"Like Your Most Paranoid, Far-Out Conspiratorial Left-Wing Nightmare," But It's True... [View all]

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http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/10/you-wont-believe-how-one-chemical-company-tried-to-discredit-a-scientists-research

WE'RE NOT MAKING THIS UP!

You Won’t Believe How One Chemical Company Tried to Discredit a Scientist’s Research

February 10, 2014

Rachel Aviv has a reported piece in The New Yorker that reads like pulp fiction. She tells the tale of a scientist who discovered that a popular herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. As he continued to investigate the matter, he came to believe that the chemical’s manufacturer was out to get him. He thought they were following him to conferences, tapping his phones and systematically trying to drive a wedge between him and the scientific community. Many of his colleagues believed that he was paranoid until a lawsuit yielded a slew of internal corporate documents showing that everything he imagined the company had been doing to discredit his work had in fact been true.

As Kathleen Geier put it for the Washington Monthly, “This story reads like your most paranoid, far-out conspiratorial left-wing nightmare come true.”

Aviv writes:

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

- snip -

Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

ORIGINAL AT: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv