Glyphosate, Deuterium, and COVID-19
By Stephanie Seneff, B.S., M.S., E.E., Ph.D.
For the past eight years, I have been studying glyphosate, the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide, Roundup, and it has taken me this long just to begin to understand the full ramifications of its insidious, cumulative toxic effects.
I have observed a worldwide trend towards upticks in diabetes and obesity, once fast food from the West becomes widely available in a given country. Typically, autism rates start going up as well, and then Alzheimer’s starts showing up more prevalently in younger and younger populations, as we are now observing in the United States and other Western countries, where glyphosate has contaminated the food supply for well over two decades.
Glyphosate kills all plants except those that are engineered through GMO technology to resist it. Its main toxic effect to plants is its disruption of the so-called shikimate biological pathway, a pathway that is essential in plants (and in many microbes), but which human cells don’t use at all. This is the main explanation for why it is claimed to be nearly nontoxic to humans. The fact is that its acute toxic effects (very short term) on humans from food exposures are minimal.
What I believe it does that is so insidious and dangerous is that it gets into proteins by mistake in place of the coding amino acid glycine, and, for some proteins, this totally disrupts their ability to do their job. It can even cause the build-up of amyloid beta plaque associated with Alzheimer’s disease [1].
Glyphosate is a pretty simple molecule. It is a complete clone of glycine, except that it has swapped out a hydrogen atom and replaced it with something called a “methylphosphonyl group” (for you chemistry buffs, a methyl is CH3 and phosphonyl is PO(OH)2). The idea that glyphosate substitutes for glycine during protein synthesis was something that was proposed to me by Anthony Samsel in December of 2015. I had thought of this possibility but rejected it, because I mistakenly thought the extra methylphosphonyl group would prevent it from hooking up into the amino acid chain.
However, once he suggested the idea, I took a closer look, and I realized that there is a coding amino acid called proline that, like glyphosate, has a nitrogen atom that attaches to two carbon atoms rather than only one. The extra material in proline doesn’t prevent the nitrogen atom from hooking up to the carboxyl group (COOH) of the adjacent amino acid in the chain. So maybe glyphosate could, too?