The recent Supreme Court decision concerning the labeling of Roundup pesticide (Monsanto Co. v. Darnell) has important implications.  While lawyers discuss the legal ramifications of this decision, there is a good chance that the Supreme Court missed some very important nuances of what’s goi ng on. There’s a debate in the scientific literature about how Roundup actually works and what exactly is/are the active ingredient(s) in the product.  There’s been a lot written about the risks of glyphosate, but very little discussion concerning an alternative possibility: that there’s an additional active ingredient or impurity in at least some batches of Roundup. Let’s begin with a little history of a different herbicide.  Agent Orange was a defoliant developed for use in the Viet Nam war.  The idea behind Agent Orange was that by reducing the forest canopy in Viet Nam, our forces would have an easier time spotting the enemy.  Making Agent Orange is tricky. The process needs careful temperature control to limit side reactions that produce a contaminant called TCDD (aka dioxin).  Some of the manufacturers didn’t do such a good job, and elevated levels of dioxin led to nasty diseases like chloracne and cancer.  Eventually, the Agent Orange Act of 1991 provided some relief for the injured troops.  The important take home here is that the really pernicious effects of Agent Orange were from a contaminant– not the primary ingredients. When Roundup was being developed (patented in 1974), Monsanto, the manufacturer, told the newly formed EPA (December, 1970) that the active ingredient was glyphosate (very roughly between a third and a half of the product).  The EPA then diligently evaluated glyphosate and they probably did it correctly.  There hasn’t been a lot of advancement in evaluating such toxicity in the last several decades. I was in grad school in the 80s looking at how chromium(VI) causes cancer (Erin Brockavich’s claim to fame ) and if a compound doesn’t kill a mouse, well, that was a pretty good indicator that it’s probably safe for humans as well.  Glyphosate looks pretty safe to animals and humans. Like pesticides, herbicides are often cocktails. They are frequently mixtures of active ingredients which is a similar idea as to most chemotherapy drugs and formulated for the same reason: if you want to kill something, then blocking multiple pathways is often more effective than just blocking a single pathway. These agricultural chemicals also contain formulant chemicals that are added to stabilize and solubilize the active ingredients. There are lots of scientific papers that delve into the interaction of EPSPS, a plant enzyme, and glyphosate.  There is also a lot of literature on glyphosate which shows that its probably pretty safe to humans but can wind up where its not wanted causing environmental harm to other plants which can have ripple effects on an ecosystem. But is that all that’s going on?  A 2019 study showed that for tomato plants, naturally water didn’t harm them, but nor did just glyphosate.  Why was glyphosate alone ineffective as an herbicide?  Probably because the added formulants have a clear purpose: they are needed to allow glyphosate to enter the plant or for some other biological activity.  There’s an additional wrinkle: when the formulants in Roundup were tested, some also showed strong herbicidal activity– without glyphosate.  What this paper suggests is that glyphosate may not be the only bio-active ingredient in Roundup.  While the authors of this 2019 paper stated that their work was not definitive and needed additional experimentation, it certainly did open up an intriguing hypothesis: If it turns out that glyphosate is not the only bio-active ingredient in Roundup, does that help explain the numerous claims of people being injured?  There are enough claims to think that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”  It is pretty clear that glyphosate isn’t very toxic to humans or animals, being highly specific for plants.   But what if glyphosate is not the only active ingredient in Roundup? The only component in pesticides that EPA tested extensively in the 1970s was the active ingredient.  Formulants are considered “inert” by the EPA and were only tested as part of the entire package of Roundup– not individually.  That’s concerning because clearly, most of the effort by the EPA was devoted to making certain the active ingredient is safe. There’s another problem: the EPA uses an “unusual” definition of inert which is that anything that is not the active ingredient is considered inert.  Most of us think that inert simply means inactive, but some formulants in one pesticide (considered “inert”) can be listed as active ingredients in another.  This EPA definition is rather confusing. Note that the label on the pesticide doesn’t have to disclose what formulants are in the pesticide or their relative amounts because companies consider that information proprietary.  Formulants are typically present in lower concentrations than the “active” ingredients which theoretically makes them less risky.  This is not a good assumption. That’s what led to the debacle of Agent Orange and has likely led to some people being injured by Roundup. Some researchers think that the ingredients of Roundup have varied over the years. What would be the issues if  some scientists at Monsanto might have become concerned that one of the formulants could sometimes have potential toxic effects, and what if some of these researchers may have suggested alternatives?  This possibility certainly adds some additional complexity to this situation if correct. In the 1990s, the situation gets even more convoluted.  Roundup wasn’t really all that popular when it was first introduced, but by the mid 1990s it was a very profitable agricultural product— especially when combined with sales of the genetically modified seeds. Yes, these seeds are one of the company’s major GMO products and accounted for more of Monsanto’s profit than Roundup itself.  Are the seeds only modified to be resistant to glyphosate?  Or are there other modifications too? This is why the Supreme Court decision is worrisome.  While this hypothetical is not meant to explore causation or connection between the product and any injury or to imply any wrongdoing, it is worth thinking about in our world of ever-increasing cancer rates and environmentally affected illnesses. If there is even a chance that someone at Monsanto may have acted unethically or did not identify all of the all the actual active ingredients in Roundup to the EPA in any formulation during all these years would the company be entitled to get away with it at the potential expense of thousands of injured individuals?  Isn’t that the net effect of what the Supreme Court has come up with?  Then if people did actually did get hurt, are they left with no recourse? Samuel Brauer, the founder of Nanotech Plus, LLC, lives in Shelton. ...read more read less