Chemical Controversies
Pesticides are substances that prevent, destroy, repel, or reduce the severity of pests. Pests are living things that occur where they are not wanted or that cause damage to humans, crops, or animals. Pests can be insects, rodents, unwanted plants, bacteria, viruses, or different types of fungus. Pesticides can vary in how toxic they are to humans and the environment. Some are persistent in the environment, animals, and birds, lasting for years; others break down soon after they are released. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants licenses, or registrations, to pesticides that it has found do not pose unreasonable risks to human health and the environment; it has registered at least 865 pesticides, which are used in thousands of pesticide products.
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Viewpoint: Who’s Who of litigation-financed junk scientists publish screed in European pay-for-play journal designed to target safe chemicals and their manufacturers for billion-dollar tort actions
Springer Nature published on November 4, 2025, in Environmental Sciences Europe, "Scientists' warning: we must change paradigm for a revolution in toxicology and ...
Viewpoint: Environmental toxin hysteria—MIT’s Undark embarrasses with hysteria-driven story aligning itself with false claims that ‘environmental toxins’ (whatever that means) are crippling our health
MIT’s Undark magazine describes itself as a publication that “will explore science … as a frequently wondrous, sometimes contentious, and occasionally troubling byproduct of ...
Viewpoint: New Zealand rebuffs science-rejectionist attack on the safe use of glyphosate weedkiller
I agree with the recent decision by the New Zealand Food Safety Authority concerning glyphosate. It states that glyphosate can ...
Viewpoint—Chemophobia: The alliance of environmental activists and lawyers
From tampons to tap water, from cereal boxes to vaccines, nearly every modern health scare rests on the same myth: ...
Viewpoint: The Washington Post’s ignorant article suggesting corn country deaths are driven by the herbicide glyphosate
Several weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article titled “The mysterious rise of cancer among adults in the Corn Belt.” It ...
Tripping through loopholes: Ketamine, Musk and America’s regulation blackout
After trying unsuccessfully to treat his depression with medication over several decades, Noel Farris, a 43-year-old web developer based in ...
GLP podcast: Cookies addictive like heroin? Toxicologist dismantles ‘food addiction’
Enjoying delicious food is a fundamental part of the human experience. Few of us would deny the enjoyment we get ...
Viewpoint: Science is a corporate conspiracy: The consequences of the alliance between RFK, Jr., his MAHA acolytes, and science-distorting enviro activists
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in ...
Viewpoint—Toxic Narratives: The lucrative environmentalist–tort lawyer-media disinformation network driving drug and chemical scares
Is aspartame, used in thousands of products, from Diet Coke to Trident Gum to Log Cabin Sugar-Free Syrup, potentially cancer-causing? ...
Activists decry EPA approval of effective PFAS family herbicide
The Trump administration is poised to again approve a new Pfas “forever chemical” pesticide ingredient, a move that is drawing ...
Setting aside $18 billion: As glyphosate cancer litigation persists, Bayer places its survival bet on SCOTUS and federal legal protection
Bayer … notes that regulators in countries from the US to Japan to New Zealand have recently reaffirmed that glyphosate-based ...
Viewpoint: Tort lawyer and HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. falsely claim thimerosal—used safely in vaccines for 90 years—contains dangerous mercury
RFK Jr. released a video addressed to the Minamata Convention on Mercury where he lied about vaccines. Again. And again ...
Viewpoint: Do chemicals in common plastics really kill
Three hundred fifty thousand of you are predicted to die every year from heart disease caused by exposure to plastics, ...
Weeds have long been the bane of farmers. Will the future be different?
[The] International Herbicide Resistant Weed Database reports that there are 534 unique cases of herbicide-resistant weeds globally, with 273 species. In all, ...
Happy 43rd birthday, GMO insulin. FDA approval in 1982 took 5 months. How many years would it take now?
This is the 43rd anniversary of one of biotechnology’s most significant milestones — the approval by the Food and Drug ...
Viewpoint: Environmentalists claim farmers can forego chemicals and genetically engineered crops and grow bumper crops with less environmental impact. If only farming was that easy
At the end of the 20th century, the United Nations (UN) launched the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were a list of ...
Why scare stories about crop chemicals outlive the science
For years, glyphosate has been the world’s most litigated molecule. The herbicide, first brought to market in 1974 under the ...
Viewpoint: While overall cancer rates remain steady, it’s rising in Midwest farm country. Are pesticides to blame?
Cancer rates among young adults in the Corn Belt, a patchwork of golden fields and straight-line highways stretching across the ...
RFK, Jr.’s bungled science on thimerosal and vaccines
Mercury, the element, is no longer used in thermometers, but it remains at the center of a decades-long debate over ...
Can we expect a wave of corporate breakups as seed industries liberate themselves from litigation-laden pesticide businesses
Companies involved in both the seed and pesticide sectors see a pipeline of pesticide-related class action lawsuits, MDLs and unlimited ...
GLP podcast: Are science journals corrupt? Dr. Kevin Folta examines the ‘replication crisis’
The science community faces an existential crisis as thousands of studies are retracted and dozens of peer-reviewed journals are forced ...
Viewpoint: Glyphosate is agriculture’s scapegoat
Glyphosate has played a central role in modern agriculture’s ability to increase yields, reduce labour costs and conserve soil through ...
“It’s raining neonicotinoids in Japan!” How the French media, environmentalists, and activist scientists conspired to distort science and severely damage the farm economy
Based on only eleven rain collections, researchers from Tokyo and Hokkaido Universities detected five neonicotinoids in Japanese rainwater at sub-nanogram-per-liter ...
Viewpoint: How cancer cultists and health justice vigilantes politicize science
A paper by Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, published in 2015 in Science, found that two-thirds of cancers were caused by "bad ...
Latest Trump and RFK, Jr. health misinformation rabbit hole: No, aluminum in vaccines is not dangerous or causally linked to autism
“We want no aluminum in the vaccine,” Trump said during the White House press conference, surprising even some ardent anti-vaccine ...
Viewpoint: MAHA’s chemophobic agriculture recommendations take a back seat to industry and science as Republican farm policy comes into focus
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has courted controversy his whole life. Since becoming the Trump administration’s top health official, Kennedy’s outlandish ...
Viewpoint: Wall Street and private equity—The hidden money bankrolling class action tort cases, from glyphosate to talc to Zantac
Have you ever wondered how lawyers manage to bankroll mass toxic tort cases, which are notoriously expensive to finance? Spoiler ...
