Tyrone hayes bak

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color below

616 capt? txt

where is my sci supp prose?

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odd that oasis doc not online (tho ~ is)

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2020 rodale inst organic award

Hayes, Ph.D.is a Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1989 and his doctorate from the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley in 1993. Hayes’ career has focused on the role of endocrine-disrupting contaminants, particularly pesticides, and their impact on global amphibian declines and public health. This research resulted in a widely known study connecting the herbicide atrazine to the feminization of male frogs. Hayes also studies environmental justice issues associated with targeted exposure of racial and ethnic minorities to chemicals and the role that exposure plays in health care disparities.

"I am proud to be a scientist on the side of something positive,” said Hayes. “Reducing the use of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers in food and agriculture will be key in maintaining healthy environments and food for future generations. I am honored to be recognized in this movement."

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3/17

interview [audio]

https://edgeeffects.net/tyrone-hayes/

Each of us is exposed to a different cocktail of chemicals every day. Growing the food we eat can be a major source of exposure that not all communities face equally. Conventional agriculture is hugely dependent upon the use of specialized chemicals for pest control; the impact of these agrochemicals on the biological systems they interact with, however, is complex. Tyrone Hayes has spent his career untangling these complexities.

As Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Hayes is best known for his researching on the herbicide atrizine and its effects on the hormones and developmental trajectories of frogs. In our recent conversation, Hayes told me about his approach to endocrinology and the high stakes of publishing findings that agribusiness deems controversial. He also offered an inside look into the world of academic funding in the natural sciences, and shared advice to future scientists hoping to achieve the ultimate—research autonomy....

Kate Ivancic: Can you tell us about how your research motivations have changed over the years?

Tyrone Hayes: Underlying my research is the topic of developmental endocrinology, the role of hormones in the development of amphibians. My involvement with endocrine disruptors has shifted me more towards eco-epidemiology and toxicology. Overall, my interests are still in how chemicals like atrazine can alter hormones and then change developmental trajectories. There are still a lot of basic science questions that we don’t understand. For example, nobody knows what hormone, or what gene, or what chemical tells your body to make sperm versus make an egg. Now, we are seeing that when male frogs are exposed to a certain chemical, they get the wrong signal and they make the wrong germ cells. This is still a very basic endocrinology question, and the frogs become an unfortunate tool that we can use to try to address that.

KI: Can you tell us a little about your research with atrazine? In the past, you’ve worked with agribusiness. How has that relationship evolved over the years?

TH: Around 1997, I was contracted to do a literature review of atrazine and its potential as an endocrine disrupter in amphibians. In 1998, I was funded to do research on atrazine, to determine its effects on amphibians. The contract was from the manufacturer of atrazine. We discovered that atrazine inhibited the growth of the voice box and the larynx, indicating that it was somehow reducing testosterone availability. We subsequently discovered that it also caused feminization; it caused either males to grow ovaries or, in some species, males to grow eggs instead of sperm in their testes. We later found that there were behavioral effects, negative impairments to male sexual behavior, that were also associated with atrazine. After the first study, the company pulled back their funding and eventually hired other people to try to prove that our work was somehow wrong. Eventually, they resorted to other types of harassment that continued until a few years ago.

Agricultural use of the herbicide atrazine is heaviest in the corn belt. Map by the US Geological Survey.

KI: Are some communities better able to mitigate the risks of chemical exposure than others? How do you work with affected communities?

TH: It’s very clear that if you’re from an affluent community you have greater access to information, greater access to education and better schools, greater access to organic local produce, and access to money to get better healthcare. You are less likely to work in an area where you are directly exposed to chemicals and other hazards, as opposed to immigrant, low income, or minority communities. You have a better environment, usually, and better access to healthcare, so you keep better track of your health. For example, if you read the papers, they say a risk factor for polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is being white; it is more common in Caucasians. A woman at one of my talks said, “No, it’s just not diagnosed in other groups.” Or, it’s diagnosed as diabetes, which happens subsequent to the PCOS. When they finally catch the PCOS, it’s further along than it would be in the Caucasian community. So, part of the problem is that in low income, minority, or immigrant communities there are more hazards in the environment and less access to information and healthcare.

Another part of the problem is that maybe you don’t even recognize there is a problem. For example, my father did floor-covering. He would come home with his hair white, and say, “Oh, look how work made me old!” His hair was white because he was sanding asbestos. His uncles, who taught him the trade, all died by age 40. If all you know is that men die at 40, you don’t even realize there is a problem. If, in addition, there is a language barrier, and you are living in a community like the agricultural community where people die at 50, you don’t know that there’s anything wrong. That’s just when people die. So, the part of the problem is that you don’t even recognize that there is a problem, because your frame of reference is that everybody is going through life in the same way. Everybody has this many miscarriages—you don’t realize that you’re in an abnormal situation. Within the agricultural community, a significant number of people are undocumented. Even if you are documented, chances are you know people who aren’t. So, even if you recognize there is a problem, you’re not going to complain. You’re not going to bring trouble to your whole community. So, there are a lot of factors that create health disparities.

I had an experience in Marin County, which is a fairly affluent county in California, asked me to come testify about a plan to fly over and drop pheromones to fight light brown apple moth. It’s not that the insect pheromones were really a risk to human health. But I think it was the idea of a plane flying over spraying something that led the community to have this big hearing. I couldn’t testify that it was dangerous, but one of the many reasons I went was to say, “Look, one county over is an agricultural county, and if you were as active in protecting everybody, then nobody would think of flying over and dropping something on you. It takes a threat to your community to spur action, but other communities really are being sprayed with things that are harmful.

KI: How do you steer clear of advocacy battles that seek to use your results for their cause?

TH: I don’t know how to answer that question. I see incredible things on Facebook sometimes, and I think, “I never said that.” I’ll see an interview that I did, for example, and there will be a group that circulates something that claims I said that the government purposefully puts chemicals in the water to turn black men gay, to destroy the black race. I think, “When did I ever say that?” I’ve learned that you can’t engage these kinds of things over Facebook. It never comes out pretty in the end. There’s no way to prevent that. The internet is both incredible for spreading information—things spread really fast. It’s also incredible for spreading misinformation.

I’ve been linked to the vaccination debate, or to chemtrails. There’s this whole theory that the government puts something in commercial airlines’ exhaust that alters the atmosphere. It’s a big thing that lots of people follow. I think because parts of my story are so unbelievable that they get linked to other unbelievable stories that aren’t actually true, and people can’t tell the difference. If I say a company has some sort of influence over the EPA, which happens, then somebody says there are things going on with vaccines, others don’t know how to separate the truth from the theory. This is in part because people don’t have access to the primary literature. For example, maybe a vaccine paper was retracted because the author faked the data. If you don’t have access to the primary literature, you don’t know that. I’ve gotten into these discussions on Facebook, and someone will ask, “After what happened to you, how can’t you see that there are other conspiracies out there?”

Occasionally, I get invitations to things and I’m side-by-side with somebody, and I just think wow. I gave a talk once alongside a guy who had been a medical doctor before getting his license taken away. He claimed that cancer was a fungus that could be cured with baking soda. Part of his angle was that doctors don’t want people to know that, because they make so much money off of cancer, and they’re trying to shut him down. Then I have to give a keynote where I’m saying a company shut my research down, just like this guy. You can understand how somebody who’s not a scientist, who doesn’t have access to the literature, could be confused by the similarities in our claims.

KI: What are your thoughts on the difference between peer-reviewed and industry monographs? Which are better for informing policy?

TH: Without being judgmental, I think industry scientists see their job as to make money, not lose money, for the industry. Having experienced that with the company that hired me for atrazine testing, I think that in some cases that involves being asked to do things which I think are unethical. That’s why I left the company. For others, it depends on how they draw the line as to what’s ethical and what’s not. It could be designing experiments that won’t show anything. They design an experiment so they can say, “We tested this chemical. It did nothing.” I think when you’re looking at industry studies you have to realize that happens. The ones that are being published are the ones that they selectively decide to publish. How they decide to publish them, and how they decide to present them matters, because they’re making money. That’s their job.

I met Johnny Cochran once. Part of his job, if he’s defending somebody, is to bring up evidence and to confuse the jury so that they can’t make a decision. To some extent, that’s what industries do with atrazine. They do studies that say negative effects can’t be replicated. In some cases, they’re outright lying. In other causes, the statement you’ll see from Syngenta all the time says, “We have over 6,000 studies that say that atrazine is safe.” Where are these 6,000 studies? They’re certainly not in the peer-reviewed published literature. The company may very well have 6,000 little things that they call studies.

It doesn’t mean that they’ve done anything to show that my work or other people’s work isn’t valid. But, then the public gets confused because there are 6,000 studies to Hayes’s three. They also use the term “good laboratory practices” for a particular set of standards for how samples are maintained for chain of custody. When they company says, “Hayes doesn’t operate under good laboratory practices,” to the lay person this is confusing. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean I have bad laboratory practices. It means I’m not using these standards, that my lab doesn’t operate on their chain of custody. It doesn’t mean that samples get lost, or that they’re lying around.  But, if you’re a lay person, you don’t know that.

KI: It seems like that’s another barrier to understanding.

TH: It’s also a sign of lack of commitment from academics. For example, when the EPA has their hearings, which I’ve presented at twice, anybody can go. You don’t even have to work on atrazine. You can say you want ten minutes to talk about atrazine and you can go to the hearing. I’m one of the few independent scientists that go to these hearings. There are obviously many people working on atrazine, but you don’t get credit for going to the hearings. You’re not going to pay yourself to fly to D.C. Industries, on the other hand, will fly in scientists that are on the payroll. When I sign in, the university’s position is that I’m representing myself, not the university. So, I can’t sign in with my credentials. I just sign in as Tyrone Hayes. The industry-sponsored scientists all sign in with their universities. If you look at the record, it looks like ten different universities and some guy named Tyrone.

KI: You are a beautiful storyteller. All over the internet you can see wonderful accounts of your research, and your abilities were reflected in your talk today. What are your plans and aspirations for writing some non-academic pieces? Where’s your book?

:{

I think, to be honest, a large part of what happened with Syngenta, had to do with my persona. I used to joke that they had meetings on how to piss off a black person. If you look at their notes, they literally did. They played on things like feelings that I didn’t fit in. They played on the impostor syndrome that minorities and women experience. They played on that, and the way that I would deliver a talk in a scientific meeting. That’s one of the things that made me think screw all that. I’m just going to tell a story just like I would if I were sitting at home with my folks. So, they got the opposite response. I got emails saying, “You’re a scientist, you’re an entertainer—a preacher.” They would make comments about my sexuality, as if I was going to get upset. The more they said things, the more I expressed who I was. }:

At one point, I said to them that I went to Harvard and could sit back and use big vocabulary and wear my Harvard jacket and my tweed suit, but I don’t have to do that. I can do it my way, and that’s even better. Probably if I were younger, and probably if I didn’t have tenure, and probably if I weren’t confident in myself, then I think they would have affected me. I think they’ve probably done the same thing to others.If you think about who the other big environmentalists in this area are—Theo Colborn, Sandra Steingraber, Rachel Carson—I think they too were all attacked for being women and being too nurturing and caring, and not being a scientist, not fitting in. I think there was the same kind of approach to how those scientists were treated.

TH:  I take off every other spring to write that book, and then I end up going to Wisconsin, going to Florida, to give talks. Then it’s time to teach again. So, I’ve thought about this long and hard. I don’t want to write one of those books that academics pass around to each other. I really want to write something that non-academics would pick up too. So, what I’ve written is more autobiographical, but it also talks about the science that’s been a big part of 20 years out of my 50 on this planet. The hope is that academics still would read it. There are many things in it about being a black scientist and the different experiences that I’ve had (because it’s a very different experience). So, hopefully there is enough science in the book, and there is enough of a story.

KI: Maybe there aren’t clear-cut answers to these issues in academia and our natural environments, but surely talking about it is helpful.

TH: I think we have to keep pushing. You learn something everywhere, whether it’s Einstein or Tupac. And I’ll tell you one thing I learned one year, when I was the keynote at the Presbyterians for Earth Care conference. You can imagine what went through my head. I’ve got gonads in my talk. I’ve got my nails painted; I usually have my eyes done and everything. But I went. And their reason for inviting me was, according to Presbyterian thought, that the Creator made us stewards of the Earth, so they wanted to learn about what I was doing so they’d know how to take care of the Earth. What really impacted me there was that their philosophy was that we can’t fix anything, but we can stop it from getting worse. If you think about climate change, we can’t fix it, but we can stop it from getting worse. Extinction? We can’t make anything come back, but we can stop it from getting worse. The same thing is true of the chemicals in our environment. We can’t fix it, but we can stop it from getting worse.

Tyrone Hayes is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds joint appointments in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the Group in Endocrinology, the Molecular Toxicology Group, and the Energy and Resources Group.  He has published more than forty papers about the environmental impacts on amphibian development in Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bioscience, Environmental Health Perspectives and elsewhere. He has been profiled in the New Yorker, Mother Jones, the TED Radio Hour, the PBS series National Geographic’s Strange Days on Planet Earth, and the children’s book The Frog Scientist. Contact.

Kate Ivancic is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She researches the development of perennial grain cropping systems and their potential in narrowing the gap in global food security. Kate holds a M.S. in Soil Science and Agroecology and is a first-time contributor to Edge Effects

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https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/coronavirus_treatment_retraction_shows_the_life_sciences_are_too_often_a_house_built_on_sand-247174

april 15 2020 on hydroxycl retract?!

hank campbell

Coronavirus Treatment Retraction Shows The Life Sciences Are Too Often ‘A House Built On Sand’

...peer review is not what the public thinks it is. The overwhelmingly majority of journals get paid to publish their articles while ad-driven ones are relying on a finite pool of reviewers when the number of published studies has ballooned 20X in 20 years. Catching errors is difficult, catching faked results is even more difficult.

The uncomfortable reality is that one in fifty scientists admitted faking research by fabricating or falsifying data while 33.7 percent admitted to questionable research practices. When it comes to knowledge of others doing it, that number jumped to 72 percent. Yet it’s rarely discovered. Even when other scientists blow the whistle, repercussions are few. As Ivan Oransky, who runs the website RetractionWatch, wrote in his chapter of Gaming the Metrics, “In short, the most common outcome for those who commit fraud is: a long career.” It's easy to understand why schools may want fraud swept under the rug. Universities lose prestige when it becomes known and that means less government money. If the researcher has tenure, the school faces lawsuits and will still have to pay years of salary before any punishment can be handed down. They may not even be able to fire the scientist. On the contributor side, if you are a young scientist who reveals fraud by a senior researcher, your career may be over.

This had profound implications for public policy long before 2020. For example, America has terrific air quality when it comes to actual smog that kills, particulate matter 10 microns in size (PM₁₀₎, but our pollution standards this century have increasingly focused on PM_2.5, invisible particles so minute you need an electron microscope to detect them. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began to focus on such ‘virtual’ pollution based on a statistical correlation that did not include raw data they could independently verify. New cars were forced to meet increasingly stringent standards for PM_2.5 which made them more expensive, and that kept older, less efficient cars in user longer, but it has not saved a single life.

A PNASpaper claimed that a common weedkiller turned male frogs feminine, and that caused a special EPA panel to be convened to study its safety. EPA then learned that the paper had been published after hand-picked "editorial review" by an insider at the National Academy of Sciences using a courtesy procedure for a friend.It did not include raw data so results could not be reproduced. When EPA asked Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes for his data on frog endocrine disruption, he refused to send it:{. EPA wasted seven years of taxpayer money studying that weedkiller, named atrazine, because members of Congress said they remained concerned.

}:

The paper was not retracted despite a lack of data. It had simply included pictures and that was enough to get published.

While PNAS changed that 'good old boys network' policy after I exposed it in the *Wall Street Journal*, not much has changed overall. Most papers are still not peer-reviewed, making the life sciences a "house built on sand." While the administration was criticized for embracing a peer-reviewed paper, that was just politics as usual. Realistically, what should government trust if not peer review? HUH?

Except peer review itself is as full of holes now as it was in 2002. Recent analyses show over 400 papers share similar title, graph, and Western blot layouts and even that obvious scam escaped notice by journals so how often is peer review really happening? Why are pictures without raw data good enough?

It’s a valid question at a time when lives are at stake, such as in wanting to rush coronavirus treatments into use.

There is an obvious way to make fraud and errors easier to detect; stop accepting papers if the authors do not include raw data. The public are often surprised when they learn that most papers published in peer-reviewed journals don't include raw data, and that government agencies accept that.There may not be fraud but there is no way for independent reviewers to determine how valid the results are.

Yet government agencies, which should be leading the nation in calling for evidence-based decision making, are least likely to support transparency.The U.S. Fish and Wildlifeservice is in opposition to public access to its data. A Freedom of Information Act Request I submitted to write a Supreme Cour amicus brief on an endangered species habitat decision came back in the form an Excel file with no headers attached. The numbers were meaningless and told the public nothing about why USFWS decided that the best habitat for the Mississippi Gopher Frog was a private piece of land in Louisiana where the frog had never lived.

The Supreme Court ruled against the government unanimously in that case. How many other decisions are made based on evidence no one is allowed to see but that don’t get such high-profile attention?

[his name not in doc?

WEYERHAEUSER CO. v. UNITED STATES FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE ET AL. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT No. 17–71. Argued October 1, 2018—Decided November 27, 2018

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/endocrine-disruptors-scare-james-delingpole/

2x? 12/13

The background: As the manufactured global-warming “crisis” runs out of steam, the environmental movement is experiencing severe donor fatigue, so the greenies have begun seeking out new theaters in which to continue their campaign to bring about the end of Western industrial civilization. The latest target is agriculture. This campaign is big and well coordinated. Around 500 activist organizations in the U.S. will in 2014 be spending up to $5 billion targeting the agriculture industry, with potentially devastating effect on the American economy

Below we tell the story of one strand of this campaign: how a kooky Mother Jones–feted young professor from UC Berkeley used bogus science and a plausible, engaging manner to help destroy an industry worth billions.

His name is Tyrone Hayes, poster child for the chemophobicLeft, Erin Brockovich with a Ph.D. He’s at the forefront of the pseudoscience of “endocrine-disruptor theory” (as first popularized by the 1996 bookOur Stolen Future, with foreword by Al Gore), and the damage he has managed to do is immense.

Hayes has been hailed by the liberal media as a crusading hero thanks to his “discovery” in the late Nineties that even small doses of Atrazine (the second most commonly used herbicide in the U.S.) are capable of causing frogs to change sex.

Problem is, studies that have attempted to replicate Hayes’s findings — one in Japan, one in Germany, and one in Maryland (the last two involving 2,000 frogs) — found no harmful effects even at extremely low doses. Hayes has consistently refused to make his data publicly available and painted himself as a victim of the brutal chemical industry. (Shades of Michael Mann and his multiply discredited Hockey Stick, anyone?)

But who is the real bully here? Hayes’s unverified claims have cost atrazine’s Swiss manufacturer, Syngenta, millions of dollars (because of the various safety trials it has been forced to conduct, at its own expense, by the Environmental Protection Agency). What’s more, Hayes has sent Syngenta’s employees a string of abusive and threatening messages, written in rap style and peppered with expletives.

In a world where the scientific method was still properly valued, Hayes would have been discredited long ago. Yet because Hayes is on the “right” side of the argument, he has continued to enjoy the support of the liberal media (the New York Timesas well asMother Jones), of academe, and of the coterie of activist scientists pushing endocrine-disruptor theory.

Though Hayes continues to enjoy tenure at Berkeley, he claims his research program has been cut out of a “desire to protect a $25 million, five-year research agreement between Berkeley and Novartis, a parent company of Syngenta.” Elsewhere he has gone so far as to suggest that Syngenta and Novartis are engaged in an evil, symbiotic relationship whereby one poisons the water supply with a cancer-causing herbicide and the other manufactures drugs that cure cancer.

None of these claims stands up. Syngenta has been entirely independent of Novartis since 2000. That five-year research grant expired as long ago as 2004.And the idea that atrazine poses any risk to human health has been rebutted in an astonishing 7,000 scientific studies around the world, which have examined — and rejected — its potential to cause everything from birth defects and genetic mutations to cancer.The Environmental Protection Agency concurs, finding that atrazine poses “no harm” to the “general U.S. population, infants, children, or other major identifiable subgroups of children.”

It is an unfortunate measure of the persuasive power of voodooscience, the precautionary principle, and environmental activism that not all regulatory bodies have been quite so robust as the EPA. After years of campaigning by activists such as Hayes, both the United Nations and the EU have now embraced endocrine-disruptor theory.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Health Organization issued a joint report earlier this year on the potential health risks of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The European Commission, meanwhile, is finalizing laws that could mandate a Europe-wide ban not only on pesticides but also on fruits, vegetables, and grains bearing even the tiniest trace of alleged endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

This has infuriated and appalled the genuine experts in the field. The editors of eight leading scientific journals specializing in chemical hazards recently signed a joint editorial attacking the Commission’s decision. They accused it of acting “contrary not only to science but to the very principles of enlightened governance and social contract.” Meanwhile, 73 leading scientists have written an open letter protesting that the rules “could rewrite well-accepted scientific and regulatory principles . . . without scientific evidence.” As John Block, former secretary of agriculture to Ronald Reagan, has argued, “Bad science could kill the global trade talks.”

It could do serious damage to American agriculture-commodity exports, too, 40 percent of which would be affected by the new regulations — at a cost to the American economy of $4 billion.

To those of us wearily familiar with the ways of the environmental movement, however, this regulatory assault on the capitalist system— justified by the flimsiest of scientific evidence — will come as no surprise whatsoever.

From anthropogenic global warming to biodiversity to species loss to pesticides and GMOs, the story is the same: The scientific method is being abandoned and the practice of peer review has been grotesquely corrupted, all to advance the dubious causes of environmental activists.

Endocrine-disruptor theory shows all the signs of being yet another pseudoscience pushed by the unscrupulous, championed by the overzealous, and accepted by the credulous in an ongoing campaign that will probably do nothing to save the planet but will most certainly cause enormous harm to Western industrial civilization.

— James Delingpole is a blogger, author, and scourge of junk-science environmentalist doommongers. His latest book, The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism, has just been published by Regnery.

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new

wiki negates his work w/ 3 art'l # 10-12

10: https://archive.epa.gov/pesticides/reregistration/web/html/atrazine_update.html  1/13 no names (links to mtg no longer work)

wayback

https://web.archive.org/web/20150905201531/http://www.epa.gov/scipoly/sap/meetings/2012/index.html

wayback fail

http://www.epa.gov/scipoly/sap/meetings/2012/june/061212panel.pdf

bios work but i recognize no names

https://web.archive.org/web/20140616222630/http://www.epa.gov/scipoly/sap/meetings/2012/june/061212bio.pdf

eg

FQPA Science Review Board

Biographical Sketches 1. Dr. Michelle Boone is an Associate Professor of Zoology at Miami University of Ohio. She received her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2000 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey from 2001-2004. Dr. Boone is currently on the Editorial Board for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and on the Board of Governors for the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

all look legit, acade or gov't eg usgs

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#11 kloas

also sci mag 2002 #298 "Conflict Brewing..."

nb "perpectives"

Renner, Rebecca (May 2008). "Atrazine Effects in *Xenopus* Aren't Reproducible (Perspective)" (PDF). Environmental Science & Technology. 42 (10): 3491–3493. Bibcode:2008EnST...42.3491R. doi:10.1021/es087113j.

12 http://www.thecre.com/pdf/2008-Atrazine_ACS.pdf

concl (also guelph)

Strain differences in response to estrogen, bisphenol A, and dioxin have been reported in rats and mice, and strain difference in response to chemicals has been reported in Daphnia magna reproduction tests, notes Osamu Tooi, one of the Japanese researchers. “The discrepancy [between] the present results and Hayes’s studies may be caused by various factors, such as genetic differences in X. laevis used, water quality, including iodide ions, food, and the composition of aquaria,” he says. But Kloas notes that for X. laevis, these differences among subpopulations or strains still need to be proven. “Even in different species of frogs, the response to estrogen under similar conditions is close, within an order of magnitude, so it would be surprising for there to be big subspecies differences. With concerns over feminization, all frog species tested so far react similarly,” he says. Amphibian species are undoubtedly in decline, but the failure of recent studies to find that atrazine feminizes X. laevis calls into question the herbicide’s role in that decline. “Something or some number of things that we don’t understand is going on with frogs,” says Skelly. Rebecca Renner is a contributing editor of ES&T.

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new

https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/atrazine-and-health.html

Chemical Industry Pressures EPA to Protect Herbicide, not Wildlife

NOTE: The following is one of a series of case studies produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists' Scientific Integrity Program between 2004 and 2010 to document the abuses highlighted in our 2004 report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making.

Despite compiling hundreds of pages of evidence documenting the harmful effects of atrazine, a commonly used weed killer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to regulate the herbicide. Atrazine has been found to cause severe hormonal damage to wildlife, including amphibians, reptiles and fish. The European Union banned the herbicide because of safety concerns in October 2003, but at almost the same time, the EPA decided to re-approve atrazine for continued use in the United States.

The Washington Post reported that a petition filed with the EPA by Washington lobbyist Jim J. Tozzi provided the main rationale for the "reregistration" of atrazine with no new restrictions.¹ Tozzi, working closely with atrazine's primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection, developed a two-pronged attack on the science that questioned atrazine's safety. First, the petition argued that hormone disruption, even when clearly proven in scientific studies, cannot be used as a reason to restrict a chemical's use, because the government has not yet settled on an officially sanctioned test for measuring such disruption. The EPA adopted this reasoning in their decision, stating: "The Agency's ecological risk assessment does not suggest that endocrine disruption, or potential effects on endocrine-mediated pathways, be regarded as a regulatory endpoint at this time."²

Secondly, the petition sought to cast doubt on independent scientific studies linking atrazine to endocrine disruption, citing a little known piece of legislation called the Data Quality Act.³ The Data Quality Act, which allows stakeholders to challenge the accuracy of information used in regulatory decision-making, was actually drafted by Tozzi and slipped into a 2000 omnibus spending bill without debate or comment. The Post reported that the Act has been primarily used by industry to challenge the basis for regulations.4

The ecological impact of atrazine has been widely studied. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the herbicide has been linked to declines in sea turtles, sturgeons, mussels and various amphibians.5 Most notably, atrazine has been found to produce hormonally confused frogs, turning them "into bizarre creatures bearing both male and female sex organs."6

Dr. Tyrone B. Hayes of the University of California at Berkeley, originally hired by the chemical company Syngenta to review studies to help certify the herbicide for re-registration with the EPA, was at first surprised when he found that African clawed frog tadpoles were "chemically castrated" when exposed to even trace amounts of atrazine – levels one-thirtieth the amount currently permitted in US drinking water. Hayes’ findings were published in both Nature7 and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.8

Hayes, who eventually resigned from the Syngenta review panel out of concern that his worrisome lab results were being buried, later charged that industry-supported scientists produced "a number of studies that were purposely flawed and misleading, and that changed the weight of the evidence."9 The two remaining members of Syngenta's atrazine review panel claimed that they had each tried but failed to replicate Hayes' data.10 In the scientific world such a claim is an insult or worse, implying that the original experiment may have been dishonest or flawed. In this case, the two scientists had both experienced difficulties raising the frogs—many of which died before metamorphosis because of being overcrowded and underfed. One scientist reported that he had contaminated the water with too much atrazine.

In other words, the new studies did nothing to disprove Hayes' results,11 which have been "echoed by at least four other independent research teams in three countries."12 When Hayes offered to help the Syngenta panel members and the EPA repeat his experiments to see for themselves whether atrazine posed a danger, the EPA declined.13 Nonetheless, the failed studies served to bolster the argument that the science linking atrazine to hormone disruption was uncertain. 

The EPA, however, did not only deem the atrazine data inconclusive; the agency allowed the chemical industry to effectively set the course of future action. As the Postreported, "in closed meetings—details of which the EPA has declined to release—company representatives and EPA officials worked out a plan to avoid tighter restrictions."14 Independent scientists and environmental groups were excluded from these negotiations. The Center for Biological Diversity reports that in the final deal, continued oversight of atrazine will be provided by atrazine manufacturers, who will be responsible for monitoring three percent of "at risk" watersheds.15 

The Natural Resources Defense Council sued the EPA over its approval of atrazine, saying that with the decision to re-register the herbicide, the EPA effectively bought into the chemical industry's effort to obscure perfectly clear science. Jennifer Sass, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, charges that the negotiated settlement went forward without any "scientific rationale."16 By accepting suspect industry science, minimizing well regarded and peer-reviewed scientific studies, and putting the chemical industry in charge of future data collection, the Bush administration showed its disregard for independent science.

1. Rick Weiss, “‘Data Quality’ Law is Nemesis of Regulation,” The Washington Post, 16 August 2004, accessed 21 September 2006.

2. Environmental Protection Agency, “Interim Reregistration Eligibility Decision for Atrazine,” January 2003, Pg. 73, accessed December 11, 2006.

3. Weiss.

4. Ibid.

5. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s Failure to Protect Endangered Species and the Public from Harmful Pesticides," Center for Biological Diversity, accessed 21 September 2006.

6. Weiss.

7. Hayes, T., et al. 2002. Herbicides: Feminization of male frogs in the wild. Nature 419: 895, subscription required.

8. Hayes, T., et al. 2002. Hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99: 5476.

9. Weiss.

10. William Souder, “It’s Not Easy Being Green: Are Weed-killers Turning Frogs Into Hermaphrodites?” Harper’s Magazine, August 2006, accessed November 16, 2006.

11. Souder.

12. Weiss.

13. Souder.

14. Weiss.

15. Center for Biological Diversity.

16. Weiss.

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all

A Valuable Reputation

After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him.

by Rachel Aviv

FEBRUARY 10, 2014

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?printable=true¤tPage=all#ixzz2ujmWp2CY

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.”

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 theEcoRisk 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 ofrisk 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.

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,(2003?) the same month that the European Commission chose to remove it from the market.The European Union generally takes a precautionary approachto 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.”

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 theWashington 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, which has represented more than sixty Fortune 500 companies. In an e-mail to Syngenta, Josh Gilder, a director of the firm and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote, “We need to start fighting our own war.” By warning that a ban on atrazine would “devastate the economies” of rural regions, the firm tried to create a “state of affairs in which the new political leadership at E.P.A. finds itself increasingly isolated.” The firm held “elite dinners with Washington influentials” and tried to “prompt members of Congress” to challenge the scientific rationale for an upcoming E.P.A. review of atrazine. In a memo describing its strategy, the White House Writers Group wrote that, “regarding science, it is important to keep in mind that the major players in Washington do not understand science.”

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.”

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!”

==

new

https://www.npr.org/2014/02/05/272100022/chemical-study-becomes-a-tale-of-conspiracy-and-paranoia

Chemical Study Becomes A Tale of Conspiracy And Paranoia

7:42

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February 5, 2014

Heard on All Things Considered

Tyrone Hayes, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent the past 15 years to studying the adverse effects of atrazine, a common herbicide used in the U.S. For much of that time, Hayes believed he was being watched and closely followed by Syngenta, the Swiss company that produces the chemical, in an effort to discredit his findings. Audie Cornish talks to New Yorker reporter Rachel Aviv for more.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. Now, the strange story of Tyrone Hayes. The biologist has devoted much of his career to studying a common herbicide used on corn, called atrazine; specifically, its effects on amphibians. Hayes believes the chemical impedes the sexual development of frogs, and he's publicly argued against the use of atrazine and criticized the corporation that makes it, Syngenta.

For years, Hayes told friends and colleagues that because of his opposition, Syngenta was also waging a campaign against him - monitoring his correspondence, following him to speaking engagements, and trying to undermine him in public, even investigating his wife. Now, some of his colleagues believed him, others thought he was losing his grip.

The story unfolds in this week's New Yorker magazine. We're joined now by reporter Rachel Aviv. And Rachel, let's start briefly at the beginning. Give us a sketch of who Tyrone Hayes is, and how he first crossed paths with Syngenta.

RACHEL AVIV: So Tyrone Hayes is a scientist at Berkeley, a professor in the integrative biology department at Berkeley. And he studies the endocrinology of amphibians, and he was asked in the late '90 by Syngenta to examine atrazine and its ecological effects. And he did experiments that showed that atrazine caused tadpoles to develop both ovaries and testes. He called these frog hermaphrodites.

And his relations with Syngenta became strained once he reported these results. And eventually, he resigned from the job; and he accused Syngenta of stalling his research, of trying to critique trivial aspects of his work. And in his resignation letter, he said that he was worried that his colleagues would think he had been part of a plan to bury important data.

CORNISH: And the relationship between Hayes and Syngenta, it's not just strained, right? It gets much, much worse. Tyrone Hayes comes to think he's essentially under surveillance from the company. What kinds of things is he doing to avoid that? Why does he come to believe that?

AVIV: He starts to notice at conferences that he attends there is someone in the audience dressed a little bit better than everyone else, and this person is asking questions that cast doubt on the credibility of his work. And he also begins to think that other scientists are remembering events differently than he does. So he begins to carry an audio recorder. And eventually, he starts to tell his colleagues that he thinks Syngenta is orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation and is trying to figure out his vulnerabilities so they can exploit them.

CORNISH: Now, soon, it seems as though Tyrone Hayes falls in that category of people who say, you know, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, right? In 2012, two massive class action lawsuits around atrazine reveal hundreds of internal Syngenta documents that shed light on their side of Tyrone Hayes' story. What did they reveal?

AVIV: The documents showed that Syngenta was probably just as preoccupied by Hayes as he was by them. They had drafted a list of goals, and the first was to discredit Hayes. They had also created a long list of possible methods for discrediting him; and that included investigating his wife, investigating his funding, conducting third-party audit of his research, asking the journals where he published to retract his papers, and conducting what they called systematic rebuttals of all of his public appearances.

CORNISH: And if you do an Internet search of Hayes, you turn up this world of conflicting information - of studies and counter studies - even though lots of other people were doing similar research, correct?

AVIV: Mm-hmm. The first thing that pops up when I do a search is Tyrone Hayes: not credible. And there are notes taken by Syngenta's public relations staff that explicitly recommend purchasing "Tyrone Hayes" as a search word on the Internet so that when people search for his research, they can control what we see.

CORNISH: Now, stepping back for a moment, in your article, you write that this is reflective of a much broader kind of campaign, the sound science movement. Talk a little bit about what that means, and what that involves.

AVIV: One of the interesting things is, I think that industries have recognized that if they want to delay regulation on a particular product, it is more effective to critique the science rather than to get into a debate about the policy. And what has been named the sound science campaign is this effort to delay regulation by kind of picking apart the science that would be used to support the regulation.

CORNISH: Would you talk about - meaning their paid studies, right? - to consultants, to people who write op-eds. Is that a part of this?

AVIV: So Syngenta had a - what they called a list of supportive third-party stakeholders. And these were people - they were scientists, journalists, writers, directors of nonprofits - who could be called upon to defend atrazine. In some cases, the public relations staff of Syngenta would write editorials and then give them to these third-party allies, as they called them. The third-party allies would sign the editorials, and then they would be placed in regional newspapers. In that sense, they looked like journalism rather than public relations documents.

CORNISH: Critics of what you're saying would argue that, what's wrong with higher standards? You know, if you're going to regulate something, why not make sure that the science is sound, and that every method is the right one? I mean, what do you say to that?

AVIV: I think at some point, there has to be an acknowledgement that the science is never going to be ideal. We can only get so far, particularly when we're looking at the effects of chemicals on humans - because we can never test them in the perfect way, which would be to feed the chemical to humans and see what happens. So there's always going to be this zone of uncertainty. And I think that the way thatEuropehas dealt with this is to acknowledge that when there's - when we reach a certain degree of uncertainty, maybe we should slow down whereas in the U.S., the general approach has been to keep going until we have absolute proof that a chemical has harms.[does not use term prec principle]

CORNISH: In the end, where do things stand with Professor Hayes, with Syngenta?

AVIV: Syngenta is - now, the EPA is conducting another review of atrazine, this coming year. And Hayes is still giving all of his lectures - 50 lectures a year. But he is doing it, I think, with the knowledge that he is not this paranoid extremist. He - his fears were real.

CORNISH: Rachel Aviv, thanks so much for talking with us.

AVIV: Thank you for having me.

CORNISH: Rachel Aviv is a staff writer with The New Yorker. We were talking about her article this week on Professor Tyrone Hayes, agribusiness Syngenta, and their long fight over the chemical atrazine.

==

New

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrone_Hayes

Tyrone B. Hayes (born July 29, 1967) is an American biologist and professor of Integrative Biology at University of California, Berkeley known for his research findings concluding that the herbicide atrazine is an endocrine disruptor that demasculinizes and feminizes male frogs. 

He is also an advocate for critical review and regulation of pesticides and other chemicals that may cause adverse health effects. He has presented hundreds of papers, talks, and seminars on his conclusions that environmental chemical contaminants have played a role in global amphibian declines and in the health disparities that occur in minority and low income populations. 

His work has been contested by Syngenta, the Swiss manufacturer of atrazine and the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. It was used as the basis for the settlement of a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Syngenta.

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Education and career

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes spent his childhood studying frogs and lizards and won a state science fair with research that showed anole lizards had to be awake to change color.^[1] After graduating from Harvard University, Hayes was a technician and freelance consultant from 1990–1992 for Tiburon, California based Biosystems, Inc.^[2] Hayes has held an academic appointment (professorship) at the University of California, Berkeley since completing his doctoral research there in 1992;^[1] He was hired as a graduate student instructor in 1992, became an assistant professor in 1994, associate professor in 2000, and professor in 2003 in the Department of Integrative Biology, Molecular Toxicology, Group in Endocrinology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley.^[2]

Atrazine research

Xenopus laevis, the African Clawed frog

:{In:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ 1997, the consulting firm EcoRisk, Inc. paid Hayes to join a panel of experts conducting studies for :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Novartis (later Syngenta) on the herbicide atrazine.^[1][3] When Hayes' research found unexpected toxicities for atrazine, he reported them to the panel, however the panel and company were resistant to his findings. He wanted to repeat his work to validate it but Novartis refused funding for further research; he resigned from the panel and obtained other funding to repeat the experiments.^[1][3]

In 2002 Hayes published findings that he says replicate what he found while he was working for EcoRisk,^[1] that developing male African clawed frogs and leopard frogs exhibited female characteristics after exposure to atrazine, first in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)^[4] and then in *Nature*.^[5][6]

In 2007, Hayes was a co-author on a paper that detailed atrazine inducing mammary and prostate cancer in laboratory rodents and highlighted atrazine as a potential cause of reproductive cancers in humans.^[7] At a presentation to the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in 2007, Hayes presented results of his studies that showed chemical castration in frogs; individuals of both sexes had developed bisexual reproductive organs.^[8]

In 2010, Hayes published research in PNAS^[9] describing laboratory work showing how exposure to atrazine turned male tadpoles into females with impaired fertility.^[3]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its independent Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) examined all available studies on this topic and concluded that "atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development based on a review of laboratory and field studies.".^[10] The EPA and its SAP made recommendations concerning proper study design needed for further investigation into this issue. As required by the EPA, Syngenta conducted two experiments under Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) and inspection by the EPA and German regulatory authorities. The paper concluded "These studies demonstrate that long-term exposure of larval X. laevis to atrazine at concentrations ranging from 0.01 to 100 microg/l does not affect growth, larval development, or sexual differentiation."^[11] A report written in Environmental Science and Technology (May 15, 2008) cites the independent work of researchers in Japan, who were unable to replicate Hayes' work. "The scientists found no hermaphrodite frogs; no increase in aromatase as measured by aromatase mRNA induction; and no increase in vitellogenin, another marker of feminization."^[12]

In 2010, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) responded to Hayes' 2010 published paper,^[13] by stating that his findings "do not provide sufficient evidence to justify a reconsideration of current regulations which are based on a very extensive dataset."^[14]

Advocacy

[

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And there are [several more](http://www.atrazine.com/Amphibians/Univ_of_CA-7-19-10.pdf)! Including one in which Tyrone introduces Syngenta to the term "tea bag," and another one in which he concludes with the Bernie Mac quote, "you don't understand... i ain't scared o' you m***f***s." You know, everybody would love it if this happened in a Katt Williams movie or something, but when a guy does it in real life then suddenly the pesticide company has to go crying to the guy's boss. We stand with you, Dr. Tyrone Hayes. Please [C.C. me](mailto:hamilton@gawker.com) on all future emails containing threats of jiz.

[[Nature](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100818/full/466913a.html). Pic [via\]](http://www.mongrelmedia.com/data/ftp/FLOW%20%28For%20Love%20of%20Water%29/11.jpg)

nb comments refer to outdated hair style[,](http://www.mongrelmedia.com/data/ftp/FLOW%20%28For%20Love%20of%20Water%29/11.jpg) so clearly a pattern developing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AtrazineUSAMap.png)

Yesterday we introduced you to Tyrone Hayes, the UC-Berkeley biologist who expresses his opposition to the herbicide atrazine with shouty, rap lyric-quoting emails to its manufacturer, Syngenta. Well—there are many more Tyrone Hayes emails where those came from!

In fact, there are more than 100 pages of Dr. Hayes' various emails to Syngenta people online, dating back several years. To read them all at once would perhaps be too much. But we'd be remiss if we didn't give you a taste. The few below are sufficient to convey a sense of what Tyrone Hayes feels strongly about: the dangers of atrazine, the greatness of Tyrone Hayes, and Tyrone Hayes' balls. Trick.

There's no doubt that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (including, Hayes says, atrazine—we're not scientists, but there's obviously an argument to be made) pose a grave threat to ecosystems. There's also no doubt that there has been a concerted effort by the chemical industry and its allies to discredit Dr. Hayes. That said: you're helping them, dude. Why so crazy?

Pic [via. Previously.] [nb much of the comments are about his rap being out of date]

===

Email: tyrone@berkeley.edu

Phone: (510) 643-1054

Full Contact Information >

Research Description

My research focuses on the role of steroid hormones in amphibian development and I conduct both laboratory and field studies in the U.S. and Africa. The two main areas of interest are metamorphosis and sex differentiation, but I am also interested in growth (larval and adult) and hormonal regulation of aggressive behavior. My work addresses problems on several levels including ecological, organismal, and molecular questions. In my work on metamorphosis, I study a local toad (Bufo boreas). Studies examine the effects of temperature on developmental rates, interactions between the thyroid hormones and steroids, and hormonal regulation of skin gland development. I am also examining the effects of tadpole density on developmental rates and measuring metamorphic rates and hormone levels of tadpoles in the field and in the laboratory. My work on sex differentiation involves the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), the Japanese kajika (Buegeria buegeri), and the Pine Barrens treefrog (Hyla femoralis). While Xenopus serves as a good model because of its availability, the latter two species have genetically distinguishable sexes. I can therefore examine early events in gonad differentiation, steroid enzyme activities, steroid receptors, etc., knowing the genetic sex of the individual larvae.

Currently, I am also examining the effects of exogenous steroids on gonadal differentiation and the potential role of endogenous steroids. My main goal is to synthesize ecological/evolutionary, organismal/physiological, and biochemical/molecular studies to learn how an animal translates changes in its external environment to internal changes, how these internal changes are coordinated, what molecular mechanisms are involved, and in turn, how changes at the molecular level affect an animal's ability to adapt to the changes in its external environment.

Selected Publications

Datuin, J.P., K.P. Ng, T.B. Hayes, and H.A. Bern. 2001. Effects of glucocorticoids on cartilage growth and response to IGF-I in the tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus). Gen. Comp. Endocrinol. 121(3):289-294.

Hayes, T.B. 2001. Hyperolius argus endocrine screen test. Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office Patents. Sep. 26, 2000. 1238(4): No Pagination. US 6123918; September 26, 2000, 424-92, USA. The Regents of the University of California.

Noriega, N. and T.B. Hayes. 2000. DDT congener effects on secondary sex coloration in the reed frog Hyperolius argus: A partial evaluation of the Hyperolius argusestrogen screen. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology B. 126B(2):231-237.

Buchholz, D.R. and T.B. Hayes. 2000. Larval period comparison for the spadefoot toads Scaphiopus couchii and Spea multiplicata (Anura: Pelobatidae) Herpetologica56(4):455-468.

Last Modified: Tue, 06/19/2012 - 13:15

...

Science Under Siege

NRDC and Syngenta have a long, contentious relationship.

Due to an array of health concerns, NRDC has recommended that atrazine use be phased out and that the weed-killer be filtered out of Americans’ contaminated drinking water. Its investigations and lawsuits in the public interest have resulted in judicial decrees requiring more monitoring of water and have spurred the EPA to subject the herbicide to additional reviews by the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) -- including an EPA SAP atrazine review launched in October, 2009 -- based on emerging science and growing concerns.

The dossier on Ivory also expressed the view that NRDC’s “Poisoning the Well” report was in essence part of a conspiracy funded by Tides, which might include Ivory's work for HuffPo.

The dossier writer had also contacted HuffPo "to inquire about additional information about their funding model, sources and ties to the Tides family of organizations." Jacobson reported that he had not yet received a reply and that he did not expect further details.

As for Ivory, the dossier reported that its opposition research was based on “publicly” available information and was the best that could be prepared under the short deadline provided by Quinn Thomas.

On June 9, 2011, as part of a sworn deposition given in the Illinois suit, Syngenta’s PR rep, Sherry Ford, denied that Syngenta or anyone acting on its behalf had “investigated” anyone except one person.

That person was not Danielle Ivory, according to Ford.

Yet, the March 4, 2010, dossier on Ivory was requisitioned by Syngenta’s hired PR team following Ivory's query to Syngenta about the coming federal lawsuit. It was produced for a PR team known for its aggressive tactics. The term "investigated" was not specifically defined in the deposition or by the opposition research firm tapped by the PR team.

Syngenta Admits It Investigated Dr. Tyrone Hayes

No, the person Ford admitted had been investigated by Syngenta was not Ivory.

He's a U.C.-Berkeley scientist whose extensive studies suggest that atrazine causes sex mutations in frogs. (A detailed story of how Syngenta has attacked this scientist's reputation is reported in January’s Mother Jonesmagazine. The deposition of Syngenta's head of PR is not discussed in that story.)

Ford claimed under oath that she herself no longer has the opposition research on Dr. Hayes.

She also claimed under oath that Syngenta's expanded first-strike PR team had been assembled in late 2009 in direct response to a tip they had received from a reporter indicating that a new federal lawsuit against the company was in the offing. At the time of Ivory's e-mail exchange with Syngenta's Paul Minehart starting March 2, 2010, the company claimed it had no knowledge of any pending federal litigation or of the allegations of the plaintiffs about atrazine.

On March 5th, HuffPo ran a story about atrazine contamination in Iowa, but it was not by Ivory.

The piece by Kerry Trueman, titled “Our Toxic Waterways: Flushing Away Our Future,” discussed a new documentary called “Big River,” by Ian Cheney and Kurt Ellis whose previous piece “King Corn,” won critical acclaim. The new documentary traced how the atrazine they used to grow corn had contaminated their local creek.

Trueman noted that recent news stories had reported concerns that atrazine might chemically castrate or “feminize” male frogs, according to Dr. Hayes' research, and that the EPA had recently announced it would re-assess the weed-killer.

Searching for a Defender of Atrazine on HuffPo

In response, Syngenta CP’s Steven Goldsmith sent an email to Josh Gilder of WHWG and Mike Buritaat Quinn Thomas asking an interesting question [8] (PDF).

“Is there anyone at HP [HuffPo] who we could cultivate on this issue rather than continuing to get bashed by everyone on their payroll?”

WHWG and Quinn Thomas had already been hard at work for six months on an array of tactics to advance Syngenta PR's third party strategy on atrazine.

One was to have Syngenta’s chief scientist, Dr. Mike Bushell, ghostwrite a chapter for a book challenging the idea of regulating atrazine by applying the “precautionary principle.”

This standard, which is embedded in U.S. and EU consumer law, places the burden of proof on manufacturers to establish that their products are not harmful if science points to significant risks to human health or the environment.  WHWG said [9] (PDF) it would “find someone else willing to put their name” on Syngenta’s “Ghost Author” story about atrazine and challenge the potential embrace of the precautionary principle by the Obama Administration's EPA. [entine?]

The ghostwritten chapter was for a book

to be published in conjunction with someone at the American Enterprise Institute [10], a DC think tank that is funded in part by large donations from corporations. It is not known whether Syngenta has funded this think tank or any of its “fellows,” directly or indirectly.

Also Needed: An Investigative Reporter to Rattle the EPA's Cages...

http://www.alternet.org/print/story/154046/revealed%3A_how_syngenta_investigated_the_press_and_shaped_the_news_about_its_controversial_weed-killer_atrazine

Tyrone Hayes, his long hair tightly pulled back into a bun, sat where he sits for a good few hours almost every day - at a small, round table in Jupiter, a restaurant and bar on Shattuck Avenue. A beer - their signature brew - is the only thing on the table besides his laptop.

But for the greater part of his work life, Hayes, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, lives in a cluttered but comfortable laboratory in the Valley Life Sciences Building. There, he researches atrazine, an herbicide which is sprayed in quantities of about 80 million tons a year across crop fields and on residential lawns.

For the last eight years, Hayes' research on the herbicide has become the focal point of a conflict between the chemical's producer, Syngenta Corporation, and scientists researching its effects. Hayes was brought into the media spotlight in July when the corporation filed an ethics complaint with the University of California for e-mails Hayes had written, some of which were explicit, which he said were a response to threats from Syngenta employees.

The subject of the controversy, atrazine, is currently the topic of a bill introduced in April in the U.S. House of Representatives seeking to ban the chemical, a re-evaluation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and two class action lawsuits filed by communities and water companies in the Midwest that allege Syngenta has placed hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs on the communities to purify herbicide-tainted drinking water.

Atrazine was banned in the European Union in 2003.

The herbicide has been a major subject of Hayes' research for more than a decade, dating back to 2000, when Hayes was a consultant for Syngenta. Since 2002, Hayes has published three studies - one in the journal Nature and two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - that demonstrate negative effects of the chemical on the sexual development of amphibians.

Atrazine functions as an herbicide by disrupting photosynthesis. But when animals, like frogs, are exposed to it - even at levels below EPA regulations - it interferes with the production of estrogen, increasing it to a point where male frogs are "chemically castrated" and 1 in 10 are turned into females, according to a March study Hayes published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While several studies corroborate Hayes' findings that atrazine is detrimental to organisms, not all agree that the herbicide is dangerous in low concentrations.

"To my knowledge (and I have participated in two EPA panels that reviewed available results) nobody else has been able to get this ultra low concentration effect," said David Skelly, a professor of ecology at Yale University, in an e-mail.

Syngenta has maintained that atrazine poses no adverse health effects to any species, claiming that Hayes' work has multiple errors and is not reproducible.

"Over 6,000 studies conducted by Syngenta and others over the years have established the safety of atrazine," said Syngenta's Principal Scientist Tim Pastoor in an e-mail. "The most comprehensive study ever done on the subject - Kloas 2009 - found that atrazine had no effect on frog sexual development. If Dr. Hayes were to provide all his raw data to EPA for careful examination, as Syngenta has done with the Kloas study, the Agency would be able to evaluate the quality of his research and his claims concerning atrazine. Until then, however, his results cannot be considered reliable."

The allegation that Hayes will not share his data with the EPA is "blatantly false," Hayes said. He said he let the agency into his lab for three days in 2002 to collect data, and in September of the same year, Thomas Steeger, a senior EPA scientist, sent him an e-mail thanking him for his cooperation.

"Although you are not required to provide EPA with any information, you have been very cooperative and have shared both the raw data and standard operating procedures from your research," the e-mail reads.

Gail Prins, a professor of physiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who signed a letter with 15 other scientists addressed to UC officials supporting Hayes' work, said Syngenta's inability to replicate Hayes' exact results is not relevant.

"I know that what Dr. Hayes does is solid. It's done with appropriate scientific methods, the data is reasonable, and it's solid good research," she said. "In science, very rarely is anything identically repeated."

Both in 2003 and in 2006, EPA re-approved the use of atrazine. In 2007, after reviewing the Kloas study, the EPA stated there was no compelling reason to further research atrazine's effect on amphibian gonadal development.

But with a new presidential administration and new leadership at the EPA, the agency has decided to reconsider the issue of atrazine sooner than expected. According to a statement from the agency, "the substantial new scientific information generated since the 2003 reregistration decision and the documented presence of atrazine in drinking water sources and other bodies of water" also prompted the agency's decision to reevaluate the herbicide.

The EPA held hearings in April and again in September, at which Hayes testified, presenting his newest research, which is set to be published in February 2011 with data contributed from 18 other labs in 12 different countries.

In the study, Hayes said he and his colleagues looked at the effects of atrazine on gonadal development on a wide range of species, from mammals to amphibians to reptiles. In addition to the February study, Hayes said he has another much larger study with 40 co-authors in the works examining the same broad set of species.

"I think (Syngenta is) concerned about that because even though they may be able to attack me - or try to attack me - you can't take 19 laboratories from around the world and say they've all done something wrong," Hayes said.

Tags: environmental protection agency, Atrazine, Tyrone Hayes, Syngenta, Frogs

Article Link: http://archive.dailycal.org/article/111194

E-mails spark ethics row

Spat over health effects of atrazine escalates.

Rex Dalton

The rapper Earl 'DMX' Simmons is not known for his conciliatory lyrics. So Tyrone Hayes, a biologist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, drew from Simmons's lexicon earlier this year while writing a series of 'trash-talking' e-mails to representatives of Syngenta, the world's largest producer of the herbicide atrazine.

Those e-mails, which Hayes says were prompted by a heated encounter with a Syngenta scientist, areincluded in an**ethics complaint**that Syngenta filed with top University of California officialson 19 July. The Syngenta scientist concerned denies provoking Hayes. The action marks the latest in a series of bitter exchanges between the Switzerland-based company and Hayes, whose work has linked atrazine to adverse effects on the environment and on human health.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100818/full/466913a.html

google search 2/17/12

Note 1st 3 are paid

mojo

The Frog of War

Atrazine makes male frogs grow ovaries. It's in your water supply. It's also the cause of one of science's weirdest feuds ever.

By Dashka Slater | Mon Feb. 6, 2012 3:00 AM GMT

Correction: The original version of this article, which also appeared in our January/February 2012 print edition, misidentified the consulting company that hired Hayes as Pacific EcoRisk, and mistakenly linked to the homepage of that company. The company Hayes actually worked for, EcoRisk, no longer exists. We regret the error.

Darnell lives deep in the basement of a life sciences building at the University of California-Berkeley, in a plastic tub on a row of stainless steel shelves. He is an African clawed frog,Xenopus laevis, sometimes called the lab rat of amphibians. Like most of his species, he's hardy and long-lived, an adept swimmer, a poor crawler, and a voracious eater. He's a good breeder, too, having produced both children and grandchildren. There is, however, one unusual thing about Darnell.

He's female.

Genetically, Darnell is male. But after being raised in water contaminated with the herbicide atrazine at a level of 2.5 parts per billion—slightly less than what's allowed in our drinking water[1]—he developed a female body, inside and out. He is also the mother of his children, having successfully mated with other males and spawned clutches of eggs. Recently he was moved to an atrazine-free tank and has turned lanky, losing the plump, pincushion look of a female frog. But last March, when UC-Berkeley integrative biology professor Tyrone B. Hayes [2]opened him up to take a look, Darnell's insides were still female. "He still has ovaries, but there's no eggs in them," Hayes told me the next day as we stood watching the frog, who swam over and inspected us soberly, then turned and flopped away.

Hayes is a 5-foot-3 fireplug of a man with a gentle voice and an easy grin who favors [3] and sweatshirts and running shorts the rest of the time. He is an unusual breed. You will find few other faculty members who keep their money and identification in a child's Spider-Man sock rather than a wallet, or run their daily 12-mile commute, or [4] and perform them at scientific meetings. The pool of endocrinologists and herpetologists who might casually mention lunching on homemade raccoon curry is also minuscule. And most scientists, upon discovering that trace amounts of one of the nation's top-selling herbicides cause gender-bending abnormalities in frogs, would have been content to publish their results and let the regulators and manufacturers fight it out.

But Hayes is not like other scientists. To be sure, he publishes in all the right journals [5] and presents his work at the key scientific meetings, but he has also spearheaded a public outcry against atrazine, testifying at government hearings, appearing in all forms of media, and even launching AtrazineLovers.com, an anti-atrazine website.

"Atrazine isn't killing the frogs," Hayes explains. "But if they're reproductively impaired, that's killing the population."

All of this has earned Hayes something approaching rock-star status. He has been the subject of a children's book (*The Frog Scientist* [6]), travels the world giving lectures, and by his estimate has appeared in a dozen documentaries. And while scores of researchers have described atrazine's worrisome effects, it is Hayes' knack for drama that has brought attention to the problem. Without him, atrazine might not be undergoing its third Environmental Protection Agency review in less than a decade [7], and Syngenta, the chemical's Swiss manufacturer, might not be facing lawsuits in state and federal courts by plaintiffs from 40 Midwestern water districts who claim atrazine has contaminated their drinking water [8]. "He's a remarkable person," says David Skelly, a Yale ecologist who has served on two of the advisory panels that help the EPA vet atrazine research. "And he's become the personality associated with this issue because he's a remarkable person."

Yet over the years, Hayes has become engaged in a remarkably antagonistic sort of symbiosis with Syngenta. Company reps trail him from one speaking engagement to the next; Hayes, in turn, bombards Syngenta with a steady flow of emails laced with profane verses, academic taunts, and even accounts of his dreams. When a batch of these emails became public in 2010 [9], Hayes' supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world's largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps [10]:

tyrone b hayes is hard as hell

battle anybody, i don't care who you tell

you object! you will fail!

mercy for the weak is not for sale

"It hasn't been productive in the debate, and it hasn't helped him," Skelly says. "I mean, why do that?"

Born in a colored hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1967, Hayes grew up catching lizards, frogs, and turtles in the swamps near his grandmother's house, which sat on land where his ancestors once toiled as slaves. He was, admittedly, "a weird kid" who raised tadpoles in wading pools and set up bird blinds based on the ones he'd seen on *Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom* [11], wearing pots on his head to fend off jay and dove attacks while he filmed their nests. He would memorize the Latin names of South Carolina beetles in his grandmother's field guides and draw pictures of animals, people, and sci-fi characters.

Hayes' father, Romeo, was a carpet installer who never finished high school, and Hayes, too, struggled in school, largely because he was bored. "I finished all the math books by third grade and most of the reading books," he recalls. "So I was considered disruptive." By middle school, his artistic talents had attracted the notice of his teachers, who placed him in classes for gifted students. But it was science that dominated his thoughts. He spent hours with chameleonlike lizards called anoles, trying to understand what made them change color. He warmed them with a blow-dryer to see if it was heat, sheltered them in a doghouse to see if it was light, and found at last that the creatures had to be awake to color-match, a discovery that won him a state science fair prize. Later, when it came time to think about college, Hayes applied only to Harvard, because he'd heard the name on *Green Acres* [12]. He got in.

The Ivy League proved a tough transition. At an undergraduate mixer his first day at Harvard in 1985, Hayes recalls introducing himself to a white student who looked at his outstretched hand and said, "It was because of affirmative action that I was wait-listed here." He felt isolated, drank too much, and thought about dropping out. But he gained his bearings with the help of amphibian expert Bruce Waldman, who mentored him, and his girlfriend Kathy Kim, who would become his wife and the mother of his two children. In the end, he graduated summa cum laude in biology. "It was the worst four years of my life," he says now. "But if I could do it all over again, I'd do it exactly the same."

After that rocky start, Hayes' rise was meteoric. He earned his Ph.D. in integrative biology from UC-Berkeley [2] in just three and a half years. Less than a year later the university hired him as an assistant professor—he would soon become the second-youngest tenured professor in his department's history. Hayes might easily have spent his career as an obscure if well-regarded authority on the endocrine systems of frogs had not his work attracted the attention of a consulting firm called EcoRisk*, which sought him out to evaluate atrazine's effects on amphibians.

Atrazine has long been a mainstay of American agriculture. Registered for use in 1959, it is now used on half the nation's corn and 90 percent of our sugarcane [13], not to mention lawns, golf courses, and Christmas tree farms. All told, about 80 million pounds of it are applied each year, making it the most widely used herbicide after glyphosate, a.k.a. Roundup. While Syngenta, the largest producer, won't disclose its profits from atrazine, the company earned $2.3 billion in 2010 from its line of selective herbicides (those that only kill specific plants), of which atrazine is the leading product. Sales keep rising as more weeds develop resistance to Roundup: Syngenta reported a14 percent bump [14] in the first half of 2011.

In 1997, EcoRisk approached Hayes on behalf of Syngenta's corporate predecessor [15], Novartis. They wanted him to study atrazine, which at the time was going through a product reapproval process mandated by the EPA. Hayes took the gig, figuring Novartis wouldn't ask him to look into the herbicide's effects if it expected him to find anything. "My hypothesis was, nothing's going to happen," he recalls.

Yet something did. In his experiments, male Xenopus exposed to atrazine had shrunken voice boxes, which put them at a disadvantage for courting females. That was startling enough. But when Hayes examined the frogs' gonads, he discovered something more disturbing: About a third of the exposed males had malformed reproductive organs [16]. Many were hermaphrodites, with both ovaries and testes. Some had more than two of each organ—and some of the testes produced eggs instead of sperm.

Xenopus are not naturally hermaphroditic, and no intersex frogs were found in Hayes' control tanks. But gender deformities were present among frogs exposed to as little as 0.1 part per billion (picture a thousandth of a grain of salt in a half gallon of water). That's 30 times less than the 3 ppb the EPA allows in our drinking water.

Since 1980, scientists had been reporting shrinking amphibian populations—close to one-third of known species are now in danger of extinction. Hayes was intrigued to think he might have discovered a cause for the decline. "Everybody is out there looking for dead frogs and what killed the frogs," he explains. "We're asking, 'How come there aren't any new frogs?' Atrazine isn't killing the frogs. But if they're reproductively impaired, that's killing the population."

To Hayes' surprise, EcoRisk and Novartis didn't seem as concerned about his findings as he was. He was asked to repeat the studies but wasn't given the necessary funding, he says, and EcoRisk scientists suggested statistical manipulations that made the voice box effect appear to vanish. Hayes weighed simply handing over his data. After all, this was contract work. "It's just like if I was an artist and you told me to paint you this color, and I paint you that color and you buy the painting and I'm done with it," he says.

Hayes postulates that atrazine affects gender by activating a gene that produces an enzyme called aromatase, which converts androgens—male sex hormones—to estrogens. In his talks, he makes sure to point out that estrogen is the same in frogs and humans. Just like frogs, we begin our development steeped in an aqueous environment: amniotic fluid. The chemical that so powerfully alters the gonads of a frog may be having an effect on us, too [19].In the end, he couldn't do it. In 2000, he resigned from the panel of scientists working for EcoRisk. He then repeated the experiment, twice, and in April 2002 published his findings [5] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has since published a dozen atrazine papers [17]in peer-reviewed journals and replicated his findings with two other frog species, both in the lab and in nature. One study, published in *pnas* in 2010[18], found that when 40 male Xenopus hatched in water contaminated with atrazine at a level of 2.5 ppb, three-quarters wound up chemically castrated or partially feminized; four, like Darnell, changed genders completely. He has also tracked a population of leopard frogs in a Wyoming pond for a decade, documenting how the ratio of males to females rises and falls in tandem with atrazine levels.

As assiduously as Hayes researches links between atrazine and hermaphroditic frogs, Syngenta attempts to disprove them, funding a stream of research that has found, variously, that atrazine exposure did not produce intersex frogs [20], that intersex frogs can be found regardless of atrazine exposure [20], and that atrazine exposure produces intersex frogs only at very high concentrations [21]. "No reliable, replicable studies have ever linked atrazine to effects on frog sexual development," Syngenta spokeswoman Ann Bryan told me via email, noting that previous EPA reviews have determined that "atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development." (Syngenta officials declined to be interviewed but agreed to answer a few written questions.)

Actually, atrazine's unintended effects are documented in dozens of peer-reviewed studies. Last year, Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy from the University of South Florida published a meta-analysis of research [22] involving amphibians and fish and found consistent results indicating that the herbicide affects the reproductive and immune systems. This past year, Hayes gathered 21 coauthors for a paper in the *Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology* [23] showing that atrazine disrupts normal hormonal function, with demasculinizing effects on male gonads in reptiles, fish, amphibians, and mammals. He and 40 coauthors from 13 countries will soon publish a literature review that reaches similar conclusions. "I'll have every scientist, with a few exceptions, who has worked on atrazine saying, 'We're together,'" he promises.

Perhaps if Syngenta had simply questioned Hayes' research in academic journals, things might have stayed focused on questions of sample sizes, lab conditions, and so on. But the company began sending staff to Hayes' research talks in the United States and abroad, where he says they sometimes passed out materials disparaging his methods and accusing him of fabricating results or refusing to share data. "A Syngenta representative does try to attend events where Dr. Hayes is speaking," Syngenta's spokeswoman confirmed. "It's in our best interest, and farmers', that we have the opportunity to counter his outrageous accusations."

At one conference in 2005, he contends, Syngenta staff scientist Tim Pastoor accused him of "cherry-picking data" and asked if he cherry-picked his dates as well. Hayes responded in an email: "don't worry...daddy has no intentions of picking your cherry." At another meeting, Pastoor asserted that atrazine was a vital tool for US farmers. Hayes emailed him to ask [25], "How long have YOU been a 'vital tool'?" adding, "I've got your vital tool right here."Over time, these tense interactions escalated into the kind of verbal jostling you'd expect in a high school hallway. Syngenta officials, according to Hayes, have made derogatory remarks about his appearance, his speaking style, and even his sexual proclivities, which sounds implausible until you consider that Syngenta's PR firm, Jayne Thompson & Associates, once proposed a covert media campaign [24] to discredit the court system in an Illinois county where judges are presiding over an atrazine lawsuit.

While there was a certain frat boy humor to this scientific smack talk, there was also an element of psychological warfare. After Hayes gave a lecture at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry confab in 2007, he received an email from Syngenta scientist Alan Hosmer, whom he knew from his EcoRisk days: "You lost and everyone at SETAC was calling you an entertaining fraud," Hosmer wrote.

Hayes felt the message was designed to arouse a black academic's worst anxieties: the fear of being seen as a buffoon or an affirmative-action mistake. This time, Syngenta reps received a six-page email response [25] titled: "I OWN THIS: A MADMAN'S MANIFESTO." In it, Hayes bragged of his fame ("I get paid $10,000 for talking for an hour"), ridiculed Syngenta's research ("nothing you have done can touch the quality of my work"), and waxed poetic about how his kids attend the fancy "white private schools" that were unavailable to him. He also deployed his favorite phrase—"I don't give a fuck"—shortened to an acronym: "IDGAF! Come on?????...do you think I care about propriety and professionalism?...I have used the 'F-word' in my talks, have quoted DMX, Busta Rhymes, Tyra Banks, Marvin Gaye...I pack the room, have em' call out security...and have been invited back every year. That's my house, Trick!"

Things came to a head in February 2010, when Syngenta's Pastoor buttonholed Hayes in the Illinois Statehouse as Hayes prepared to testify before an Assembly committee. "Who's taking care of your family and your lab when you're traveling so much, Tea Bag?" Pastoor allegedly said. "Don't you worry about that?" The episode ended, Hayes claims, with Pastoor saying: "Next time you give a talk, I'm going to bring some of my good old boys and let you tell them how atrazine is making them gay. That should be fun. How about that, Tea Bag?"

Hayes was mystified: Was Pastoor referring to his initials, T.B. Hayes, or to the sexual act known as "teabagging"? Either way, he saw it as an effort to unnerve him prior to his testimony. "He wants me to think that if I go out for a run tonight, some people in a pickup truck are going to come," he says. Pastoor did not respond to my requests to get his side of the exchange; Syngenta's spokeswoman replied that "Dr. Hayes' unfounded allegations are not relevant to serious scientific or public policy discussions."

Hayes dashed off a furious rhyming response to Pastoor, Hosmer, and Syngenta attorney Alan Nadel. The next day, a message from Nadel to Pastoor landed back in his mailbox, clearly cc'd by accident: "Tim: I think you did hit a nerve. Alan." Hayes took it as proof that Syngenta officials were plotting to get under his skin. "They're probably Googling: 'Things that black people don't like to hear,'" he says.

• ya outa' luck...bouta show you how it is right nowA cooler head might have filed the emails away and gone back to his frogs. But Hayes was infected by an acute case of *esprit d'escalier. He continued bombarding his nemeses with hip-hop battle taunts until that July, when Syngenta filed an ethics complaint with UC-Berkeley charging that the emails were not only "aggressive, unprofessional and insulting, but also salacious and lewd." It also went public with 102 pages [26] of Hayes' emails. Exhibit A:

see you're ****ed...(i didn't pull out) and ya fulla my j*z right now!

The messages went viral, lighting up the blogosphere with headlines like "Dr. Tyrone Hayes: Biologist, Cock-Fixated Megalomaniac Email Addict [27]" (Gawker) and "Berkeley Scientist Gets Gully in Emails to Shady Pesticide Company 'I Ain't Scared O' You Mofos [28]'" (Bossip). TheNew York Times [29] and *Science* [30] wrote about the scandal, as did the esteemed journal *Nature* [31]—which has published Hayes' work [32].

"I spent a week in bed with a stomachache," Hayes recalls, mainly because he was worried how it would look to the foundations he relies on for research money—not that he would ever take the emails back. His critics were ecstatic. Googling "Dr. Tyrone Hayes [33]" now returns paid results from groups like AgSense, an agribusiness coalition that leads its critique of Hayes by quoting his "propriety and professionalism" outburst. Alex Avery, who created an [34] as part of his work with the Center for Global Food Issues, an anti-organics think tank, also quoted the emails[35], asking, "What does it take for a scientist to be discredited?"

More than this, apparently. The university's chief counsel ruled that no ethics violation had occurred but admonished both sides to behave. "We told him that his communications have the potential to reflect poorly on him and diminish the impact of his research-based arguments," says Mark Schlissel, Hayes' former dean. "He said he understood that." Sixteen scientists from a variety of disciplines wrote to the university in support of Hayes, casting Syngenta's move as a diversionary tactic. Others tried to distinguish between the messages and the messenger. "Science with an attitude is still science. Its validity doesn't depend on whether you like the behavior of an individual scientist," wrote environmental economist Frank Ackerman in a widely circulated *Grist* article [36].

Privately, though, Hayes' allies were aghast. His irreverence had always been an asset, attracting attention to atrazine just as Rachel Carson's impassioned lyricism [37] drew attention to DDT. But now irreverence had tipped toward irrationality. "Ultimately, as scientists, we have to sell our research and make sure that people are aware of it," says Jason Rohr, the researcher who did the meta-analysis. "But we also have to be objective."

Now that he's tenured [2], the facade is no longer necessary. He can rap. He can cuss. And if anyone wants to question his legitimacy, "I'm coming at you, and I don't care who knows it." That's more or less what he means when he signs his Syngenta emails "my name is tyrone."When I ask Hayes what possessed him to engage with Syngenta in this particular way, he's silent for a moment. "Wow, that's probably a long conversation," he says. The answer is related to his motto: IDGAF. For him, not giving a fuck means refusing the Faustian bargain that in exchange for a shot at professional respect you have to leave your true self at home. In his youth, Hayes told me, he hadn't even wanted to sign his full name to his paintings, because Tyrone was such a stereotypically black name. But that kind of cultural inauthenticity, he now believes, embodies the same sort of dishonesty that allows someone to fudge data on a contract job. "How can you be one person in your personal life and another in your professional life?" Hayes asks.

It's been about 18 months since the email uproar, and Hayes has concluded that it has helped him more than it hurt. "Thanks to their advertising," he gloats, "I'm giving 129 talks in the next year." It has also brought his work to new audiences via pop-culture blogs. "Now I've got minorities who would never have had access to this information," he says. And that's important because minorities are most at risk of exposure; half of America's farmworkers are Hispanic, according to the USDA [38]. "They have levels of atrazine in their urine that are 24,000 times what we use in our laboratory," Hayes adds.

In 2009, a *New York Times* investigation [8] found that 33 million Americans are exposed to atrazine through drinking water. EPA data from 2010 shows contamination exceeding the federal limit in 9 out of 10 states monitoring it—several Midwestern water districts reported between 9 and 18 times the limit. (Atrazine's tendency to contaminate water supplies is one reason the European Union voted to ban it in 2003 [39].)

The EPA has claimed these spikes are not a health hazard. Yet epidemiological studies have found links between prenatal atrazine exposure and birth defects [40], premature birth [41], and low birth weight [19]—even at extremely low concentrations. As Hayes explains, "0.1 ppb is not a low dose at all. Estrogen is active at levels that are 100 to 1,000 times lower than that. So in terms of an endocrine disruptor, that's a high dose."

The EPA is weighing this argument as it reconsiders whether to ban or restrict atrazine. In July, its advisory panel, citing "strong" epidemiological evidence, criticized the agency forunderstating the chemical's carcinogenic potential [42]. But with the EPA's review of the science now headed into its fourth year, Hayes doesn't expect much in the way of decisive action. Back in 2005, the Natural Resources Defense Council obtained documents revealing that agency officials met privately with Syngenta more than 40 times while evaluating atrazine's toxicity. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund [43] reported that fewer than 20 percent of the papers the EPA relied upon in its past decision-making were peer-reviewed, while at least half were conducted by scientists with a financial stake in the product.

The other reason Hayes is skeptical involves the power of the corn lobby. Corn farmers like atrazine because it increases yields and lets them cut back on plowing, reducing erosion. "Frogs are doing quite fine in Kansas," says Jere White, head of the Kansas Corn Growers and Kansas Grain Sorghum Producers Associations. "Anecdotally, I'd say they must not have read Dr. Hayes' studies."

Hayes is working on several new papers, including one he contends will be his most disturbing yet. It will show that male frogs exposed to atrazine early in life have feminized brains and tend to assume the bottom position when copulating, even when placed in a tank with females. While these frogs lack female sex organs, Hayes explains, their hormonal profile looks female, and "they have an identity that says female."

The last time we spoke, Hayes was getting ready to shoot Syngenta an email announcing his upcoming publications. "I think it'll just be informative," he told me. "Just to let them know. That's why they call me Tyrone."

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngenta-feud-frog-endangered

Links:

[1] http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/basicinformation/atrazine.cfm#four

[2] http://ib.berkeley.edu/research/interests/research_profile.php?person=85

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Bg_OjG1ds&feature=related

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MxrH4lN0-A

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC122794/

[6] http://www.pamelasturner.com/the_frog_scientist_79242.htm

[7] http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/8b770facf5edf6f185257359003fb69e/554b6abea9d0672f85257648004a88c1!OpenDocument

[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/us/23water.html?pagewanted=all

[9] http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/hip-hop-uc-professor-battles-chemical-company-6198

[10] http://atlantapost.com/2010/09/06/tyrone-b-hayes-is-hard-as-hell-scientists-emails-bringcontroversial- herbicide-to-light/

[11] http://www.wildkingdom.com/

[12] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058808/

[13] http://atrazinefacts.com/what-is-atrazine-27.asp

[14] http://www.syngenta.com/global/corporate/en/news-center/news-releases/Pages/en-%20110722.aspx

[15] http://www.syngenta.com/global/corporate/en/about-syngenta/Pages/company-history.aspx

[16] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/12/0909519107.abstract

[17] http://www.atrazinelovers.com/t1.html

[18] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/12/0909519107.full.pdf+html

[19] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1741023/

[20] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es048134q

[21] http://www.thecre.com/pdf/carr_pub.pdf

[22] http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.0901164

[23] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076011000665

[24] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-05-28/business/ct-biz-0529-spinmeister-20110528_1_syngenta-crop-protection-atrazine-public-relations

[25] http://www.atrazine.com/Amphibians/Tyrone-Hayes-emails.pdf

[26] http://www.atrazine.com/Amphibians/Univ_of_CA-7-19-10.pdf

[27] http://gawker.com/5620781/dr-tyrone-hayes-biologist-cock+fixated-megalomaniac-email-addict

[28] http://bossip.com/279392/berkeley-scientist-tyrone-hayes-uses-rap-lyrics-in-battle-againstpesticide-%20company-30346/

[29] http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/08/26/26greenwire-enviro-groups-cheer-as-scientistbombards-%20agri-18199.html?pagewanted=all

[30] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/08/i-told-ya-you-cant-stop-the-rage.html

[31] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100818/full/466913a.html

[32] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6910/full/419895a.html

[33] https://www.google.com/search?q=Dr.+Tyrone+Hayes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

[34] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KJ299_dijo

[35] http://www.cgfi.org/2010/07/the-strange-case-of-dr-tyrone-hayes/

[36] http://www.grist.org/article/food-the-atrazine-e-mails-science-with-an-attitude-is-still-science

[37] http://www.rachelcarson.org/

[38] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/LaborAndEducation/FarmLabor.htm

[39] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16967834

[40] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667895/

[41] http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1289/ehp.0900784

[42] http://www.epa.gov/scipoly/sap/meetings/2011/july/072611transcript.pdf

[43] http://www.alternet.org/story/147540/