicated questions like does Roundup/glyphosate cause cancer, and did it specifically cause this cancer.
If a company is willing to engage in an extended cover-up, the jury can, rightfully, draw the conclusion that the company actually believes there is a problem even if their paid "experts" claim otherwise.
This is civil court, not criminal. The standards are different.
The entire concept of trying to determine fault in specific cancer cases is bogus. Carcinogens change the odds, but you can never definitively point to one as being at fault for a particular cancer.
Civil Juries are asked to make a probabilistic decision, not a definitive decision. The filter end up being whether it is "more likely than not, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty" a cause of the harm.
That's true. Its unfortunate that our regulatory agencies have been so utterly captured by industry that they are essentially worthless when it comes to oversight. Worse yet, the existence of these agencies gives many a false sense of confidence that there is some governmental body out there insuring that we aren't being poisoned by corporations and that our environment isn't being saturated by chemicals, but unfortunately that isn't so.
The jury is meant to be a random selection of members of society, but what alternative do you propose then; a jury of 'experts' in the field? that would seem flawed
Juding the crediibility of each side does not mean you are anywhere closer to the truth. How about commissioning independent studies to answer the question?
You are aware that Monsanto internal emails where made public that showed them colluding with various "independent" agencies? They shot themselves in the foot trying to make the issue go away instead of letting follow up studies clear Roundup of any cancer issues.
Then such studies were not independent per definition if Monsanto had any kind of access to them or who conducted them. If need be, mandate the government to monitor said studies and sue any form of intervention. There are many ways to make it more difficult for companies to put pressure: secrecy, duplication, decentralization, etc...
The studies in those emails where kicked of by government agencies in response to the cancer claims. So that is exactly the scenario Monsanto already has interfered with and is prepared to interfere with again.
> and sue any form of intervention.
So we double down on lawsuits instead of just using one and util those new lawsuits are decided the old one spends decades in limbo? Right now the getting caught trying to manipulate studies was part of the original lawsuit and Monsanto/Bayer certainly did not enjoy the results.
> secrecy, duplication, decentralization
That seems to contradict the whole do "two" studies directly in response of the lawsuit. They are not secret, just two means you can manipulate one without any way to decide the correct study and having the same government agencies from the emails set them up just the kind of centralisation any company with regulators in their poket would love.
Who is a 'lay person'? Since few here are scientists who have done studies on pesticides and roundup everyone on this board is a lay person and thus hardly in a position to make any informed comment on rule of law or this case. Your whole 'lay person' argument discredits all lay people including yourself, given 'experts' have designed the system and it is working as designed, so what is the value of a lay software persons opinion on matters of law and pesticides?
This is throwing a tantrum against rule of law. It shocking many here have no respect for citizens and by extension democracy, have appropriated for themselves a monopoly of wisdom and think science is something only scientists understand. Well that rules out the software engineers as they are not scientists or experts and they should limit comment to software issues or this is clear evidence of the dunning kruger effect in the software ecosystem.
There are serious disagreements among scientists so there is no 'scientific consensus' on a large number of issues. For normal people here when top voted comments show open disdain for citizens and democracy and cannot have empathy for citizens being potentially poisoned and side with billion dollar pharmaceutical companies you are in serious trouble.
If I sit you down for 30 minutes on a drum of dangerous nuclear waste, and within a year, you develop prostate cancer, how would you ever be able to definitively prove that I caused that cancer?
It could have, after all, been a random mutation in your body - caused by a stray cosmic ray.
Cancer is a probabilistic outcome. It is impossible to prove that any one particular thing caused any one particular cancer.
To clarify, you are hinting that there is a strong case to me be made for holding you liable, correct? I had a hard time determining what your takeaway was.
I would agree with that, as society should work to prevent actions that significantly increase the probability of severe harm, even if complete and definitive proof of harm cannot be had in each individual case.
I would be surprised if case law doesn't support that general idea. I'm sure the courts have had to deal with probabilistic situations before.
For an individual no, but with enough data points, which probably exist since roundup exists long enough, you could make a reliable prediction where it came from.
But if there are enough data points and they show roundup doesn't cause cancer above the population baseline, if someone who used roundup gets cancer we should in turn conclude roundup wasn't the cause.
In the process of creating damages that dissuade companies from damaging behavior, we're also creating people with immense power (if they ever collect).
I could see a $2B amount making sense if the couple controlled a multi million dollar company that failed because they fell ill from cancer.
But otherwise, wouldn't it make sense to pay the victims some multiple of their average annual income for life plus health care costs and send the rest to a charity or hospital?
That would still generate a $2B verdict as a deterrent, but would also limit people from obtaining massive wealth without creating value.
Unfortunately, equating a human life to dollars is always insulting. To that individual, their life could be worth an infinite amount and more than all the money in the world.
So, it's always a messy business trying to compensate someone for their health.
> Unfortunately, equating a human life to dollars is always insulting. To that individual, their life could be worth an infinite amount and more than all the money in the world.
True, but that's irrelevant. My life is worth more to me than any comapny could pay, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't expect recompense if the company poisoned me to death. I would want to enjoy my final days in as little suffering as possible and leave something behind for whoever I might care about.
The fact is, that by making them ill you have effectively ended their life. It's manslaughter, perhaps even murder, and you have prevented them from working to support their family.
If you're going to live the remainder of your life in suffering I would bloody well hope the parties responsible start emptying their pockets for you and your family.
I can't believe I'm actually having to defend the concept of compensation from a company that poisoned someone to death. I know HN has a serious case of corporate sycophancy but this is on another level.
Sorry for any confusion, but there absolutely should be serious compensation to the victims. The question is only how much. Some might consider $1B an insult to the value of a human life.
Since it's impossible to compensate someone fairly when looking at it from the value of a human life, I'm wondering if there isn't another way to calculate these settlements where the end goal is still the same: 1) provide a generous payment to the victims and 2) create a financial deterrent string enough for the offending company to stop and repair their actions and prevent any other companies from thinking of doing the same thing.
For #1, $10M, $100M, $1B, $10B, $100B, etc. are never enough for anyone that enjoys their life and their health. I just think it's worth considering how quickly we could create 2,000 lawsuit billionaires if the formula is $1B per terminal illness. Maybe that's a good thing for the 1% to be comprised of the descendants of victims who might spend their money in a conscious way, but I think $1B is such a rare, difficult thing to achieve and creates tremendous power that it's worth thinking about. Because why not give them $5B or $100B or make them the richest individuals on the planet? It still wouldn't be a fair deal for getting cancer.
For #2, I'm simply suggesting that we should consider paying some portion of the penalty to a hospital, charity, competitor, etc.
If you'd rather the $2B goes to the victim and another $2B goes to cancer research, ok. Or $2B to the victims and $2B to a competitor that could have sold more product had they not been undercut by cheap, cancer-causing products, that's fine too.
I just think society as a whole would benefit if we put some of the money into repairing the situation rather than only compensating the victim.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the WHO) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.
After that, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (part of the CDC) announced a review of the herbicide, and the plaintiffs alleged that Monsanto conspired to conceal the risks by influencing or delaying that review.
For example, a Monsanto scientist contacted a former EPA toxicologist: “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep from having a domestic IARC occur with this group. May need your help”
And Monstanto's liason to the EPA wrote to another Monsanto toxicologist: “[EPA division director Jesudoss “Jess” Rowland] told me no coordination [between the EPA and the ATSDR] is going on and he wanted to establish some saying ‘If I can kill this I should get a medal’. However, don’t get your hopes up, I doubt EPA and Jess can kill this."
"Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumours was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one. Reuters was unable to determine who made the changes."
It’s worth noting that these reviews were written in response to the ethically questionable and misleading IARC review. They did not impact the prevailing expert opinion, formed before the IARC review, that Roundup is generally safe and that there’s no systematic evidence suggesting its carcinogenicity.
Radio waves (every frequency) are classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the same organisation.
(edit: its possibly not probably thanks to commenter below)
This has lead to anti vaxxer types believing smart electricity meters are out to kill them (no idea why low powered smart meters are the devil over other emmiting devices).
If you listen to International Agency for Research on Cancer every electronic device in your home, could kill you with cancer.
No, the IARC classified radio waves as possibly carcinogenic, not probably.
Furthermore, they said the evidence was "limited" for glioma caused by cell phone use (and thus the associated frequencies) and inadequate to draw conclusions for other types of cancers and other exposures.
It was a very measured statement that's been misrepresented.
"The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B)"
Its based on one small discredited study that asked people WITH cancer to estimate their lifetime usage of mobile phones. According to that study we should have many times more brain cancers than we do have (rates have remained static since phones were introduced).
And yet because of that study they make a blanket statement about all RF. So a 1 milliwatt 20 hz transmitter gets the same classification as a 10 terrahert 500w transmitter and the magnetic field around a cable carrying AC.
Its insane fear mongering from people paid to fear monger, not do rational science.
Edit: all of a sudden my posts suddenly start getting loads of down votes. Really strange.
Here is the famous 1 Million women study that was completed after the IARC published their infamous press release:
No, it was based on two studies for glioma, including "the largest investigation so far of mobile phone use and brain tumours" with 2500 cases and 2500 controls, and those two studies plus a third for acoustic neuroma.
Still, as you say, the evidence was limited, which is exactly what the IARC said.
And they did not make a blanket statement for RF. They specifically and very clearly said the possible risk was cell phone use.
It explicitly, in the first line, states it covers all RF electromagnetic radiation. Regardless of why they decided RF was bad (mobile phone) they decided it was all bad.
"The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B)"
The largest study since then has been 1 million woman.
"In this large prospective study, mobile phone use was not associated with increased incidence of glioma, meningioma or non-CNS cancers."
That million woman study did find an increased risk of :s/cancer/tumors/ associated with cell phone use.
> For acoustic neuroma, there was an increase in risk with long term use vs never use (10+ years: RR = 2.46, 95% CI = 1.07-5.64, P = 0.03), the risk increasing with duration of use (trend among users, P = 0.03).
And you quoted the IARC press release out of context. Immediately after the words you quote it says: "...based on an increased risk for glioma...associated with wireless phone use."
> That million woman study did find an increased risk of cancer associated with cell phone use. ... For acoustic neuroma, there was an increase in risk
You are incorrect. Acoustic neuroma is a benign tumor ie. non-cancerous.
Can you really fault Motorola for trying to quash bogus science and do PR which says that their product, which doesn't cause cancer, doesn't cause cancer? Opps I mean Monsanto.
Well that’s why the defense cross examines the plaintiffs experts and calls their own expert witnesses. It probably sounded a lot worse when the roundup expert is getting crossed and has to admit to the amount they are getting paid to testify for roundup.
"Coffee should no longer be classified as a carcinogen to humans, according to World Health Organization (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer." (2016)
That said, they still classify lots of things we regularly interact with as carcinogenic, or likely carcinogenic. And I’m not even disputing these classifications but they show that such classifications need to be understood in context.
This is the third jury that looked at all the available evidence and reached the same conclusion. That's 36 people that spent hours carefully looking at the available documents and u̶n̶a̶n̶i̶m̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ agreed that Roundup can cause cancer and that Monsanto covered up the risks. Maybe we shouldn't be so dismissive?
Clarification: It technically didn't need to be unanimous because it had 12 people. Civil juries in California have to be unanimous if they're smaller than a certain size. Civil juries in some other states do have to be unanimous.
How do you square this with all the major regulatory organization's experts concluding that there is no evidence glyphosate poses a cancer risk to humans?
Organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization, European Commission, Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency, Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment have concluded that there is no evidence that glyphosate poses a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans. The EPA has classified glyphosate as "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans." One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), affiliated with the WHO, has made claims of carcinogenicity in research reviews; in 2015 the IARC declared glyphosate "probably carcinogenic." [1]
[The IARC] dismissed and edited findings from a draft of its review of the weedkiller glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion that the chemical probably causes cancer.
Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumors was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one. [2]
That Reuters article by Kate Kelland came up during the trial because internal Monsanto emails show that they fed that story to that reporter. That was used by the plaintiffs to show Monsanto's multimillion dollar effort to deceive the news and scientific media about glyphosate.
It's a different matter entirely if Monsanto fed false information to the reporter. But it seems like they're pointing out that the IARC ignored scientific data and published an opinion on glyphosate contrary to the scientific consensus and every other regulator body. If the IARC's conclusions were flawed, Monsanto should be pointing it out.
I'm also not sure why you'd need internal Monsanto emails to know that Monsanto is the source, since the Reuters article itself says Monsanto is the source about midway through.
The IARC didn't "ignore scientific data", they came to a different conclusion based on weighting multiple studies available against each other than the one Monsanto would have preferred. It is precisely the job of the IARC to find a scientific consensus based on the available data and publish it.
Monsanto on the other hand used Reuters to spread FUD about the IARC. A strategy right out of the cigarette industries playbook.
> they came to a different conclusion based on weighting multiple studies available against each other than the one Monsanto would have preferred
They also came to a different conclusion than every single other national and international agency on glyphosate. Which is why I'm inclined to believe the IARC is wrong here. Monsanto bribing or corrupting the scientists from every other agency studying glyphosate across many countries and the IARC being the only bastion of honest scientists is, in my opinion, pretty much impossible.
If you read the Reuters article, it's quite specific about what the IARC removed from their earlier draft. For example,
"In further discussion of the same 1983 study, IARC’s final published report refers to expert pathologists on a panel commissioned to reanalyze the work of the original investigators. The IARC draft notes that these pathologists “unanimously” agreed with the original investigators that glyphosate was not related to potentially precancerous tissue growths in the mice. IARC’s final report deletes that sentence.
Reviewing a second mouse study, the IARC draft included a comment saying the incidence of a type of animal cancer known as haemangiosarcoma was “not significant” in both males and females. IARC’s published monograph, by contrast, inserts a fresh statistical analysis calculation on the data in male mice, and concludes that the findings were statistically significant."
The IARC's final report removed the conclusion from every study finding that glyphosate was not carcinogenic (compared to the IARC's draft that was leaked to Reuters). That sounds like they're ignoring scientific data.
I think reading on the history of past events can answer this question quite clearly. History has this very odd tendency to repeat itself with striking similarity. This [1] is a reasonable brief on leaded fuel. You can find much more in depth and interesting articles on its history elsewhere. But there are many similarities to the current situation. As early as the 1920s the dangers of leaded fuel were somewhat apparent. Yet the official government position would be to proclaim its safety for many decades. It wasn't until the 1970s that efforts towards a gradual phaseout were implemented and that was more over environmental concerns than it's own dangers.
So what happened? Again it's all very similar. There were various reports that were published throughout the decades about the dangers of leaded fuel but these studies, the individuals behind them, and even the journals that published such work were all vigorously attacked. By contrast the industry published large amounts of their own research and strongly incentivized "independent" research supporting the position that leaded fuel was safe. Thus you ended up with 'decades of research proving the safety of leaded fuel.' This, alongside further corporate influence, are what helped drive regulators and other government agencies to fall in line.
I'd look at the World Health Organization's IARC report in a different way. A researcher leaked to Monsanto confidential internal drafts of a UN organization's internal deliberations. Think about the implications of that. Whoever leaked that did so precisely in an effort to undermine the final report. Do you think they were otherwise an impartial and objective researcher? Probably not. Yet somehow they made their way onto an IARC panel which makes all effort to control for conflicts of interests, both perceived and real. That sort of influence is exactly how you have things such as the EPA saying glyphosate is perfectly safe at the same time that other countries, such as France, find it necessary to phase out and ultimately completely ban the product.
And the worst part here is that as corporations grow larger and become more effective at injecting themselves into positions of influence, government agencies can be expected to become less reliable. For instance this [2] is the former head of the FDA, in a special position created by the last president which he referred to as the 'Czar of Foods'. A Monsanto lawyer and VP known for a legal argument that companies ought be allowed to knowingly add at least a small amount of carcinogenic material into processed foods. That is the person who was the head of food safety in the US for the better part of a decade.
> And the worst part here is that as corporations grow larger and become more effective at injecting themselves into positions of influence, government agencies can be expected to become less reliable.
A current example of that might be the FAA allowing aircraft manufacturers to self-certify that their planes are safe, as happened with the Boeing 737-Max fiasco.
With regards to your specific leaded-petrol example, I honestly feel that if the government keeps proclaiming something is safe that turns out not to be, they should be held responsible for making right afterwards.
I can certainly see how government agencies might be slow to update their position when new research comes out.
> I'd look at the World Health Organization's IARC report in a different way. A researcher leaked to Monsanto confidential internal drafts of a UN organization's internal deliberations. Think about the implications of that. Whoever leaked that did so precisely in an effort to undermine the final report. Do you think they were otherwise an impartial and objective researcher? Probably not. Yet somehow they made their way onto an IARC panel which makes all effort to control for conflicts of interests, both perceived and real.
Implying Monsanto had infiltrated the IARC and other agencies is quite literally a conspiracy theory, and I think in general unlikely. And in this case specifically, wrong. The draft wasn't leaked to Monsanto; it was obtained during legal proceedings.
> That sort of influence is exactly how you have things such as the EPA saying glyphosate is perfectly safe at the same time that other countries, such as France, find it necessary to phase out and ultimately completely ban the product.
French politicians banned glyphosate based on the IARC's report. That's not a separate data point.
That guy is a twat but the safety of something isn’t determined by whether you can safely drink a pint of it, unless, well, it’s a drink. You also can’t safely eat a pound of salt (it’s much more harmful than drinking a pint of Roundup), yet salting your food in moderation is safe, and no jury will award you punitive damages against McDonald’s for salting their fries (even though McDonald’s is known to use excessive, and harmful, quantities of salt).
Probably glyphosate isn't really carcinogenic. It's a substituted amino acid and lots of studies have shown it to be benign.
But maybe it is. Maybe there is something we didn't know. Maybe Monstanto pumped out a bunch of fake studies. Probably not but this could be.
Something to consider is this. The cheapness of our food production, which is not just the US but much of the world at the moment is in part to use of glyphosate aka "roundup ready" base crops like corn and soybeans. This allows higher yields with less cultivation. Now maybe this is all wrong and we should do it differently, but at the moment that is how it is. These "base" products trickle up into all sorts of things like meat, sodas, beer, who knows what else. And internationally.
If glyphosate is not carcinogenic and this case is about lawyers and sensationalists and non scientific people out to stop "chemicals" or make a fast buck and in so doing raise global food prices it would be very egregious. Because it won't just be Wheaties in California that go up in price, it will be tortillas in Honduras and flatbread in Algeria and who knows what else. In those places, unlike the US, a non insignificant portion of income is spent on food so the pain will be greater.
I'm not suggesting if a chemical is shown to be harmful it should be allowed. But there are ramifications of short term greed and non scientific thinking beyond the immediate.
I think we did know all of those things, but Monsanto was very well connected to the political establishment. Is it so difficult to accept the fact that this whole thing screams "corruption on the highest levels"?
If I remember correctly, Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Family were heavily involved with Monsanto.
I'm not sure how well-known it was. Bayer and Mansanto agreed to merge in 2016. The first large jury award in a case claiming RoundUp caused cancer was in August 2018.
It's worth noting that RoundUp has been sold and marketed for close to fifty years at this point. It is extremely well understood, extremely well studied, extremely common, but we're only recently seeing a number of successful lawsuits claiming glyphosate is a carcinogen.
A very solid and respected company paid a gigantic amount for an ailing, future-less (Monsanto had closed most of its research), and clearly ethically struggling company with thousands of lawsuits against it. Worst corporate decision I've ever seen. I can't explain it other than that the CEO, Board, etc of Bayer have been bribed. There is no way they could have been that incompetent. The pending bankruptcy will be a gigantic loss for German industry and the big winners are the usual venture capitalists that drained Monsanto the years before, and got this huge payout.
Is it just me or did everyone say before the Bayer / Monsanto merger that it's a hugely bad idea and the joint company will have way more problems in court?
Told you so. (Also seems to be the opinion of the majority of shareholders...)
Something I have yet to find is how much these people have been exposed to the chemical. Are they farmers that are spraying it in large quantities throughout the season or just regular folks at home spraying a little here and there on a weed? The difference is 100's of gallons vs less than 1 gallon. Also, are they then handling, processing and possibly eating food crops that have been previously doused with it? Sort of critical information to make educated choices on what's a "safe" amount vs "risky" amount.
They calculate risk / reward with models just like most acquisitions work. Honeywell bought a company back in my hometown once and took on their legal liability for environmental cleanup. Something like ~500M, they absorbed the legal ownership of whatever the company had, but their models say hey this is an overall net benefit of 600M - 500M we take on, hey we still make 100M lets do it!
First, talk about Roundup and cancer and endocrine disruption has been going on for 20 years. It's not just about Glyphosate but about the adjuvants that Monsanto adds. These make it work better against insects but might be more toxic than the active ingredient.
Second, the lawsuits have been in the courts for a long time. Yes the big jury awards happened after the merger, but these were brewing long before that.
What does this do to the company's financial future? If there are thousands more of these lawsuits coming and the legal precedent has been set, and this one verdict took 40% of Bayer's cash position away, how can they survive the next 12 months? Are they bankrupt already if even 10% of these lawsuits go through with the same verdict? https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/BAYRY/balance-sheet#figure_t... Even if the verdict is slashed to 1/10th $100mil and they win 90% of their lawsuits, they will still lose 1,000. That's 1k X $100mil = $100bil in losses. Even cutting this by 50% they are still out of business.
The punitive damage awards will be reduced to no more than about 10X the compensatory damage awards, so the math shouldn't be done using the actual verdict size.
There goes another useful product, victim of the court lottery. I was wondering why I was hearing all of these ads today from lawyers saying that if you're a roundup user to contact them. The gold rush is on.
Monsanto just needed to go out of business, even if it’s renamed to Bayer. They’re one of the most evil companies in US history. They jury voted this way simply because Monsanto is an evil company.
I'm in favor of giant companies being beholden to the citizens of the country that they operate in, but I'm not happy that some random jury's opinion on medicine or science is being touted as any sort of authority on the matter.
This is pretty much how the jury system works for every trial (not just this one). The jury are not experts on interpreting evidence which will always require some degree of scientific knowledge. They just have to count on expert witness testimony (which both sides may have). Anyone called up for jury duty who has expertise in the area is unlikely to be selected to sit on the jury.
Consider a vim vs emacs trial. Assuming there is something like an objective truth, would you believe a jury of HN readers would be more or less likely to find it compared to random people given competing presentations trying to convince them?
(I’m actually not completely sure of the right answer)
There’s also a reasoning from democracy: you want the general public to be involved to represent something closer to prevalent moral views than what a caste of specialists may come up within their isolated community.
There may even be something of trade off where you’re sometimes ok with arriving at a verdict that is objectively wrong according to experts, but feels intuitively right to the public. This is dicey, and probably shouldn’t apply to criminal trials. But trust in the justice system is a value in and of itself.
I imagine the problem is that the other jurors would probably listen to the expert juror and trust and believe them more than they should. In effect, you end up with a one-person jury. Whatever the expert juror's opinion is, the rest will follow and endorse.
You could have both sides present expert witnesses that are assessed by a specialized court, with no jury and with judges who have relevant training. This isn't possible at the Federal level and in most states since they constitutionally require jury trials for civil cases above a certain dollar amount, but you could do it in states that do not, and the other states could amend their constitutions.
Specialized courts for things like patent law are used in lots of places outside the US precisely because juries are often unsuitable for evaluating technical questions (among other reasons).
You're seriously citing patent court as a better example?
Patent law I think is one of the most laughably dysfunctional things courts have tried to understand.
The other major problem is bribes. It'd be so risky to bribe an entire jury that I imagine most companies wouldn't dare. But in my gut I imagine most judges could be influenced for much less than 2 billion.
Are you talking about patent law in the United States? As I explained, the US does not use the specialized court system I described, relying on juries of laymen to assess patent cases, which has been argued by eminent people to be the primary source the dysfunctions of US patent legal system: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3270000
If you are talking about patent legal systems outside the US, you'd have to argue those systems are worse to use it as evidence against my claims. (If all patent systems are bad worldwide, this doesn't tell us much about the value of specialized courts other than that they can't solve unsolved problems.) Could you point to such an argument?
If you think that increasing the number of necessary people to bribe is an effective way to prevent bribery, then you can just increase the number of judges, which could be indexed to the amount being claimed.
I'm talking about in the US. You're right on the first point - 95% of patent cases do have a jury. The part I felt was dysfunctional was that often times judges seem LESS aware of many modern topics (e.g. tech) than a cross-section of laypeople. Plus a huge number of patent cases happen in some rando district of East Texas which is problematic, but that's really beside your point.
I'd be okay with a "jury of judges" approach (provided it was at least 6, like a normal jury) to reduce undue influence, if legal system could hypothetically arrange that.
> I'm not happy that some random jury's opinion on medicine or science is being touted as any sort of authority on the matter.
Well you never sat on the jury so you dont know what information was presented to them. Obviously enough data was presented to them to form a conclusion though.
You're talking about juries from the same nation, even same state, as the jury who was utterly impressed by "if it does not fit, you must acquit!", right? Juries, that suffer from the CSI Effect[1]. Juries that not only are made up of scientific laypersons but judicial laypersons. Juries, that have been shown to fuck up every 1 in 8 criminal cases[2], where the burden of proof is supposed to be a lot higher than in a civil case, such as this one.
So, I am not convinced about your use of "obviously".
If the only thing that happened during a trial was the counsel standing up and saying ‘Dear people of the jury, this man is GUILTY!’ that would be enough data for a jury to form a conclusion. That doesn’t mean the data was any good.
It isn't the jury's place to use their expertise to rule in a case. Similarly, you wouldn't want a jury of homeopaths using their expertise to decide in a case involving evidence-based medical treatment.
How do you know? A lawsuit judgement is virtually the only kind of punishment a corporation can suffer. They can’t go to jail, so how do you propose to punish a corporation for wrongdoing?
>After three days of deliberations, the jurors awarded the Pilliods $1 billion each in punitive damages. The jury also awarded Alva Pilliod over $47,000 in past economic damages, $8 million in noneconomic damages and $10 million for future damages.
>Jurors handed Alberta Pilliod over $201,000 in past economic damages, $8 million in noneconomic damages and $26 million for future damages.
…
>… Three jurors disagreed with the $1 billion award for each of the Pilliods, including Olsen. “I thought it was too high,” he said.
I'm a little disgusted with these lawsuits. The preponderance of scientific evidence is on the side of Monsanto (gag): Roundup isn't carcinogenic. The one study that is significant to these cases from the IARC has numerous statistical flaws. From the coverage that I've seen, most of these cases have been won on the back of numerous emails and texts from Monsanto trying to delay and suppress the release of potentially negative studies until after their legal cases are resolved.
So I guess Monsanto are jerks but also these cases are flawed science.
Monsanto can and has spent millions to provide scientific results that back their position. Mansanto can and has spent millions to block scientific research that contradicts their position.
The balance of power is so unbelievably skewed that "the science" simply cannot be trusted. There is no study that Mansanto can't buy. There is no study than mom and pop can buy.
So, we look them in the eyes and we see scumbag villain vs simple folk. We see scumbag villain pumping out lakes of chemicals and crushing people and my what big teeth you have. And you've made how many billions on these chemicals? And how much is the poor little grandma asking for?
It's a no-brainer. Dig some millions out of your sofa cushions and pay the poor family.
It's not scientific. It's emotional. And lots of normal people get pretty emotional about the big bad wolf. Still, they didn't shoot the wolf. It's still alive and able to eat some other grandma. It just had to pay for a grandma it may not have eaten at all.
Are you saying that there's no study they couldn't create or that there's no study funded by another group they couldn't change? One of those is an exceptionally strong accusation (the other is still quite strong, but a different scale)
Monsanto benefits from conflating glyphosate with Roundup. There are several chemicals in Roundup that may be nastier than glyphosate in isolation, and the purposes of most of those chemicals is to multiply the potency of glyphosate.
These days I tend to assume that anyone posting about glyphosate in a Monsanto discussion has either been taken in by astroturfing or is being paid to confuse the two and everyone they talk to about it.
We aren't talking about a chemical here. We are talking about a commercial cocktail of chemicals.
No, it doesn't legitimize any quackery or pseudoscience. Inspecting the financial motivations for bias behind studies can only reveal them to be weaker evidence than they appeared to be at first glance, but it cannot reverse their conclusions.
If removing from consideration the Monsanto-funded studies changes the balance of evidence from "probably safe" to probably unsafe" instead of merely changing it to "I don't know", then that's only because there was already credible evidence on the unsafe side of the scale.
>Inspecting the financial motivations for bias behind studies can only reveal them to be weaker evidence than they appeared to be at first glance, but it cannot reverse their conclusions.
Strictly speaking, you're absolutely right, but in the court of public opinion where policy battles are fought, financing is commonly used as grounds to dismiss entire studies outright, without the slightest thought given to the actual scientific methodology used in the papers.
As well it should be? We've shown time and time again that the source of funding control a) whether or not results get published, e.g. 99 "bad results" don't ever get published but the 1 "good result" is, and b) the extent to which the design and execution of the study is biased towards a "good result".
The pendulum has swung very wide in favor of controlling interests, in fact I would argue that a large portion of the "anti-science" sentiment we are seeing is due to the perceived rigging of the scientific landscape. I say perceived here because even if 95% of science produced today is good the ones that directly affect the public and garner headlines are going to be related directly to a corporate interest, e.g. pharma, chemical companies etc. Also of note, guess who doctored the results about vaccines and autism? A credentialed scientist, obviously retracted at this point but I would put it to you that the very fact that this got published represents to the laity that there is a fundamental problem in science today.
Science was the belle of the ball in the early/mid 20th century, then had the benefit of the doubt as the century ended but now clearly has a public reputation problem. Getting money(the wrong kind) out of science is just as important as getting money out of politics, you should not trust the result of an article paid for by Monsanto anymore than you should trust the politician that they have bought as well.
> If the Monsanto-funded studies suck, it will 100% be possible to point to the reasons why in those studies.
You can't read a study to determine that it's wrong because of something like survivorship bias, because you're not reading all the conflicting results that didn't get published. The only way to determine that kind of cause is to conduct a lot of independent research seeking to replicate the questionable study. That's more likely to happen if you discount and throw out the questionable studies, leaving you with a more realistic picture of the quantity and quality of evidence you have on the issue. If you take questionable studies at face value, you're more likely to decide that you have enough evidence to come to a conclusion.
Name one study that sides with Monsanto that wasn't paid for by Monsanto. Now name a study that was paid for by Monsanto that puts them in a bad light. Now look at the final draft after the scientists were done and see if it hasn't been flipped on its head.
You can pile up a hundred studies that cheer for Monsanto, and one that goes against them and I will choose the 1 if they were all paid for by Monsanto.
If you think there are multi-national gazillion dollar companies out there willing to go to almost any lengths to build their empire, you might be susceptible to many forms of quackery. Or you could be entirely reasonable.
The point is that Kool-Aid can release the results of some study they funded that shows that Kool-Aid is healthier than orange juice.
They can say it is scientific because it used scientific techniques.
I'm saying that it can't be trusted. It's not that "science can't be trusted". It's that "not everything can be trusted to be scientific".
Any study paid for by Monsanto goes in my "untrustable" book until it can be independently verified by competent scientists who do not have a conflict of interest and do not rely on any party for funding or publication that has a conflict of interest.
I agree with you there. The problem was you seemed to be implying that because Monsanto is a rich corporation, they control all the science on glyphosate, and we therefore can't rely on science at all. Court rulings have to rely on science to have any legitimacy. There are countless reasons why judgements based on emotions without science are a very bad idea.
In this case, it seems that the jury discounted the scientific value of all the studies that were bought by Monsanto. That didn't leave them much. What was left was not incredibly compelling, but seemed to lean away from Monsanto.
Some studies have leaned away from Monsanto and demonstrably been tampered to lean back towards Monsanto.
So if you're trying to weed out the noise and get down to real science, things don't look good for Monsanto. They don't look terrible for Monsanto until you see how much Monsanto works to bury, obscure, or tamper with real scientific findings. At that point, you bring the hammer down.
If juries are allowed to go around awarding billions of dollars to individuals, the big bad wolf won’t be around for long. I hope whatever we replace capitalism with is good!
The evidence IARC is relying on is extremely thin. I'm not commenting on the case, so much as making the observation that glyphosate can be fine (it most likely is) without the Roundup product itself being safe.
I don't care much for opinion. Science does not seem too divided on the matter. But humans are emotional creatures, and Monsanto understands that it does not really matter what the science says, it only matters who gets the better media spin. You can bet they are really wishing right now that they had gotten a better handle on the PR.
'Science' certainly is divided on the matter, (and I'd say most of it does not paint glyphosate in a great light) which is why Monsanto tries to suppress the science it doesn't like, hires trolls to brigade social media and engages in obfuscation and obstruction.
I would suggest Bayer/Monsanto like any big company can quash scientific studies if they appear deleterious to their future income streams, first came to light with the tobbacco industry. Perhaps thats why so few studies exist that show glyphosate in its true light, but instead portray's it as a panacea when any inteligent person knows panacea's in the world do not exist, so there must be harmful effects.
> So I guess Monsanto are jerks but also these cases are flawed science.
It seems like the question here should be whether this outcome provides justice, not whether it represents the best scientific conclusion available. Shouldn't Monsanto be punished in some fashion for unethically trying to suppress evidence and mislead the public, even if it eventually turns out that Roundup is not as dangerous as it was suspected/feared to be?
A jury verdict like this is certainly not the best imaginable way to discipline corporations for such wrongdoings, but if this is what's achievable with our current legal system, then it seems to be at least somewhat justified.
The only question in front of a court is whether they broke the law. If they did something unethical but we don't have a law against it... well, fight for a new law.
If you want justice based on your morals & feelings, then you can just drop the pretense of "rule of law" / a legal system and let the mob or powerful rule as they whish. But I doubt such a system will turn out in my favor.
> "The jury found Roundup had been defectively designed, that the company failed to warn of the herbicide’s cancer risk and that the company acted negligently. "
There's certainly reason to question the jury's determination about defective design, since that's a relatively scientific question. But that wasn't the only question before the jury.
The issue of negligence with regards to the disclosing risks to the public seems to be reasonably relevant to Monsanto's misconduct; this certainly isn't a mob lynching a corporation without regard for rule of law, and on the surface it doesn't even appear to be a particularly ridiculous stretch of the law.
It has been sprayed over entire villages in South America to kill all cocaine plants in the area for decades. I'm not aware of any higher cancer rates of these villagers vs the regular populous. I'm not actually sure where all the hysteria over this product is coming from really.
I don't know about South America, but in most parts of Asia, the data is unreliable because a) poor rural people don't always get treatment, and even when they do, the diagnostics aren't always correct or even reported, and b) data collection is poor in rural areas - both the quality and quantity.
So I'd take any statistical claim with a grain of salt.
Farmers in the US have been using it for years as well. We have much better data on them. While farmers cancer numbers are not the same as the general US population, when you control for other known differences in farmer behavior roundup isn't an issue.
Can a legal mind please explain to us laypeople how $! billion (per plaintiff) in punitive damages doesn't belong on the other side of Alice's looking glass. Why not make it $1 Cajilion?
It's a punishment. You can't send a corporation to jail, you can only fine them. The Jury found that Monsanto committed fraud, and acted with malice. $1B is enough to hurt the corporate finances, very much by design.
What punishment do you think would be appropriate?
i agree, the punitive damages should be equivalent to a few years jailtime at least. it should equal the company not doing any business for a decade or so
I'm not a legal mind, but these are punitive damages, not compensatory ones. The couple didn't endure $2 billion worth of suffering, but Monsanto did commit $2 billion worth of misconduct.
so shouldn't it go to the government instead? if the couple didn't suffer for $2B, why should they get it? they should get enough for their suffering, and the rest should go to government for public health.
Courts are less likely to award further punitive damages. Those who doesn't have the resources to go against Monsanto's lawyers would have incentives to participate in a class action lawsuit.
Not a lawyer, but I do know that judges often reduce the damages awarded by juries, and the final settlements are often reduced further when plaintiffs realize how long they'll have to wait for appeals.
Because Monsanto made much more than $2B producing this chemical. Monsanto made much more than $2B producing GMO seeds that depend on this chemical for their value. Monsanto made much more than $2B crushing farmers who didn't want to buy Monsanto product.
Monsanto made billions and billions and billions. They destroyed hundreds of farmers. They lied and cheated and obstructed when challenged. Then they sold their company to cash in on even more money.
You might say that Monsanto has existed in a world on the other side of Alice's looking glass. Bayer rewarded all of that with huge M&A money. This decision reaches into that world beyond the looking glass to bring the chickens home to roost.
From my (admittedly limited) understanding, they would trespass on peoples farms and test their crops to see if they had any features similar to their GMO seed products (which could be present just due to the fact that your neighbors' farms use Monsanto seed, and pollen isn't exactly easy to control). According to the report cited in the article "Monsanto brought some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states." I'm sure some of that may be valid patent protection, but it's hard to defend yourself when a company as large as Monsanto decides it wants to challenge you in the legal system, and I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The story that they sued people who just had accidental contamination is a lie. They went after people who deliberately violated their contracts by saving seed, or who deliberately sprayed they crop with glyphosate to concentrate trace contamination by allowing only those plants to survive.
Monsanto really seemed to bring out ideological derangement among its critics.
Some farmer plants and harvests a crop, and allows some portion of the crop to go to seed. So far, so good. Normal practice for 1000s of years.
Then one year, the neighbor down the road plants some super special patent-protected seeds and doesn't control pollination. Farmers crops get pollinated by neighbor due to no fault of farmer.
Farmer plants seeds next year and notices genetic differences. Farmer specifically selects for desirable genetic traits in determining which crops to allow to go to seed. Normal practice for 1000s of years. Only this time, Monsanto comes knocking.
Or alternatively, farmer sells excess seeds to seed repo. Normal practice for generations. Seed repo notes genetic differences. Some farmers notice that repo sells seeds which include many that have desirable trait. They increase purchases from such repos. Monsanto comes knocking.
Nobody stole anything. Nobody violated any license or contract. To exclude contaminated seeds from inventory would place significant burden on farmers and repos. So Monsanto can intentionally or unintentionally contaminate farms that don't use Monsanto, then very intentionally ruin their ability to harvest seed for future planting.
Farmers have to sell non-Monsanto seed for a discount to pay for screening and disposal of contaminate. Repos have to sell non-Monsanto seed for a premium to pay for screening and disposal of contaminate and insurance for legal liabilities if screening is imperfect.
Self-sustaining farming is effectively crushed. You cannot harvest your own seed, and non-Monsanto seed is more expensive to purchase because of legal threats. Voila! Monsanto becomes the single source for seed. Nobody is able to produce seed without their permission.
Of course, you could try to turn the tables and sue Monsanto if your crop is ever contaminated. Good luck with that.
Those poor victimized farmers. There they were, practicing the traditional Spraying O' The Roundup, a practice going back centuries, when Mean Ol' Monsanto noticed they were concentrating the traces of GMO genes by the selection effect this caused. How dare those villains at Monsanto have sued over this! I'm sure they twirled their movie mustaches and cackled in evil glee.
The heavy sarcasm indicates that you think the farmers did something illegal, unfair, unethical, or wrong in some other way. They sprayed Roundup to kill undesirable vegetation. This is the very purpose for which Monsanto sells Roundup.
Do you think it is wrong to spray Roundup on thistle in your lawn to protect the grass? Even if your grass exhibits traits probably influenced by your neighbor's grass?
Would it have somehow been ok if the farmers had hand-picked and uprooted each stem of less desirable product without using Roundup? If you are trying to select for Roundup resistance, why wouldn't you use Roundup in that selection process?
Monsanto could choose not to sell Roundup to these farmers. They could have quit spreading their pollination all over the countryside indiscriminately. Instead, Monsanto chose to sue farmers who had not stolen anything, not violated any contract. Imagine if Fukushima farmers were sued because their crops exhibited some desirable trait after the nuclear meltdown and they continued to select for that trait.
Yes. I think all the cases where Monsanto sued, the farmers were doing something wrong. In most cases, this was keeping seeds to replant, or selling seeds from their harvests. This was in violation of their contracts.
> Do you think it is wrong to spray Roundup on thistle in your lawn to protect the grass?
Yes, because that will KILL YOUR GRASS. So you only do it if you're stupid or trying a little patent-violating experiment in natural selection.
The farmer who sprayed Roundup on his field to concentrate the trace of patented genes in the soybeans wasn't doing it for any legitimate purpose. Doing that on a field without the contamination would not have worked! He was trying to evade patent protection and get access to the patented genes for free. The courts properly decided he was in the wrong.
You seem to think that because contamination occurred, patent protection was lost regardless of what the farmer does. But this is not the case. The behavior of the farmer here matters.
He wasn't trying to get access to the patented genes for free. He was specifically given access to the patented genes for free. He didn't sneak around and steal it. It was forced on him. His choices were:
* don't plant
* plant, but don't harvest seed
* plant, harvest seed, test and remove any contaminant
* plant, harvest seed, take your chances
* plant, select for resistance using legally purchased chemicals
* plant, sue Monsanto for contamination
Imagine if some rogue scientist exposed me to some chemical that made all my offspring develop a patented ocular structure that produced better than 20/20 vision, and caused all their offspring to develop the same. Imagine that said scientist did so without my consent or knowledge.
Should the scientist win a lawsuit against me when my grandchildren exhibit the patented trait? Should my children be barred from reproducing?
Or does the scientist lose patent protection when they contaminate others? If I encourage my children to seek mates from a pool of others who were contaminated does that behavior matter?
Also, FWIW, an experiment to see if I have Roundup-resistant grass is not a patent-violating experiment. Anybody who so desires can run a protocol where they spray generations of crops with decreasingly diluted Roundup to select for resistance. This violates no patents. And I have in the past sacrificed portions of my lawn to eradicate a particularly noxious thistle. You may call this stupid, but my grass grew back very quickly and the thistle never returned.
Mostly seed saving and even selling, I think, in violation of contract.
Ask yourself: what exactly would Monsanto have gained by suing farmers for accidental contamination? It's not like they're going to make money off the lawsuit itself, and it would not be going to act as any kind of deterrent, if the farmer didn't deliberately do something else like spraying the field to concentrate the contamination.
They’ve got a long history of doing this. I learned about it from the documentary Food, Inc. (which I’d highly recommend), but it’s also been widely covered in the media:
Don't try to understand the US legal system: you would risk damaging your brain. Almost no other country uses juries in civil cases. Almost no other country has "punitive damages".
Juries are equipped to answer whether a person not so different from the jurors is guilty of a crime not so far removed from the jurors' experience. They are not equipped to resolve factual questions about things like this (or patent cases -- another crazy one we see on HN).
Jury == random number generator. Maybe they get it right, but only by chance.