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In this report by Reuters the layer for Dewayne Johnson stated:

Brent Wisner, a lawyer for Johnson, in a statement said jurors for the first time had seen internal company documents “proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer.” He called on Monsanto to “put consumer safety first over profits.”

Source: Reuters: Monsanto ordered to pay $289 million in world's first Roundup cancer trial

Did Monsanto know that roundup caused cancer? Which internal documents indicate that this is the case?

Edit

I'm more interested to see if Brent Wisner was lying about internal documents or not. Are these documents publicly available after the court case?

Voltage Spike
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    There is no compelling evidence that Roundup causes cancer (see https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/41997/is-roundup-weed-killer-carcinogenic), therefore, according to the claim, Monsanto would have elements that the scientific community doesn't know about. – Samuel Churlaud Aug 16 '18 at 21:27
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    That is exactly my question in that court case were there *internal documents* of Monsanto that indicated that Monanto knew roundup caused cancer that are *not widely available* but were shown as evidence. – Voltage Spike Aug 16 '18 at 23:01
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    It needs to be noted that, according to press reports, the guy was exposed to Roundup at levels far above "normal" -- the guy virtually bathed in it. Few investigations of the carcinogenic properties of the chemical would assume such high exposure levels, so many study results may be irrelevant. – Daniel R Hicks Aug 17 '18 at 00:21
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    I think a better form of the question would be closer to just "Did Monsanto have internal documents indicating that Roundup/glyphosate was carcinogenic?" The current form, "Did Monsanto know that Roundup caused cancer?" is at least close to a loaded question that presupposes "Roundup causes cancer", while the separate question of whether Monsanto had evidence of it does a better job of being neutral as well as more clearly distinguishing this from the prior question. – Kamil Drakari Aug 17 '18 at 17:38
  • @KamilDrakari if they did have documents, they wouldn't be available to the public. Only in the event of a court case would the documents be show, which I think that this evidence was not shown in court, hence my question. I'm not interested in external documents. I'm more interested to figure out if Brent Wisner is flat out lying or not. – Voltage Spike Aug 17 '18 at 17:53
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    A jury decision doesn't make it so, and even the lawyers wording doesn't establish that it is probably so. Since it's not established, IMO, I'm not sure how one could show that they knew the non-established fact was fact. – PoloHoleSet Aug 17 '18 at 18:22
  • @PoloHoleSet Were studies from Monsanto shown in court? – Voltage Spike Aug 17 '18 at 19:22
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    The trouble with this question in general that, when small studies are done or when many studies are done, some will show a chance association with some cancer or other (for the same reason that sometimes you get 5 heads in a row when tossing an unbiased coin). Roundup has been very widely studied so this is quite likely. But also irrelevant to understanding whether or not it actually causes cancer: for that we need the weight of all evidence not selective quotes from the random studies that showed an association. – matt_black Aug 18 '18 at 10:52
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    Baum Hedlund (the law firm representing the plaintiff) made a number of documents available on their website ([pdf](http://baumhedlundlaw.com/pdf/monsanto-documents/monsanto-documents-chart-101217.pdf), [blog post](https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-roundup-lawsuit/monsanto-secret-documents/) with more verbose description). From skimming the list, there doesn't seem to be any smoking gun, but I did not have time to read through in detail. Also it's unclear if there are other, still sealed documents. – Tgr Aug 18 '18 at 15:28
  • @Matt_black I'm not interested in the content off the documents, just thier existence – Voltage Spike Aug 18 '18 at 17:02
  • Repeating @ Kami @ Polo @ matt: "Has Monsanto had" not: "knew", unpublished evidence, withheld evidence, did they *suppress* unwelcome study results, aborted negative trending studies? . Whether it causes cancer: "We" do not know for sure, but they might only be ever so slightly better "in the know"; or ever so slightly far ahead of the curve to suppress all negative influence on stock performance or profit? – Bottomline: Please try to focus this on either withholding (potential) evidence; or the scrutiny of the documents actually used in court (see @ Tgr for that), – LangLаngС Aug 18 '18 at 18:56
  • @laptop2d The trouble is that "know Roundup causes cancer" in your question assumes that and single studies could provide *proof*. They can't. All the studies we have seen don't show anything unexpected by chance. If Monsanto withheld say 100 studies, we'd expect maybe 5 to show positive association purely by chance. That's not *proof* unless the withheld studies were **very** large and well conducted which I don't think could be suppressed and the lawyers would not have missed. – matt_black Aug 20 '18 at 17:18
  • My point was more that, if there was a study where the conclusion was "it ***could*** cause cancer" that would be as un-definitive a statement as one could make. If I said that the substance "almost certainly does not" cause cancer, that in no way conflicts with "it could cause cancer." That, and juries are notoriously bad at getting the science right in liability cases, at least in the USA adversarial system, where winning takes precedence of getting to the truth and facts, but the idea is that opposing BS will cancel out and the truth will somehow emerge. – PoloHoleSet Aug 22 '18 at 19:36

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