I’m a Biologist, years ago our lab got federal funding to research glyphosates potential as a neurotoxin and its capabilities to be used as a weapon. The DoD was concerned enough about this chemical that they poured the most funding I’ve ever seen at my university into a project.

The problem here is not science but capitalism, we should really get rid of this ideology

Then people wonder why people don’t trust “science”

Everyone responsible for this should be in jail

This problem could be solved if funding was also awarded to projects that can verify important results like this. Effectively allow scientists to verify the results thoroughly. This means to redo the entire study! Peer review is there to catch blatant lapses in logic and basic science. But in order to see if those results are as they say you have to redo it.

There is a lot of trust between scientists that they will act morally and truthfully but these days when funding is scarce and pressure is high some will resort to all sorts of shortcuts. The most used is over inflated goals to get the funding. That is benign enough. Others will tweak the results to get ahead and claim their place in front of the others and hope to fix the problem down the line.

Funding doesn’t allow repeat studies, studies with ideas too close to what has been done before etc. Also the time allotted is too short. 3 years is not enough to go from zero to finished idea ready for the market, yet that’s the aim most of the time. How on earth do people think anyone will have the time and brain space to verify what others have done and force them to retract it?

I can see how people can start to be skeptical of science but the truth of the matter is that science should be funded without the expectation of profitability in the short term. People should demand better funding for schools and research. And then ask that all science of held to the highest standard at all times! Having cheap fast science to the highest standard doesn’t work! If you don’t believe me have a look at the titan submersible to get an idea. We wouldn’t be here posting messages on this platform if science was funded the same 80 years ago.

The damage done.

What is save or not in the chem and pharma industry in the capitalism depends of the profit it brings, nothing else.

Might be a dumb question/remark but while this story is super bad, I don’t believe our regulations are based on this one study, right? AFAIK, EFSA and IARC (which only found limited evidence of carcinogenic effect on humans) used more data (with better quality) than just this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-017-1962-5

While this article and its conclusions are bad and did a lot of damage in terms of trust, do we know that this retraction means that the conclusions is that it is toxic? I’d be surprised that this is the one study we base all our regulatory decisions on, because I tend to trust EFSA’s conclusion, their work is usually good and up to date.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-017-1962-5

I feel like any paper that’s published that cited a paper which got retracted, should automatically be reviewed and assessed to determine if they should also be retracted.