It's Friday, August 17th, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date, our weekly recap of

science in the news. I'm And I'm Indravis Gontas. And I'm Keshore Hari. All right, this week, I was

shocked by something. And now, normally I would say, oh, this is where I talk about the Parker

Solar Probe and how amazing that is. But something else really kind of blew my mind this week. And it was

in a legal court. So here in San Francisco, a lawsuit was filed by a groundskeeper at a local school

against Monsanto because he claims that he contracted cancer as a result of being exposed to their

herbicide roundup, which is the most widely used herbicide in the world. And he said over the

course of using this weed killer in the course of his job and having a couple accidents,

that he was exposed to enough

roundup and in conjunction with how that interacted with a bunch of other chemicals in the

roundup itself, not just the active ingredient, that he contracted cancer. This story is very sad

in the sense that he is, they accelerated a trial because

he has terminal cancer, and so he will be passing soon. And so the jury found in favor of

the groundskeeper and awarded $290 million in damages. And why I'm bringing

us up on a science show is that there is a lot of hand-wringing about how the jury came to this

conclusion because the science says they might have come to the wrong conclusion

here. Yeah, I mean, I thought that there was already, you know, a pretty, pretty growing body of

evidence, pretty large body of evidence that Roundup is comparatively safe. Yeah, so there's three

essential big studies that have been done and a bunch of smaller ones. Roundup has been pretty heavily studied. And the active ingredient in Roundup that gets often studied is glyphosate. And so there's been some small animal studies that have been done. Most of them, what they've seen, like most of the concerning ones have shown at a very high dosage.

And I mean like the equivalent of us eating like 30 kilograms of this stuff.

Like so like bathing in it.

We saw some rats develop some adenomas in their kidneys.

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