Monsanto, the maker of the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, filed a motion June 16 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California to reconsider the chemical's addition to California's Proposition 65 list of agents known to cause cancer.

The agrochemical giant made this move based on a June 14 Reuters investigation of Dr. Aaron Blair, a lead researcher on the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) committee, that classified glyphosate as a "2A probable human carcinogen" in March 2015.

On June 22, Monsanto's petition for review and application for stay were denied by the court.

Earlier this year, California became the first state to consider requiring Monsanto to label glyphosate as a chemical "known to the state to cause cancer" in accordance with the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, better known as Prop 65. The designation was compelled by the IARC's glyphosate classification.

Glyphosate is at the center of hundreds of cancer lawsuits in which plaintiffs across the U.S. claim that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma due to exposure to Monsanto's Roundup, pointing in part to the IARC cancer classification.

Syngenta AG was ordered to pay $217.7 million to a group of Kansas farmers who claimed the company carelessly marketed its genetically modified corn seed, causing contamination of U.S. crops and a rejection of export sales to China by officials there.

A Kansas jury issued the verdict Friday in the first trial brought by U.S. farmers alleging Syngenta caused five years of depressed corn prices. Several other trials are pending as lawyers pursue suits on behalf of some 350,000 corn growers claiming as much as $13 billion in losses.

It’s the first time RNA interference will be used to kill insect pests.

DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You don’t spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in the DNA of the crop itself. If a pesky western corn rootworm comes munching, the plant’s self-made DvSnf7 dsRNA disrupts a critical rootworm gene and kills the pest.

This last step is called RNA interference, or RNAi, and the Environmental Protection Agency last week approved the first insecticide relying on it. Just a few years ago, RNAi was the hot, new biotechnology generating both hype and controversy. But its first approval as an insecticide has been surprisingly low-key. The EPA’s decision attracted little attention from the press or even from environmental groups that reliably come out against new genetically modified crops.

The first product DvSnf7 dsRNA will show up in is SmartStax Pro, a line of genetically modified corn seeds made in collaboration between two agricultural giants, Monsanto and Dow. The RNAi part comes from Monsanto, which has its eye on a number of RNAi applications. Monsanto expects corn seed with RNAi to be on the market by the end of this decade.

Arkansas's pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.

"It's fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product," says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.

The tension — which even led to a farmer's murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.

LITTLE ROCK— In response to dozens of new complaints of misuse of the highly toxic and drift-prone pesticide dicamba, an Arkansas regulatory committee today recommended an emergency ban of the controversial pesticide that has spurred three lawsuits and a dispute that led to the murder of an Arkansas farmer.

If the Arkansas Pesticide Committee’s recommendation is approved on Tuesday by the Arkansas State Plant Board, as well as by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the ban on in-crop uses of the pesticide will be immediate.

“What we’re seeing in Arkansas is proof of what we all already knew — that this dangerous, drift-prone pesticide is not safe to use,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Assurances from pesticide makers that new dicamba products and tighter application regulations would end the drift problems that damaged hundreds of thousands of acres simply ignored reality.”

CAPE CORAL, Fla. -

More than 1,000 people claim a product that's still on store shelves has given them cancer.

Multiple class action lawsuits plague the maker of the popular weed killer, Roundup. Monsanto vehemently denies its product makes people sick.

But the NBC2 Investigators talked with a Cape Coral man who said the weed killer nearly killed him.

More than 50 complaints of crops damaged by dicamba herbicide drifting from neighboring farm fields have been reported to the Arkansas State Plant Board so far in 2017.

That number is up sharply from 2016, in which 32 dicamba drift complaints were filed in the entire year, said Tom Barber, extension weed scientist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

Among the damaged crops are some 100 acres of soybeans in Division of Agriculture research plots at the Northeast Research and Extension Center at Keiser in Mississippi County.

Ironically, those soybean plots were part of research by Division of Agriculture weed scientist Jason Norsworthy on dicamba drift and volatility.

The dicamba drift and volatility trials, for herbicide products from Monsanto and Syngenta, are needed before the products can be certified for use in Arkansas, Norsworthy said. The damage from unexpected dicamba drift interrupted the trials, making Norsworthy’s data useless in most of the plots unless he replants and starts over.

In 2012, Jennifer Doudna, along with a small group of scientists, invented a ground-breaking technology to edit DNA known as Crispr. Scientists are still experimenting with it.

Crispr has been in the news recently because a group of scientists released a much-debated study arguing that editing genes can lead to many unintended, unpredictable consequences. In the controversial case, the scientists edited genetic blindness out of a group of mice and said they found two thousand unintended consequences. The scientific community is split on the results, and Doudna said it's hard to conclude anything from the study. But she knows the possible dangers of gene editing, and she warned about them in a Wired article in May.

Marketplace's senior tech correspondent Molly Wood spoke with Doudna at the Wired Business Conference in New York earlier this month and asked Doudna what concerns her the most about her revolutionary new technology?

In January this year, two US agencies proposed the first substantial overhaul in 30 years of how they regulate genetically altered crops and livestock. Some plant scientists expressed relief. Some animal researchers used more colourful language.

The proposals — one to govern plants, the other to govern animals — came to wildly different conclusions. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) suggests that many plants whose genomes have been altered by a single DNA letter change should not need approval before being released in the field. However, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) contends that animals whose genomes have been similarly changed might have to go through a rigorous evaluation before being released onto the market.

Although CRISPR can precisely target specific stretches of DNA, it sometimes hits other parts of the genome, causing DNA mutations that are not predicted by the computer algorithms that are widely used by researchers to look for off-target effects.

In the article below we see the typical honesty with which off-target effects of the CRISPR gene editing technique are discussed in the medical research field.

In the area of plant biotechnology, it’s a completely different story. GMO proponents dishonestly claim a precision, a predictability, and a controllability for the technology that remains theoretical and unproven.

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