ANOTHER LEFT-WING SCIENCE SCANDAL – IOTW Report

ANOTHER LEFT-WING SCIENCE SCANDAL

Powerline: Glyphosate is the active ingredient in RoundUp, the most widely used herbicide in the world. Glyphosate is a non-selective herbicide, meaning it will kill just about any plant. Since it would kill the crop as well as the weeds, for quite a few years it couldn’t be used over the top of an emerging crop. Instead, its use was restricted to lower-value burndown situations, where weeds in a field would be killed prior to planting, or, e.g., to keep down weeds on railroad rights of way.

The first commercially successful genetic modification, carried out by Monsanto, which owned the patents on glyphosate, was to make plants tolerant of glyphosate. A GMO variety, commonly referred to as “RoundUp Ready,” would survive a glyphosate application while the weeds in the field would die. The development of glyphosate tolerant crops (soybeans, corn, cotton, eventually others) was a marvel: farmers could apply RoundUp over the top of crops, killing weeds while the crop was unaffected. The result was cheaper food and clothing.

As a bonus, glyphosate was remarkably benign from an environmental standpoint. In general, insecticides are toxic to humans because humans are quite a bit like bugs. Herbicides, on the other hand, are generally not very toxic to humans, because we aren’t a lot like plants. But even in this context, glyphosate stood out as a harmless chemical. It targets an enzyme that is found in plants, but not in humans or animals. Moreover, glyphosate breaks down easily and does not persist in the environment. It is pretty much the perfect herbicide (until resistance starts to develop, but that’s another story).  more here

15 Comments on ANOTHER LEFT-WING SCIENCE SCANDAL

  1. These two statements are useless:

    “Glyphosate is probably carcinogenic.”

    “Glyphosate is probably not carcinogenic.”

    This sentence has at least some value:

    “…the unpublished research found no evidence of a link between glyphosate and cancer.”

  2. You should see the look on their faces when you tell them where 50% of their lifetime exposure to radiation comes from. Potassium-40 from within their own body! Try to time it when they’re eating a banana…

  3. Glycophosphate sucks. It is poison. That is why they sell it. Last year the World Health Organization’s cancer group, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified it as a probable carcinogen.
    monsanto sucks.
    Glycophosphate is harmful to humans. That is heavily suppressed by monsanto. They will go to any length to silence opposition. Probably some of the responders to this thread are in the employ of that evil entity.
    Glycophosphate works by rpreventing the formation of a critical amino acid in plants. It interrupts what is called the “shikimate pathway” When this pathway, or biochemical process, is interrupted, the plant dies. The creators say ‘it only works on plants and it can’t hurt humans’ or something similar. But it does hurt humans. Our intestines are the home of beneficial bacteria, the ‘intestinal flora.’ that make the proper digestion of the food we eat possible. And those bacteria do have the shikimate pathway.
    Then the argument is often given that glycophosphate is only used on fields prior to planting or on young plants. Few are aware that it is also used to encourage maturing of plants (if they are ’roundup ready’) and also as a dessicating, or drying, agent on harvested crops, such as wheat. It is there- it is on your food.
    Don’t eat or handle the shit. It is no wonder that there are all the bowel medication ads on CNN to keep them afloat.
    There are more than 800 million pounds of pesticides used in the US every year, and the glycophosphate portion of that grows.
    I’m not an eco-nut, but I do work in the health care field. Learn yourself up on this stuff.

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