Science Can’t Solve the Roundup Cancer Cases. Only a Jury Can.
Maybe an individual would have developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the same age even without exposure to the pesticide. Courts struggle with “maybe.”
In science and in law, the evidence matters.
Photographer: Iroz Gaizka/AFP, via Getty Images
Scientists can’t, for the most part, prove that a given product caused a particular person to get cancer — not the way you can prove, say, that a car with faulty brakes caused a fatal crash. And so when a federal jury in San Francisco District Court decided that the weed killer Roundup was a “substantial factor” in causing someone to get a type of cancer called non-Hodgkins lymphoma, they didn’t actually have proof for the individual case. What they had was evidence that the product was a probable factor in the man’s cancer, based on studies that follow large populations.
Of course science should be the deciding factor in such cases, but there’s no sense in implying that scientists can do the impossible. What scientists and society at large have come to agree upon is that it’s reasonable to award people compensation if it’s more likely than not that they would have avoided the cancer if they’d been able to avoid the product in question. This latest verdict, announced yesterday, is the second in favor of a plaintiff who got cancer after using Roundup, made by Monsanto, which was recently acquired by Bayer. In the first case, the plaintiff was awarded $80 million.