Dr. Giles E. Seralini is a French professor and author who has written a new book called The Monsanto Papers, which chronicles the story of how one of the biggest companies in the world destroyed the reputation of scientists who were critical of their weed killer, Roundup. In this episode, we talk to Dr. E. about his story, and the tactics used by the company to smear his research, and how they got him to retract an article that was critical of one of their biggest weed killers,Roundup. Dr. Ceralini also talks about how he and his co-counsel, Catherine Forgy, took on the company and won a landmark court case against them, and why we should all be worried about the dangers of Roundup and other weed killers like it. This episode is brought to you by LaCie and the Center for Food Safety, and edited by Vanessa Blanchard and Annie-Rose Strasser. Thank you for listening and supporting our mission to fight for transparency and open the door to a better future for all of our patients. and all of the people who need to know the truth about what's really going on in the weeds we eat and grow on our land. We hope you enjoy this episode and share it with your friends, family, colleagues and the ones you care enough to share it on social media. Thank you so much for being a part of the fight against the fight to protect our planet and our planet. . It means a lot to us, and we will never stop fighting for what we need to protect the truth and fight for the truth. We will always be fighting for the little people in order to live in the fight for a better world. , and we hope you do not only for us to have access to the truth, not just for ourselves, but for ourselves to have a voice in the real world to make a voice that s a voice to be heard in the next generation to speak out about what matters in our everyday life in a world that matters, not only in our world, and that we all have a say in our day to speak up for our future, and not just in our words, and our voices are heard in our own. - Let s talk about it, and in our power to speak for us all, and everyone s voice, everywhere we need a voice, and they get a voice heard in their power to say the truth in the future.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, it's my pleasure to have as my guest today a figure that anybody who is familiar with the regulation of Dr.
00:00:11.000Chemicals knows his name well, Professor Giles Eric Seralini.
00:00:16.000He's a French professor and I'm going to tell you a little bit about How I ran into Professor Sperlini in 2013, a couple of years before the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer analyzed Monsanto's weed killer and found it to be a probable human carcinogen,
00:00:37.000a technical chemical journal retracted a well-known article about a group of rats that had been fed Roundup, Monsanto's weed killer, and developed cancer.
00:00:49.000The author of that article was Professor Seralini, and he had done something that nobody else had dared to do.
00:00:56.000Monsanto had used a bunch of tame scientists that we call biostitutes to do similar studies on rats, but all of those studies only lasted for 90 days.
00:01:10.000And we know that cancer does not develop in rats the following exposure, typically for 100 days.
00:01:17.000By limiting their bodies to 90 days, they were able to pretend that Roundup didn't cause cancer.
00:01:26.000And Professor Ceralini had done something nobody else dared to do, which is to take the exact same test that Monsanto did for 90 days and do it for two years instead, which was the typical life span of a rat.
00:01:40.000And he found that 80% of the rats that consumed Roundup developed tumors compared to 30% in the control group.
00:01:49.000Not only that, but the tumors in the rats were 130% larger.
00:01:54.000We now know because of the case that we brought with the Baum-Hedlund law firm that I was privileged to be co-counseling on, We got hundreds of thousands of pages from Monsanto that are called the Monsanto papers.
00:02:08.000And we took those papers and had them unsealed.
00:02:12.000And for the first time we saw Monsanto's internal communications And we saw their strategy for destroying Professor Zeralini's reputation and getting his article retracted.
00:02:28.000Monsanto had employed former intelligence agents and other hitmen.
00:02:35.000Destroy the reputations of scientists and to get retractions from the journals.
00:02:41.000It had a number of strategies and it called those strategies.
00:02:45.000Each one of those strategies was designed to make sure that Monsanto, that roundup, was not harmed by the scientists.
00:02:53.000One of the strategies was called Let Nothing Go.
00:02:57.000Another one was called Freedom to Operate, or FTO. Another was called Whack-A-Mole.
00:03:03.000In other words, every time a scientist would pop his head over the barricades and publish a study that showed that a roundup was unsafe, they would whack him.
00:03:14.000Project Spruce was another one, and all of them were implemented by these barricades.
00:03:23.000Black Ops spies, including former members of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
00:03:30.000And the key target was Professor Ceralini, who does not take corporate money.
00:04:10.000A new book called The Monsanto Papers, which discloses and chronicles your tale and the tale of all of these other scientists who got crushed by Monsanto over the years.
00:04:42.000I've been working during more than 30 years on these topics to understand how the pollution, and in particular due to GMOs and pesticides, how the pollution is killing people on the long run, making not only cancers, but also immune disease, under crying and nervous diseases, And all kinds of chronic pathologies we are most of us suffering from.
00:05:09.000So my research was on that and I was also hired by the French government to be an expert on GMOs.
00:05:16.000And then I discovered that something was going wrong in this topic because they were not making the good experiments and they were not Really interpreting truly the results.
00:05:33.000So I already had several court affairs to make the transparency on that.
00:05:39.000And when Beaumedun cabinet came to me, Catherine Forgy, in fact, in Normandy, to visit my university and To ask, what can we do to prove that all our patients do suffer from Roundup, the biggest herbicide in the world?
00:05:58.000I said, well, you should first look at what Monsanto has done.
00:06:03.000And they worked on the Monsanto papers.
00:06:10.000I was myself working on the topic since 30 years.
00:06:14.000And then we had The deepest investigation that I know of about one of the biggest big pharma companies in the world to understand how they can know about the crimes that they are doing.
00:06:31.000We did an investigation in 2.5 million pages and I was cited 56,000 times in these pages.
00:06:41.000So they crossed everything with my research to hide And as an investigator, my The goal was only the transparency on this.
00:06:53.000We discovered that they knew that they were making crimes, that they were having toxic products with the round of the main herbicide of the world, but not only, with also the GMOs that were transformed, that were modified in order to contain this pesticide, that people do not really always understand that.
00:07:20.000That most of the GMOs are modified to contain a lot of from that, to be tolerant to it.
00:07:29.000So, let me just explain that to our listeners.
00:07:33.000Originally, when we were told that we could genetically modify food, the big GMO companies were saying, when you do this, it's going to reduce the amount of pesticides that you use.
00:07:47.000You're going to have food that creates bigger kernels of corn, larger strawberries.
00:07:53.000Higher quality food, more meat, more of everything, and great abundance of cornucopia, of the green revolution, without chemicals.
00:08:04.000In fact, what GMOs have primarily been used for is to make crops so that they're tolerant of pesticides.
00:08:13.000You put a gene in a corn seed That makes it so the pesticides, which will kill anything that's green, will not kill that corn.
00:08:27.000You can saturate the landscapes from airplanes with this toxin, and the only thing on that landscape that will grow will be the The Roundup Ready corn and Roundup Ready soy and now they have Roundup Ready wheat and barley and sorghum and all of these other plants that are Roundup Ready and they've actually dramatically increased the use of pesticides and the exposures to our children rather than to reduce
00:08:59.000You are fully right that it's really devastating for the environment, but not only.
00:09:04.000Because the plant is itself, the plant does survive either soy or corn or others, obviously rape and so on.
00:09:14.000They do survive with big quantities of these toxic pesticides in the seed, in the plant that we eat or that the animals eat.
00:09:24.000And we have discovered in the book, and this is a revelation, why that works like that.
00:09:32.000In fact, Roundup does contain toxic poisons that have not been declared, and this is completely new, that have not been declared to the authorities.
00:09:43.000And this is why they knew that they made a crime.
00:09:46.000Donna Farmer, the main chief toxicologist from Monsanto, now from Bayer, Who has bought the company, and she works for Bayer, admits that they have never done the...
00:10:07.000In the middle of our trial, Bayer purchased Monsanto for $63 billion.
00:10:13.000Monsanto had a toxicologist that worked for them for very many years who was notorious across the globe as a liar, as a dishonest person who formulates phony studies in order to exonerate exculpity.
00:10:33.000On Santa's chemical arsenal, and her name is Donna Farmer, and she now works for Bayer, so you are saying?
00:10:42.000And what we reveal in the book is that they knew that they made crimes, and we have a new revelation, in fact.
00:10:51.000The new revelation is that Roundup and many pesticides in the world do contain hidden poisons, That are, in fact, made with petroleum waste, petroleum chemical carcinogens.
00:11:05.000So we have understood why this is carcinogenic and why this is underground disrupting.
00:11:11.000And this petroleum waste is recycled in pesticides.
00:11:15.000And GMOs are designed to be able to contain all this chemical toxic waste from petroleum.
00:11:24.000And also, it's spread In the environment, and this explains many cancers.
00:11:31.000And not only, I would like to underline that, the lymphomas, for which Monsanto and Bayer have lost 10 billion in court, but also many other diseases.
00:11:44.000So today, there are about 130,000 patients that are suffering from that, according to the court.
00:11:53.000However, they may be One or two million patients, maybe more, that have suffered from different chronic diseases due to Roundup.
00:12:03.000What you're saying is, in our case, we were only able to address one of the many diseases, which was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
00:12:17.000There are 130,000 clients of all of our law firms who were able to divide the $10 billion that we won from Monsanto slash Bayer.
00:12:29.000But actually what you're saying is the number of people that actually are sick from all the other ingredients and from different diseases is 10 or 20 times that large.
00:12:41.000Maybe larger even, because the nervous disease have joined the story recently and all the degenerative disease that we can see in our polluted world.
00:12:53.000However, this is the first time that we understand how it works.
00:12:58.000Because they are recycling petroleum waste in pesticides.
00:13:04.000I think there is a big secret that not only we have discovered by our research, but which is proven by the Monsanto papers.
00:13:14.000And I understood that because I am at the center of these Monsanto papers in their documents.
00:13:22.000I think that today we can go further to forbid most of the pesticides because they do contain hidden poisons and that we have discovered not only in my research but in the Monsanto papers.
00:13:34.000And this is very important for the future of the world because we can have another agronomy, we can have another agriculture in the world to avoid finally have a devastation on the environment and to avoid to make people hungry and to make people miserable because they do not have enough money to raise enough animals and mammals.
00:14:00.000And not only we have solutions, But we have discovered for the first time the mechanism by which these big pharma companies have hidden the reality.
00:14:11.000And this is, I think, a unique example because before all the court affairs were talking about pollutants one by one, pesticides one by one, but we have discovered something a lot more general in the crimes that they do commit in this system.
00:14:34.000Well, so what you're saying is that the testing that was done by Monsanto addressed only one of the ingredients, and that ingredient was glyphosate.
00:15:25.000For instance, we have demonstrated that in the most recent pesticides that are without glyphosate, but do contain acetic acid or pelargonic acid, there are these hidden poisons that act to intoxicate people and to intoxicate the environment.
00:15:44.000Most of the agencies know them, like benzo-R-Pyrane, which is one of the highest carcinogenic compounds known.
00:15:53.000They are petroleum residues, and these compounds, which are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals, such as arsenic or lead or Nickel and other heavy metals that are used in our industry, they are also recycled in pesticides.
00:16:12.000In fact, a good part of the benefit of these companies comes from the fact that they recycle petroleum waste together with even nanoparticles and plasticizers.
00:16:23.000So we have discovered a crucial point Which is at the center of many problems that we have in our society.
00:16:34.000Because we live, for instance, in the roundup that you cited, there is only 40% glyphosate or anything else.
00:16:42.000But there are 60% of secret compounds.
00:16:45.000And this is a real shame not to put the transparency and the light of this compound, which are by themselves carcinogenic and highly toxic, but not only carcinogenic, nervous toxic at a nervous level, toxic at a nanocrine level, at an immune level, toxic at a nanocrine level, at an immune level, etc.
00:17:03.000And this is really damaging our world, our public health, and the consequences on our world are great.
00:17:14.000We are based on the petroleum system, and to recycle these petroleum residues in our food, finally, is a real crime.
00:17:24.000You know, in the United States, it's difficult for us to see how to solve this problem because the amount of money that is pouring into our political system from onset, from bear, from the chemical industry, from the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry, and they dominate our Congress.
00:18:06.000It begins to be a little different because we have 119 European deputies that have made a group in order to, not a new political group, but an environmental group of people from different parties.
00:18:24.000In order to make the transparency on how the health agencies do to authorize all these products.
00:18:33.000What is special is that we have discovered that it is oil or the petroleum lobby who is able to make crimes to follow on their activities, and they have done many of those.
00:18:48.000That have in fact recycled the petroleum waste, which is numerous, in the food, in the environment, through pesticides.
00:18:56.000These hidden poisons are kept there since the Second World War in these pesticides because there is a secret part of the composition of the pesticide which is not revealed to the public.
00:19:11.000And for the first time with this book, with the Monsanto papers, we have seen that they admit and know that.
00:19:19.000And this is very new and I discovered in the same time with my research These results that I'm publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
00:19:30.000And yes, we have politicians that begin to be aware of the situation.
00:19:35.000They don't know yet how to deal with it.
00:19:37.000And I think that the more there will be light in this story, the more people will find solutions.
00:19:44.000Because we can have, another world is possible, and we can have agronomy and agriculture to feed the world, to feed 15 billion people, In the world, without this petroleum industry, without pesticides, and with permaculture, co-cultures, etc., we know that we can do that.
00:20:06.000This industrial agriculture, using a lot of pesticides, is probably responsible, according to the big scientific corporation, the Honest Corporation, is responsible for 30% of the modification of the climate change.
00:20:23.000So everything is linked because, you know, we spend numerous petroleum in order to eat one kilocalorie consumable of a burger, for instance.
00:20:34.000So we can have another world without consuming so many petroleum, without eating pesticides.
00:20:41.000We don't need to, and people will live better.
00:20:45.000I think we have discovered how they make crimes Since the Second World War, recycling the petroleum waste in the food.
00:20:52.000And we now know that chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides actually reduce productivity, agricultural productivity, and destroy soils permanently.
00:21:05.000We explain also in this book, on the Monsanto Papers and in other books, that we know how to deal with very good systems And that there are solutions to change this petroleum-based agriculture.
00:21:20.000The thing is, people don't know that when they use pesticides, they eat petroleum waste.
00:21:26.000And it is very important that this new light on how the crimes do function in agriculture, that we shed a new light on this system in order to be able to vote clearly in the parliaments, in the world, And we think there are solutions today.
00:22:00.000We needed to read a lot of These papers and we needed to go deep in this investigation in order to understand many details.
00:22:09.000So what's new is that we understood a lot of things.
00:22:14.000Now, with all these discoveries, through research, through the research of my group since 30 years, but also this crust with what the company has done, and this is why they fight against me so much.
00:22:30.000Probably some people linked to them tried to kill me, and at least We say what we know today, but I think there is more.
00:22:45.000I had the chance to survive all this system, but today many people didn't survive in the patients that you helped for this story.
00:22:57.000And again, I underline that non-Hodgkin lymphomas is just a small part of the problem.