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.”
Three years earlier,
Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to
conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than
half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already
published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a
professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest
potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine
might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became
strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.
Hayes continued
studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta
representatives were following him to conferences around the world. He worried
that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. He
complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back
of the room, taking notes. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at
a different hotel each night. He was still in touch with a few Syngenta
scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and
his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. To confuse them,
he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while
he was travelling. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents
in sealed boxes. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had
“risked my reputation, my name . . . some say even my life, for what I thought
(and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that
anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In
another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was
suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”
For years, despite his
achievements, Hayes had felt like an interloper. In academic settings, it
seemed to him that his colleagues were operating according to a frivolous code
of manners: they spoke so formally, fashioning themselves as detached
authorities, and rarely admitted what they didn’t know. He had grown up in
Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of
residents finish high school. Until sixth grade, when he was accepted into a
program for the gifted, in a different neighborhood, he had never had a conversation
with a white person his age. He and his friends used to tell one another how
“white people do this, and white people do that,” pretending that they knew.
After he switched schools and took advanced courses, the black kids made fun of
him, saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s white.”
He was fascinated by
the idea of metamorphosis, and spent much of his adolescence collecting
tadpoles and frogs and crossbreeding different species of grasshoppers. He
raised frog larvae on his parents’ front porch, and examined how lizards
respond to changes in temperature (by using a blow-dryer) and light (by placing
them in a doghouse). His father, a carpet layer, used to look at his
experiments, shake his head, and say, “There’s a fine line between a genius and
a fool.”
Hayes received a
scholarship to Harvard, and, in 1985, began what he calls the worst four years
of his life. Many of the other black students had gone to private schools and
came from affluent families. He felt disconnected and ill-equipped—he was
placed on academic probation—until he became close to a biology professor, who
encouraged him to work in his lab. Five feet three and thin, Hayes
distinguished himself by dressing flamboyantly, like Prince. The Harvard
Crimson, in an article about a campus party, wrote that he looked as if he
belonged in the “rock-’n’-ready atmosphere of New York’s Danceteria.” He
thought about dropping out, but then he started dating a classmate, Katherine
Kim, a Korean-American biology major from Kansas. He married her two days after
he graduated.
They moved to Berkeley,
where Hayes enrolled in the university’s program in integrative biology. He
completed his Ph.D. in three and a half years, and was immediately hired by his
department. “He was a force of nature—incredibly gifted and hardworking,” Paul
Barber, a colleague who is now a professor at U.C.L.A., says. Hayes became one
of only a few black tenured biology professors in the country. He won
Berkeley’s highest award for teaching, and ran the most racially diverse lab in
his department, attracting students who were the first in their families to go
to college. Nigel Noriega, a former graduate student, said that the lab was a
“comfort zone” for students who were “just suffocating at Berkeley,” because
they felt alienated from academic culture.
Hayes had become
accustomed to steady praise from his colleagues, but, when Syngenta cast doubt
on his work, he became preoccupied by old anxieties. He believed that the
company was trying to isolate him from other scientists and “play on my
insecurities—the fear that I’m not good enough, that everyone thinks I’m a
fraud,” he said. He told colleagues that he suspected that Syngenta held “focus
groups” on how to mine his vulnerabilities. Roger Liu, who worked in Hayes’s
lab for a decade, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, said, “In
the beginning, I was really worried for his safety. But then I couldn’t tell
where the reality ended and the exaggeration crept in.”
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.”
Syngenta, which is
based in Basel, sells more than fourteen billion dollars’ worth of seeds and
pesticides a year and funds research at some four hundred academic institutions
around the world. When Hayes agreed to do experiments for the company (which at
that time was part of a larger corporation, Novartis), the students in his lab expressed
concern that biotech companies were “buying up universities” and that industry
funding would compromise the objectivity of their research. Hayes assured them
that his fee, a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, would make their lab
more rigorous. He could employ more students, buy new equipment, and raise more
frogs. Though his lab was well funded, federal support for research was growing
increasingly unstable, and, like many academics and administrators, he felt
that he should find new sources of revenue. “I went into it as if I were a
painter, performing a service,” Hayes told me. “You commissioned it, and I come
up with the results, and you do what you want with them. It’s your
responsibility, not mine.”
Atrazine is the second
most widely used herbicide in the U.S., where sales are estimated at about
three hundred million dollars a year. Introduced in 1958, it is cheap to
produce and controls a broad range of weeds. (Glyphosate, which is produced by
Monsanto, is the most popular herbicide.) A study by the Environmental
Protection Agency found that without atrazine the national corn yield would
fall by six per cent, creating an annual loss of nearly two billion dollars.
But the herbicide degrades slowly in soil and often washes into streams and
lakes, where it doesn’t readily dissolve. Atrazine is one of the most common
contaminants of drinking water; an estimated thirty million Americans are
exposed to trace amounts of the chemical.
In 1994, the E.P.A.,
expressing concerns about atrazine’s health effects, announced that it would
start a scientific review. Syngenta assembled a panel of scientists and
professors, through a consulting firm called EcoRisk, to study the herbicide.
Hayes eventually joined the group. His first experiment showed that male
tadpoles exposed to atrazine developed less muscle surrounding their vocal
cords, and he hypothesized that the chemical had the potential to reduce
testosterone levels. “I have been losing lots of sleep over this,” he wrote one
EcoRisk panel member, in the summer of 2000. “I realize the implications and of
course want to make sure that everything possible has been done and controlled
for.” After a conference call, he was surprised by the way the company kept
critiquing what seemed to be trivial aspects of the work. Hayes wanted to
repeat and validate his experiments, and complained that the company was
slowing him down and that independent scientists would publish similar results
before he could. He decided to resign from the panel, writing in a letter that
he didn’t want to be “scooped.” “I fear that my reputation will be damaged if I
continue my relationship and associated low productivity with Novartis,” he
wrote. “It will appear to my colleagues that I have been part of a plan to bury
important data.”
Hayes repeated the
experiments using funds from Berkeley and the National Science Foundation.
Afterward, he wrote to the panel, “Although I do not want to make a big deal
out of it until I have all of the data analyzed and decoded—I feel I should
warn you that I think something very strange is coming up in these animals.”
After dissecting the frogs, he noticed that some could not be clearly
identified as male or female: they had both testes and ovaries. Others had
multiple testes that were deformed.
In January, 2001,
Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to
discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but
Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife.
He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed
taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting,
in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were
hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered
meals.
After lunch, Syngenta
introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous
errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically
significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be
trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology
professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly
uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the
statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A
couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve
been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never
experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”
Hayes later e-mailed
three of the scientists, telling them, “I was insulted, felt railroaded and, in
fact, felt that some dishonest and unethical activity was going on.” When he
explained what had happened to Theo Colborn, the scientist who had popularized
the theory that industrial chemicals could alter hormones, she advised him,
“Don’t go home the same way twice.” Colborn was convinced that her office had
been bugged, and that industry representatives followed her. She told Hayes to
“keep looking over your shoulder” and to be careful whom he let in his lab. She
warned him, “You have got to protect yourself.”
Hayes published his
atrazine work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a year and
a half after quitting the panel. He wrote that what he called “hermaphroditism”
was induced in frogs by exposure to atrazine at levels thirty times below what
the E.P.A. permits in water. He hypothesized that the chemical could be a
factor in the decline in amphibian populations, a phenomenon observed all over
the world. In an e-mail sent the day before the publication, he congratulated
the students in his lab for taking the “ethical stance” by continuing the work
on their own. “We (and our principles) have been tested, and I believe we have
not only passed but exceeded expectations,” he wrote. “Science is a principle
and a process of seeking truth. Truth cannot be purchased and, thus, truth
cannot be altered by money. Professorship is not a career, but rather a life’s
pursuit. The people with whom I work daily exemplify and remind me of this
promise.”
He and his students
continued the work, travelling to farming regions throughout the Midwest,
collecting frogs in ponds and lakes, and sending three hundred pails of frozen
water back to Berkeley. In papers in Nature and in Environmental Health
Perspectives, Hayes reported that he had found frogs with sexual abnormalities
in atrazine-contaminated sites in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming. “Now that
I have realized what we are into, I cannot stop it,” he wrote to a colleague.
“It is an entity of its own.” Hayes began arriving at his lab at 3:30 A.M. and
staying fourteen hours. He had two young children, who sometimes assisted by
color-coding containers.
According to company
e-mails, Syngenta was distressed by Hayes’s work. Its public-relations team
compiled a database of more than a hundred “supportive third party
stakeholders,” including twenty-five professors, who could defend atrazine or
act as “spokespeople on Hayes.” The P.R. team suggested that the company
“purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time
someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our
material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian
hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for
“Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not
Credible.”)
In June, 2002, two
months after Hayes’s first atrazine publication, Syngenta announced in a press
release that three studies had failed to replicate Hayes’s work. In a letter to
the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eight
scientists on the EcoRisk panel wrote that Hayes’s study had “little regard for
assessment of causality,” lacked statistical details, misused the term “dose,”
made vague and naïve references, and misspelled a word. They said that Hayes’s
claim that his paper had “significant implications for environmental and public
health” had not been “scientifically demonstrated.” Steven Milloy, a freelance
science columnist who runs a nonprofit organization to which Syngenta has given
tens of thousands of dollars, wrote an article for Fox News titled “Freaky-Frog
Fraud,” which picked apart Hayes’s paper in Nature, saying that there wasn’t a
clear relationship between the concentration of atrazine and the effect on the
frog. Milloy characterized Hayes as a “junk scientist” and dismissed his “lame”
conclusions as “just another of Hayes’ tricks.”
Fussy critiques of
scientific experiments have become integral to what is known as the “sound
science” campaign, an effort by interest groups and industries to slow the pace
of regulation. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational
Safety and Health, wrote, in his book “Doubt Is Their Product” (2008), that
corporations have developed sophisticated strategies for “manufacturing and
magnifying uncertainty.” In the eighties and nineties, the tobacco industry
fended off regulations by drawing attention to questions about the science of
secondhand smoke. Many companies have adopted this tactic. “Industry has
learned that debating the science is much easier and more effective than
debating the policy,” Michaels wrote. “In field after field, year after year,
conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are
deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not
reliable.”
In the summer of 2002,
two scientists from the E.P.A. visited Hayes’s lab and reviewed his atrazine
data. Thomas Steeger, one of the scientists, told Hayes, “Your research can
potentially affect the balance of risk versus benefit for one of the most
controversial pesticides in the U.S.” But an organization called the Center for
Regulatory Effectiveness petitioned the E.P.A. to ignore Hayes’s findings.
“Hayes has killed and continues to kill thousands of frogs in unvalidated tests
that have no proven value,” the petition said. The center argued that Hayes’s
studies violated the Data Quality Act, passed in 2000, which requires that
regulatory decisions rely on studies that meet high standards for “quality,
objectivity, utility, and integrity.” The center is run by an industry lobbyist
and consultant for Syngenta, Jim Tozzi, who proposed the language of the Data
Quality Act to the congresswoman who sponsored it.
The E.P.A. complied
with the Data Quality Act and revised its Environmental Risk Assessment, making
it clear that hormone disruption wouldn’t be a legitimate reason for
restricting use of the chemical until “appropriate testing protocols have been
established.” Steeger told Hayes that he was troubled by the circularity of the
center’s critique. In an e-mail, he wrote, “Their position reminds me of the
argument put forward by the philosopher Berkeley, who argued against empiricism
by noting that reliance on scientific observation is flawed since the link
between observations and conclusions is intangible and is thus immeasurable.”
Nonetheless, Steeger
seemed resigned to the frustrations of regulatory science and gently punctured
Hayes’s idealism. When Hayes complained that Syngenta had not reported his
findings on frog hermaphroditism quickly enough, he responded that it was
“unfortunate but not uncommon for registrants to ‘sit’ on data that may be
considered adverse to the public’s perception of their products.” He wrote that
“science can be manipulated to serve certain agendas. All you can do is
practice ‘suspended disbelief.’ ” (The E.P.A. says that there is “no indication
that information was improperly withheld in this case.”)
After consulting with
colleagues at Berkeley, Hayes decided that, rather than watch Syngenta
discredit his work, he would make a “preëmptive move.” He appeared in features
in Discover and the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that Syngenta’s science
was not objective. Both articles focussed on his personal biography, leading
with his skin color, and moving on to his hair style: at the time, he wore his
hair in braids. Hayes made little attempt to appear disinterested. Scientific
objectivity requires what the philosopher Thomas Nagel has called a “view from
nowhere,” but Hayes kept drawing attention to himself, making blustery comments
like “Tyrone can only be Tyrone.” He presented Syngenta as a villain, but he
didn’t quite fulfill the role of the hero. He was hyper and a little frantic—he
always seemed to be in a rush or on the verge of forgetting to do something—and
he approached the idea of taking down the big guys with a kind of juvenile
zeal.
Environmental activists
praised Hayes’s work and helped him get media attention. But they were
concerned by the bluntness of his approach. A co-founder of the Environmental
Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, told Hayes to “stop what you
are doing and take time to actually construct a plan” or “you will get your ass
handed to you on a platter.” Steeger warned him that vigilantism would distract
him from his research. “Can you afford the time and money to fight battles
where you are clearly outnumbered and, to be candid, outclassed?” he asked.
“Most people would prefer to limit their time in purgatory; I don’t know anyone
who knowingly enters hell.”
Hayes had worked all
his life to build his scientific reputation, and now it seemed on the verge of
collapse. “I cannot in reasonable terms explain to you what this means to me,”
he told Steeger. He took pains to prove that Syngenta’s experiments had not
replicated his studies: they used a different population of animals, which were
raised in different types of tanks, in closer quarters, at cooler temperatures,
and with a different feeding schedule. On at least three occasions, he proposed
to the Syngenta scientists that they trade data. “If we really want to test
repeatability, let’s share animals and solutions,” he wrote.
“I’ve been thinking,
maybe you’d like to keepsome of your rocks here in my cave.”
In early 2003, Hayes
was considered for a job at the Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke. He
visited the campus three times, and the university arranged for a real-estate
agent to show him and his wife potential homes. When Syngenta learned that
Hayes might be moving to North Carolina, where its crop-protection headquarters
are situated, Gary Dickson—the company’s vice-president of global risk
assessment, who a year earlier had established a fifty-thousand-dollar
endowment, funded by Syngenta, at the Nicholas School—contacted a dean at Duke.
According to documents unsealed in the class-action lawsuits, Dickson informed
the dean of the “state of the relationship between Dr. Hayes and Syngenta.” The
company “wanted to protect our reputation in our community and among our
employees.”
There were several
candidates for the job at Duke, and, when Hayes did not get it, he concluded
that it was due to Syngenta’s influence. Richard Di Giulio, a Duke professor
who had hosted Hayes’s first visit, said that he was irritated by Hayes’s
suggestion: “A little gift of fifty thousand dollars would not influence a
tenure hire. That’s not going to happen.” He added, “I’m not surprised that
Syngenta would not have liked Hayes to be at Duke, since we’re an hour down the
road from them.” He said that Hayes’s conflict with Syngenta was an extreme
example of the kind of dispute that is not uncommon in environmental science.
The difference, he said, was that the “scientific debate spilled into Hayes’s
emotional life.”
In June, 2003, Hayes
paid his own way to Washington so that he could present his work at an E.P.A.
hearing on atrazine. The agency had evaluated seventeen studies. Twelve
experiments had been funded by Syngenta, and all but two showed that atrazine
had no effect on the sexual development of frogs. The rest of the experiments,
by Hayes and researchers at two other universities, indicated the opposite. In
a PowerPoint presentation at the hearing, Hayes disclosed a private e-mail sent
to him by one of the scientists on the EcoRisk panel, a professor at Texas
Tech, who wrote, “I agree with you that the important issue is for everyone involved
to come to grips with (and stop minimizing) the fact that independent
laboratories have demonstrated an effect of atrazine on gonadal differentiation
in frogs. There is no denying this.”
The E.P.A. found that
all seventeen atrazine studies, including Hayes’s, suffered from methodological
flaws—contamination of controls, variability in measurement end points, poor
animal husbandry—and asked Syngenta to fund a comprehensive experiment that
would produce more definitive results. Darcy Kelley, a member of the E.P.A.’s
scientific advisory panel and a biology professor at Columbia, said that, at
the time, “I did not think the E.P.A. made the right decision.” The studies by
Syngenta scientists had flaws that “really cast into doubt their ability to
carry out their experiments. They couldn’t replicate effects that are as easy
as falling off a log.” She thought that Hayes’s experiments were more
respectable, but she wasn’t persuaded by Hayes’s explanation of the biological
mechanism causing the deformities.
The E.P.A. approved the
continued use of atrazine in October, the same month that the European
Commission chose to remove it from the market. The European Union generally
takes a precautionary approach to environmental risks, choosing restraint in
the face of uncertainty. In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify
delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued
regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more
than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the
American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the
scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a
monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and
weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling,
the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate
administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit
models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of
politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of
risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget,
which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A
rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and
then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible,
demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”
In 2003, a Syngenta
development committee in Basel approved a strategy to keep atrazine on the
market “until at least 2010.” A PowerPoint presentation assembled by Syngenta’s
global product manager explained that “we need atrazine to secure our position
in the corn marketplace. Without atrazine we cannot defend and grow our
business in the USA.” Sherry Ford, the communications manager, wrote in her
notebook that the company “should not phase out atz until we know about” the
Syngenta herbicide paraquat, which has also been controversial, because of
studies showing that it might be associated with Parkinson’s disease. She noted
that atrazine “focuses attention away from other products.”
Syngenta began holding
weekly “atrazine meetings” after the first class-action suit was filed, in
2004. The meetings were attended by toxicologists, the company’s counsel,
communications staff, and the head of regulatory affairs. To dampen negative
publicity from the lawsuit, the group discussed how it could invalidate Hayes’s
research. Ford documented peculiar things he had done (“kept coat on”) or
phrases he had used (“Is this line clean?”). “If TH wanted to win the day, and
he had the goods,” she wrote, “he would have produced them when asked.” She
noted that Hayes was “getting in too deep w/ enviros,” and searched for ways to
get him to “show his true colors.”
In 2005, Ford made a
long list of methods for discrediting him: “have his work audited by 3rd
party,” “ask journals to retract,” “set trap to entice him to sue,” “investigate
funding,” “investigate wife.” The initials of different employees were written
in the margins beside entries, presumably because they had been assigned to
look into the task. Another set of ideas, discussed at several meetings, was to
conduct “systematic rebuttals of all TH appearances.” One of the company’s
communications consultants said in an e-mail that she wanted to obtain Hayes’s
calendar of speaking engagements, so that Syngenta could “start reaching out to
the potential audiences with the Error vs. Truth Sheet,” which would provide
“irrefutable evidence of his polluted messages.” (Syngenta says that many of
the documents unsealed in the lawsuits refer to ideas that were never
implemented.)
To redirect attention
to the financial benefits of atrazine, the company paid Don Coursey, a tenured
economist at the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago,
five hundred dollars an hour to study how a ban on the herbicide would affect
the economy. In 2006, Syngenta supplied Coursey with data and a “bundle of
studies,” and edited his paper, which was labelled as a Harris School Working
Paper. (He disclosed that Syngenta had funded it.) After submitting a draft,
Coursey had been warned in an e-mail that he needed to work harder to
articulate a “clear statement of your conclusions flowing from this analysis.”
Coursey later announced his findings at a National Press Club event in
Washington and told the audience that there was one “basic takeaway point: a
ban on atrazine at the national level will have a devastating, devastating
effect upon the U.S. corn economy.”
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Hayes had been promoted
from associate to full professor in 2003, an achievement that had sent him into
a mild depression. He had spent the previous decade understanding his
self-worth in reference to a series of academic milestones, and he had reached
each one. Now he felt aimless. His wife said she could have seen him settling
into the life of a “normal, run-of-the-mill, successful scientist.” But he
wasn’t motivated by the idea of “writing papers and books that we all just
trade with each other.”
He began giving more
than fifty lectures a year, not just to scientific audiences but to policy
institutes, history departments, women’s health clinics, food preparers,
farmers, and high schools. He almost never declined an invitation, despite the
distance. He told his audiences that he was defying the instructions of his
Ph.D. adviser, who had told him, “Let the science speak for itself.” He had a
flair for sensational stories—he chose phrases like “crime scene” and
“chemically castrated”—and he seemed to revel in details about Syngenta’s
conflicts of interest, presenting theories as if he were relating gossip to
friends. (Syngenta wrote a letter to Hayes and his dean, pointing out
inaccuracies: “As we discover additional errors in your presentations, you can expect
us to be in touch with you again.”)
At his talks, Hayes
noticed that one or two men in the audience were dressed more sharply than the
other scientists. They asked questions that seemed to have been designed to
embarrass him: Why can’t anyone replicate your research? Why won’t you share
your data? One former student, Ali Stuart, said that “everywhere Tyrone went
there was this guy asking questions that made a mockery of him. We called him
the Axe Man.”
Hayes had once
considered a few of the scientists working with Syngenta friends, and he
approached them in a nerdy style of defiance. He wrote them mass e-mails,
informing them of presentations he was giving and offering tips on how to
discredit him. “You can’t approach your prey thinking like a predator,” he
wrote. “You have to become your quarry.” He described a recent trip to South
Carolina and his sense of displacement when “my old childhood friend came by to
update me on who got killed, who’s on crack, who went to jail.” He wrote, “I
have learned to talk like you (better than you . . . by your own admission),
write like you (again better) . . . you however don’t know anyone like me . . .
you have yet to spend a day in my world.” After seeing an e-mail in which a
lobbyist characterized him as “black and quite articulate,” he began signing
his e-mails, “Tyrone B. Hayes, Ph.D., A.B.M.,” for “articulate black man.”
Syngenta was concerned
by Hayes’s e-mails and commissioned an outside contractor to do a
“psychological profile” of Hayes. In her notes, Sherry Ford described him as
“bipolar/manic-depressive” and “paranoid schizo & narcissistic.” Roger Liu,
Hayes’s student, said that he thought Hayes wrote the e-mails to relieve his
anxiety. Hayes often showed the e-mails to his students, who appreciated his rebellious
sense of humor. Liu said, “Tyrone had all these groupies in the lab cheering
him on. I was the one in the background saying, you know, ‘Man, don’t egg them
on. Don’t poke that beast.’ ”
Syngenta intensified
its public-relations campaign in 2009, as it became concerned that activists,
touting “new science,” had developed a “new line of attack.” That year, a paper
in Acta Paediatrica, reviewing national records for thirty million births,
found that children conceived between April and July, when the concentration of
atrazine (mixed with other pesticides) in water is highest, were more likely to
have genital birth defects. The author of the paper, Paul Winchester, a
professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, received
a subpoena from Syngenta, which requested that he turn over every e-mail he had
written about atrazine in the past decade. The company’s media talking points
described his study as “so-called science” that didn’t meet the “guffaw test.”
Winchester said, “We don’t have to argue that I haven’t proved the point. Of
course I haven’t proved the point! Epidemiologists don’t try to prove
points—they look for problems.”
A few months after
Winchester’s paper appeared, the Times published an investigation suggesting
that atrazine levels frequently surpass the maximum threshold allowed in
drinking water. The article referred to recent studies in Environmental Health
Perspectives and the Journal of Pediatric Surgery that found that mothers
living close to water sources containing atrazine were more likely to have
babies who were underweight or had a defect in which the intestines and other
organs protrude from the body.
The day the article
appeared, Syngenta planned to “go through the article line by line and find all
1) inaccuracies and 2) misrepresentations. Turn that into a simple chart.” The
company would have “a credible third party do the same.” Elizabeth Whelan, the
president of the American Council on Science and Health, which asked Syngenta
for a hundred thousand dollars that year, appeared on MSNBC and declared that
the Times article was not based on science. “I’m a public-health professional,”
she said. “It really bothers me very much to see the New York Times front-page
Sunday edition featuring an article about a bogus risk.”
Syngenta’s
public-relations team wrote editorials about the benefits of atrazine and about
the flimsy science of its critics, and then sent them to “third-party allies,”
who agreed to “byline” the articles, which appeared in the Washington Times,
the Rochester Post-Bulletin, the Des Moines Register, and the St. Cloud Times.
When a few articles in the “op-ed pipeline” sounded too aggressive, a Syngenta
consultant warned that “some of the language of these pieces is suggestive of
their source, which suggestion should be avoided at all costs.”
After the Times
article, Syngenta hired a communications consultancy, the White House Writers
Group,
In 2010, Hayes told the
EcoRisk panel in an e-mail, “I have just initiated what will be the most
extraordinary academic event in this battle!” He had another paper coming out
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which described how
male tadpoles exposed to atrazine grew up to be functional females with impaired
fertility. He advised the company that it would want to get its P.R. campaign
up to speed. “It’s nice to know that in this economy I can keep so many people
employed,” he wrote. He quoted both Tupac Shakur and the South African king
Shaka Zulu: “Never leave an enemy behind or it will rise again to fly at your
throat.”
Cartoon
“Would you care for
some fresh-ground pepper and/or a clarinet solo?”
OCTOBER 22, 2012
Syngenta’s head of
global product safety wrote a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences and to the president of the National Academy of
Sciences, expressing concern that a “publication with so many obvious
weaknesses could achieve publication in such a reputable scientific journal.” A
month later, Syngenta filed an ethics complaint with the chancellor of
Berkeley, claiming that Hayes’s e-mails violated the university’s Standards of
Ethical Conduct, particularly Respect for Others. Syngenta posted more than
eighty of Hayes’s e-mails on its Web site and enclosed a few in its letter to
the chancellor. In one, with the subject line “Are y’all ready for it,” Hayes
wrote, “Ya fulla my j*z right now!” In another, he told the Syngenta scientists
that he’d had a drink after a conference with their “republican buddies,” who
wanted to know about a figure he had used in his paper. “As long as you
followin me around, I know I’m da sh*t,” he wrote. “By the way, yo boy left his
pre-written questions at the table!”
Berkeley declined to
take disciplinary action against Hayes. The university’s lawyer reminded
Syngenta in a letter that “all parties have an equal responsibility to act
professionally.” David Wake said that he read many of the e-mails and found
them “quite hilarious.” “He’s treating them like street punks, and they view
themselves as captains of industry,” he said. “When he gets tapped, he goes
right back at them.”
Michelle Boone, a
professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s
scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and
some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t
speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is
the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.” However, she added, “I do
think some people feel he has lost his objectivity.”
Keith Solomon, a
professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has received
funding from Syngenta and served on the EcoRisk panel, noted that academics who
refuse industry money are not immune from biases; they’re under pressure to
produce papers, in order to get tenure and promotions. “If I do an experiment,
look at the data every which way, and find nothing, it will not be easy to
publish,” he said. “Journals want excitement. They want bad things to happen.”
Hayes, who had gained
more than fifty pounds since becoming tenured, wore bright scarves draped over
his suit and silver earrings from Tibet. At the end of his lectures, he broke
into rhyme: “I see a ruse / intentionally constructed to confuse the news /
well, I’ve taken it upon myself to defuse the clues / so that you can choose /
and to demonstrate the objectivity of the methods I use.” At some of his
lectures, Hayes warned that the consequences of atrazine use were
disproportionately felt by people of color. “If you’re black or Hispanic,
you’re more likely to live or work in areas where you’re exposed to crap,” he
said. He explained that “on the one side I’m trying to play by the ivory-tower
rules, and on the other side people are playing by a different set of rules.”
Syngenta was speaking directly to the public, whereas scientists were
publishing their research in “magazines that you can’t buy in Barnes and
Noble.”
Hayes was confident
that at the next E.P.A. hearing there would be enough evidence to ban atrazine,
but in 2010 the agency found that the studies indicating risk to humans were
too limited. Two years later, during another review, the E.P.A. determined that
atrazine does not affect the sexual development of frogs. By that point, there
were seventy-five published studies on the subject, but the E.P.A. excluded the
majority of them from consideration, because they did not meet the requirements
for quality that the agency had set in 2003. The conclusion was based largely
on a set of studies funded by Syngenta and led by Werner Kloas, a professor of
endocrinology at Humboldt University, in Berlin. One of the co-authors was Alan
Hosmer, a Syngenta scientist whose job, according to a 2004 performance
evaluation, included “atrazine defence” and “influencing EPA.”
After the hearing, two
of the independent experts who had served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory
panel, along with fifteen other scientists, wrote a paper (not yet published)
complaining that the agency had repeatedly ignored the panel’s recommendations
and that it placed “human health and the environment at the mercy of industry.”
“The EPA works with industry to set up the methodology for such studies with
the outcome often that industry is the only institution that can afford to
conduct the research,” they wrote. The Kloas study was the most comprehensive
of its kind: its researchers had been scrutinized by an outside auditor, and
their raw data turned over to the E.P.A. But the scientists wrote that one set
of studies on a single species was “not a sufficient edifice on which to build
a regulary assessment.” Citing a paper by Hayes, who had done an analysis of
sixteen atrazine studies, they wrote that “the single best predictor of whether
or not the herbicide atrazine had a significant effect in a study was the
funding source.”
In another paper, in
Policy Perspective, Jason Rohr, an ecologist at the University of South
Florida, who served on an E.P.A. panel, criticized the “lucrative ‘science for
hire’ industry, where scientists are employed to dispute data.” He wrote that a
Syngenta-funded review of the atrazine literature had arguably misrepresented
more than fifty studies and made a hundred and forty-four inaccurate or
misleading statements, of which “96.5% appeared to be beneficial for Syngenta.”
Rohr, who has conducted several experiments involving atrazine, said that, at
conferences, “I regularly get peppered with questions from Syngenta cronies
trying to discount my research. They try to poke holes in the research rather
than appreciate the adverse effects of the chemicals.” He said, “I have
colleagues whom I’ve tried to recruit, and they’ve told me that they’re not
willing to delve into this sort of research, because they don’t want the
headache of having to defend their credibility.”
Deborah Cory-Slechta, a
former member of the E.P.A.’s science advisory board, said that she, too, felt
that Syngenta was trying to undermine her work. A professor at the University
of Rochester Medical Center, Cory-Slechta studies how the herbicide paraquat
may contribute to diseases of the nervous system. “The folks from Syngenta used
to follow me to my talks and tell me I wasn’t using ‘human-relevant doses,’ ”
she said. “They would go up to my students and try to intimidate them. There
was this sustained campaign to make it look like my science wasn’t legitimate.”
Syngenta denied
repeated requests for interviews, but Ann Bryan, its senior manager for
external communications, told me in an e-mail that some of the studies I was
citing were unreliable or unsound. When I mentioned a recent paper in the
American Journal of Medical Genetics, which showed associations between a
mother’s exposure to atrazine and the likelihood that her son will have an
abnormally small penis, undescended testes, or a deformity of the
urethra—defects that have increased in the past several decades—she said that
the study had been “reviewed by independent scientists, who found numerous
flaws.” She recommended that I speak with the author of the review, David
Schwartz, a neuroscientist, who works for Innovative Science Solutions, a
consulting firm that specializes in “product defense” and strategies that “give
you the power to put your best data forward.” Schwartz told me that
epidemiological studies can’t eliminate confounding variables or make claims
about causation. “We’ve been incredibly misled by this type of study,” he said.
Cartoon
“The back of the house?
Didn’t I already show you that?”
MAY 7, 2012
BUY THE PRINT »
In 2012, in its
settlement of the class-action suits, Syngenta agreed to pay a hundred and five
million dollars to reimburse more than a thousand water systems for the cost of
filtering atrazine from drinking water, but the company denies all wrongdoing.
Bryan told me that “atrazine does not and, in fact, cannot cause adverse health
effects at any level that people would ever be exposed to in the real-world
environment.” She wrote that she was “troubled by a suggestion that we have
ever tried to discredit anyone. Our focus has always been on communicating the
science and setting the record straight.” She noted that “virtually every
well-known brand, or even well-known issue, has a communications program behind
it. Atrazine’s no different.”
Last August, Hayes put
his experiments on hold. He said that his fees for animal care had risen
eightfold in a decade, and that he couldn’t afford to maintain his research
program. He accused the university of charging him more than other researchers
in his department; in response, the director of the office of laboratory-animal
care sent detailed charts illustrating that he is charged according to standard
campus-wide rates, which have increased for most researchers in recent years.
In an online Forbes op-ed, Jon Entine, a journalist who is listed in Syngenta’s
records as a supportive “third party,” accused Hayes of being attached to
conspiracy theories, and of leading the “international regulatory community on
a wild goose chase,” which “borders on criminal.”
By late November,
Hayes’s lab had resumed work. He was using private grants to support his
students rather than to pay outstanding fees, and the lab was accumulating
debt. Two days before Thanksgiving, Hayes and his students discussed their
holiday plans. He was wearing an oversized orange sweatshirt, gym shorts, and
running shoes, and a former student, Diana Salazar Guerrero, was eating fries
that another student had left on the table. Hayes encouraged her to come to his
Thanksgiving dinner and to move into the bedroom of his son, who is now a
student at Oberlin. Guerrero had just put down half the deposit on a new
apartment, but Hayes was disturbed by her description of her new roommate. “Are
you sure you can trust him?” he asked.
Hayes had just returned
from Mar del Plata, Argentina. He had flown fifteen hours and driven two
hundred and fifty miles to give a thirty-minute lecture on atrazine. Guerrero
said, “Sometimes I’m just, like, ‘Why don’t you let it go, Tyrone? It’s been
fifteen years! How do you have the energy for this?’ ” With more scientists
documenting the risks of atrazine, she assumed he’d be inclined to move on.
“Originally, it was just this crazy guy at Berkeley, and you can throw the
Berserkley thing at anyone,” she said. “But now the tide is turning.”
In a recent paper in
the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Hayes and twenty-one
other scientists applied the criteria of Sir Austin Bradford Hill, who, in
1965, outlined the conditions necessary for a causal relationship, to atrazine
studies across different vertebrate classes. They argued that independent lines
of evidence consistently showed that atrazine disrupts male reproductive
development. Hayes’s lab was working on two more studies that explore how
atrazine affects the sexual behavior of frogs. When I asked him what he would
do if the E.P.A., which is conducting another review of the safety of atrazine
this year, were to ban the herbicide, he joked, “I’d probably get depressed
again.”
Not long ago, Hayes saw
a description of himself on Wikipedia that he found disrespectful, and he
wasn’t sure whether it was an attack by Syngenta or whether there were simply
members of the public who thought poorly of him. He felt deflated when he
remembered the arguments he’d had with Syngenta-funded pundits. “It’s one thing
if you go after me because you have a philosophical disagreement with my
science or if you think I’m raising alarm where there shouldn’t be any,” he
said. “But they didn’t even have their own opinions. Someone was paying them to
take a position.” He wondered if there was something inherently insane about
the act of whistle-blowing; maybe only crazy people persisted. He was ready for
a fight, but he seemed to be searching for his opponent.
One of his first
graduate students, Nigel Noriega, who runs an organization devoted to
conserving tropical forests, told me that he was still recovering from the
experience of his atrazine research, a decade before. He had come to see
science as a rigid culture, “its own club, an élite society,” Noriega said.
“And Tyrone didn’t conform to the social aspects of being a scientist.” Noriega
worried that the public had little understanding of the context that gives rise
to scientific findings. “It is not helpful to anyone to assume that scientists
are authoritative,” he said. “A good scientist spends his whole career
questioning his own facts. One of the most dangerous things you can do is
believe.”
An earlier version of
this article did not properly credit the organization that produced and co-published
the report with Environmental Health News; it was 100Reporters.
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