The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.

The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week.

The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors.

The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct.”

But the EPA memo concluded that Monsanto and one of its employees—with the financial backing of a consortium of other glyphosate manufacturers—seemed to have contributed key criteria including the “intellectual content” of the report. The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct,” according to the memo, which was written by a US special agent in the EPA Inspector General’s Office’s crimes division. The memo does not make clear whether Monsanto disclosed to the consortium, known officially as the Glyphosate Task Force, that it would be a “ghost writer” on the report.

This is the latest example to emerge of Monsanto’s concerted efforts to sway public understanding of its blockbuster herbicide glyphosate. In December, another influential review article that had found glyphosate to be safe was retracted after the publisher announced the paper’s authors had not disclosed Monsanto’s role. And a Mother Jones investigation about glyphosate being sprayed in forests found other examples of Monsanto’s hand in secretly orchestrating research........

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