Viral speculation: Monsanto’s commission of scientific fraud to capture the regulation of Roundup

Corporations commit scientific fraud to capture regulation. Fraudulent science yields bad law and policy, undermining environmental and public-health regulation based on sound science. Building on Kaurov and Oreskes (2025), this paper traces the regulatory and judicial impact of Greim et al. (2015) (Greim2015)—a Monsanto-ghostwritten article that misrepresents a key study showing a significant relationship between glyphosate exposure and carcinogenicity in mice (Kumar, 2001). Through case-study analysis, I demonstrate how pesticide regulators and courts have uncritically relied on Greim2015 to conclude that glyphosate and Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup pose no unreasonable risks to human health, in contrast to the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) classification of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. These findings illuminate how and why corporations manipulate science, underscoring the need to reform the regulatory and judicial review of science.