A scientific study that regulators around the world relied on for decades to justify continued approval of glyphosate was quietly retracted last Friday over serious ethical issues including secret authorship by Monsanto employees " raising questions about the pesticide-approval process in the U.S. and globally. The April 2000 study by Gary Williams, Robert Kroes and Ian Munro " which concluded glyphosate does not pose a health risk to humans at typical exposure levels " was ghostwritten by Monsanto employees, and was "based solely on unpublished studies from Monsanto," wrote Martin van den Berg, co-editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. It also ignored "multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies" that were available at the time. Some of the study authors may also have received undisclosed financial compensation from Monsanto, he noted. The retraction came years after internal corporate documents first revealed in 2017 that Monsanto employees were heavily involved in drafting the paper. "What took them so long to retract it?" asked Michael Hansen, senior scientist of advocacy at Consumer Reports. The ghostwritten paper is in the top 0.1% of citations among academic papers discussing glyphosate. The retraction exposes the flaws of a regulatory system that relies heavily on corporate research, and an academic publishing system that is often used as a tool for corporate product defense.