A jury has awarded $250 million in punitive damages and nearly $40 million in compensatory damages to a former school groundskeeper who alleged in a lawsuit that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, caused him cancer. [1]
The plaintiff, DeWayne Johnson, was seeking $400 million in punitive damages and $39 million in compensatory damages from the biotech company, according to his attorney.
Europe’s highest court ruled July 25 that crops edited with CRISPR technology should face the same tough scrutiny as conventional genetically modified (GM) organisms. [1]
The decision, handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), is a blow to many scientists and other proponents of gene-editing who had hoped that gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 would be exempted from existing European law limiting the planting and sale of GM crops.
As the U.S. Department of Agriculture works to establish a uniform national standard for labeling foods that may be genetically engineered, critics continue to call out the dangers of putting the federal government in charge of the situation. The federal government was first granted this authority in July 2016 when former President Obama signed into law a bill which amended the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 to require the Secretary of Agriculture to establish the national standard for labeling GE foods.
The list seems to grow daily. The multinational ConAgra now joins General Mills, Mars, and Kellogg’s as a company which will label its products if they contain genetically modified ingredients. With Vermont’s mandatory GM labeling bill going into effect this summer, this is a decision more companies will have to make, and soon.
