I'm very sorry for your loss. But as a cancer researcher, I can fairly confidently say that glyphosate had nothing to do with your father's death. There just isn't any evidence showing that it has direct mutagenic activity or even other indirect biological influences on the probability of developing cancer. I've also lost several fit, active nonsmoking friends and family to cancer. Our cells copy themselves imperfectly, and sometimes our inborn regulatory mechanisms go awry. There's not always a "cause", beyond the fact that our bodies aren't built to a perfect spec. There's a massive amount of work going on these days to develop entirely new classes of treatments, so I hope the clinical situation in a few decades will be brighter by far. Again, sorry for your loss.

It was my understanding that while the IARC classification of glyphosate as a carcinogen has been disputed, exposure has been shown to increase the risk of melanoma, especially in occupational contexts:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27058477/?i=15&from=gl...

That's a terrible paper. This is a small epidemiological study where they're looking both at 1. exposure to sun and 2. occupational exposure to -any- herbicides/pesticides/fungacides/insecticides (not just glyphosate) and trying to pull out odds ratios of melanoma risk. Outdoor work definitely increases melanoma risk, but I wouldn't try to pull out much more than that from this paper!

Thanks for clarifying!

He didn't really clarify anything though, just gave his opinion on evidence that he said didn't exist just a comment before.

You could have given any of the other studies that warn against roundup and people will always find something wrong with the study. When people make up their minds about this stuff they stop looking at it objectively.

I invite you to visit some places in Argentina and you will surely change your mind. You can find more information about this here http://www.i-sis.org.uk/argentinasRoundupHumanTragedy.php

I can understand this is a very strong belief that you hold, but it's the same kind of story that was used to link vaccines and autism. In the middle ages, similar appearingly non-random connections were used to convict people of witchcraft.

Lots of people get cancer. In many cases, without having any obvious risk factors. Non-smokers still get lung cancer, for example. Human beings have an amazing ability to notice correlations, to make connections. It's an adaptation that has been hugely advantageous to us as a species, but sometimes it causes us to see correlation where the underlying evidence is not very good.

That's not to say that Roundup didn't give your dad cancer. Maybe it did, but science requires more evidence than anecdotes.

But how do you know it was because of Roundup? Just because they used Roundup does not necessarily mean that that's what caused the cancer, even if Roundup's ingredients are carcinogenic. So how are you so certain it was the Roundup?

I understand the desire to blame something.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of enough evidence in the universe to be come to that conclusion.

Statistically speaking the odds are very high that it was something else because so many things cause cancer.

It's safe to assume that roundup causes less than 50% of cancer deaths (it's probably much lower), which means that most likely it wasn't roundup. Even if it was shown to be worse than tobacco, it's still a long way from being the likely culprit. Tobacco is the single worst thing, so we are very aware of it. It 'only' causes 30% of deaths, but that has mobilized governments around the world to curb its use.

>He didn't drink, didn't smoke, he was very active, very fit, and yet he got cancer.

This easily describes massive swaths of people that got cancer from too much exposure to the sun.

So all the nay sayers are right, I can't prove it was roundup. But the cancer he got was the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma not some unrelated cancer from sun exposure.

His side of the family is cancer free going back generations. And they lived well into their 90's. One of my great uncle's made it to 103 or 104 (I think, I know it was over a hundred because I remember the fuss, I was very young). My dad was diagnosed at 75 and died the same year.

I can't prove anything, I'm a programmer not a cancer researcher. He was the guy who was convinced it was roundup, he was 100% mentally after the diagnosis and did tons of research trying to figure out what could have caused the cancer. He was baffled by getting cancer, nobody in his family got cancer and he had no bad habits that could have lead to this. So maybe he talked himself into it, I dunno. What I do know is he had nothing else in his history that he found, all he found was roundup.

If someone can show that there is zero connection between roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma then I have no idea what caused the cancer. But if you google non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and roundup you'll see the lawyers lining up to sue. Are all those lawsuits imaginary? Usually the lawyers don't get involved in those sorts of numbers unless they think they are going to win.

I'm so sorry your dad died, I'm with you on the roundup, very nasty stuff and a nasty company lobbying/suppressing any claims that say otherwise. I worked with it for many years myself until I left the industry.

I was diagnosed with a brain tumor recently, I wasn't surprised to say the least. Won't get much of a two sided argument on HN about this unfortunately. It's interesting to see the usual anti-big-corporation crowd on HN and Reddit stick up for Monsanto. I guess when a message gets pushed hard enough the crowd follows.

I'm not sure it's crowd following in this case though.

For us (who are supposed to be objective) it shouldn't be a case of who we like or don't like or big evil corporations (which Monsanto well indeed may be, not arguing that point) but rather the objective evidence. And as far as I'm aware glyphosate objectively isn't very harmful to mammals.

It's a substituted amino acid. As opposed to something like paraquat which breaks cell membranes and generally is toxic to pretty much all biological forms.