EcoRisk

hacks for chemicals, went after Hayes when he refused to join them?

http://www.usask.ca/toxicology/jgiesy/pdf/publications/JA-507.pdf

robert bruce, kaminski u mich

a valuable rep aviv

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

ecorisk

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. Hayeseventually 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.

..In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

...

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 panelwrote that Hayes’s study had “little regard for assessment of causality,” lacked statistical details, misused the term “dose,” made vague and naïve references, and misspelled a word. They said that Hayes’s claim that his paper had “significant implications for environmental and public health” had not been “scientifically demonstrated.” Steven Milloy, a freelance science columnist who runs a nonprofit organization to which Syngenta has given tens of thousands of dollars, wrote an article for Fox News titled “Freaky-Frog Fraud,” which picked apart Hayes’s paper in Nature, saying that there wasn’t a clear relationship between the concentration of atrazine and the effect on the frog. Milloy characterized Hayes as a “junk scientist” and dismissed his “lame” conclusions as “just another of Hayes’ tricks.”

Fussy critiques of scientific experiments have become integral to what is known as the “sound science” campaign, an effort by interest groups and industries to slow the pace of regulation. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, wrote, in his book “Doubt Is Their Product” (2008), that corporations have developed sophisticated strategies for “manufacturing and magnifying uncertainty.” In the eighties and nineties, the tobacco industry fended off regulations by drawing attention to questions about the science of secondhand smoke. Many companies have adopted this tactic. “Industry has learned that debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy,” Michaels wrote. “In field after field, year after year, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not reliable.”

In the summer of 2002, two scientists from the E.P.A. visited Hayes’s lab and reviewed his atrazine data. Thomas Steeger, one of the scientists, told Hayes,“Your research can potentially affect the balance of risk versus benefit for one of the most controversial pesticides in the U.S.” But an organization called the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness petitioned the E.P.A. to ignore Hayes’s findings. “Hayes has killed and continues to kill thousands of frogs in unvalidated tests that have no proven value,” the petition said. The center argued that Hayes’s studies violated the Data Quality Act, passed in 2000, which requires that regulatory decisions rely on studies that meet high standards for “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity.” The center is run by an industry lobbyist and consultant for Syngenta, Jim Tozzi, who proposed the language of the Data Quality Act to the congresswoman who sponsored it.

The E.P.A. complied with the Data Quality Act and revised its Environmental Risk Assessment, making it clear that hormone disruption wouldn’t be a legitimate reason for restricting use of the chemical until “appropriate testing protocols have been established.” Steeger told Hayes that he was troubled by the circularity of the center’s critique. In an e-mail, he wrote, “Their position reminds me of the argument put forward by the philosopher Berkeley, who argued against empiricism by noting that reliance on scientific observation is flawed since the link between observations and conclusions is intangible and is thus immeasurable.”

...

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.

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 herbicideparaquat, 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.”

...

A few months after Winchester’s paper appeared, the Times published an investigation suggesting that atrazine levels frequently surpass the maximum threshold allowed in drinking water. The article referred to recent studies in Environmental Health Perspectives and the Journal of Pediatric Surgery that found that mothers living close to water sources containing atrazine were more likely to have babies who were underweight or had a defect in which the intestines and other organs protrude from the body.

The day the article appeared, Syngenta planned to “go through the article line by line and find all 1) inaccuracies and 2) misrepresentations. Turn that into a simple chart.” The company would have “a credible third party do the same.”Elizabeth Whelan, the president of the American Council on Science and Health, which asked Syngenta for a hundred thousand dollars that year, appeared on MSNBC and declared that the Times article was not based on science. “I’m a public-health professional,” she said. “It really bothers me very much to see the New York Times front-page Sunday edition featuring an article about a bogus risk.”

Syngenta’s public-relations team wrote editorials about the benefits of atrazine and about the flimsy science of its critics, and then sent them to “third-party allies,” who agreed to “byline” the articles, which appeared in the Washington Times, the Rochester Post-Bulletin, the Des Moines Register, and the St. Cloud Times. When a few articles in the “op-ed pipeline” sounded too aggressive, a Syngenta consultant warned that “some of the language of these pieces is suggestive of their source, which suggestion should be avoided at all costs.”

After the Times article, Syngenta hired a communications consultancy,the White House Writers Group, 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!”

...

Berkeley declined to take disciplinary action against Hayes. The university’s lawyer reminded Syngenta in a letter that “all parties have an equal responsibility to act professionally.” David Wake said that he read many of the e-mails and found them “quite hilarious.” “He’s treating them like street punks, and they view themselves as captains of industry,” he said. “When he gets tapped, he goes right back at them.”

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.” However, she added, “I do think some people feel he has lost his objectivity.”

Keith Solomon, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has received funding from Syngenta and served on the EcoRisk panel, noted that academics who refuse industry money are not immune from biases; they’re under pressure to produce papers, in order to get tenure and promotions. “If I do an experiment, look at the data every which way, and find nothing, it will not be easy to publish,” he said. “Journals want excitement. They want bad things to happen.”

frog of war

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.

...

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 adozen 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.

...

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?"...

http://ecologicalrisk.com/Cummins_CV.pdf

Harwell Gentile & Associates, LC, is dedicated to providing scientifically defensible solutions in support of environmental decisionmaking. The principals and affiliates of Harwell Gentile & Associates are a team of primarily university-based natural, physical, and social scientists. We specialize in the application of risk-based principles to solving complex environmental problems at a diversity of spatial and temporal scales; developing innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to assessing and managing ecosystem risks and restoration activities; and creating policy-relevant conceptual and simulation models to support environmental management actions.

Curriculum Vitae

Kenneth W. Cummins

Co-Director, Institute for River Ecosystems,

Senior Advisory Scientist, California Cooperative Fishery Research Unit, and

Adjunct Professor, Fishery Biology Department, Humboldt State University Arcata, CA

95521

VOX and FAX: 707-825-7350.

Personal Data

Place of Birth: Chicago, IL, USA

Education

1955 B.A. (Biology) Lawrence University, Appleton, WI (Magna cum

Laude, Phi Beta Kappa)

1957 M.S. (Fisheries) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

1961 PhD.(Zoology/Limnology) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Professional Background

2004-present Co-Director, Institute for River Ecosystems, Humboldt State University

Arcata, CA.

1999-present Senior Advisory Scientist, California Cooperative Fishery Unit and

Adjunct Professor, Fisheries Biology Department, Humboldt State

University, Arcata, CA

2002-2004 Interim Director, Institute for Forest and Watershed Management,

Humboldt state University, Arcata, CA

University of Miami, Rosensteil School of Atmospheric and Marine Science, Miami, FL

(1998-2000).

University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Science, Gainsville, FL (1997-

2000).

Florida International University, Department of Biological Science, Miami, FL (1997-

2000).

University of South Florida, Department of Biology, Tampa, Fl (1999-2000).

Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Meyers, FL (1999-2000).

References for Contact (after permission)

Dr. Richard W. Merritt, Chair

Department of Entomology

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824

(517-355-8309)

Dr. Gene Likens, Director

Institute of Ecosystem Studies

The Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum

Box AB

Millbrook, NY 12545

(914-677-5343)

Dr. Charles Goldman

Division of Environmental Studies

University of California, Davis

Davis, CA 95616

(916-777-5343)

Dr. J. David Allan

School of Natural Resources and Environment

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

(313-764-6553)

Dr. Stuart Fisher

Department of Zoology

Arizona State University

Tempe, AZ 85287

(602-965-4734)

Dr. G. Wayne Minshall

Department of Biology

Idaho State University

Pocatello, ID 83291

ecorisk

Toxicol. Sci. (August 2005) 86 (2): 273-280.

doi: 10.1093/toxsci/kfi203

First published online: May 18, 2005

Effects of Atrazine on CYP19 Gene Expression and Aromatase Activity in Testes and on Plasma Sex Steroid Concentrations of Male African Clawed Frogs (Xenopus laevis)

Markus Hecker*, 1 , June-Woo Park*, Margaret B. Murphy*, Paul D. Jones*, Keith R. Solomon†, Glen Van Der Kraak‡, James A. Carr§¶, Ernest E. Smith¶, Louis du Preez?, Ronald J. Kendall¶ and John P. Giesy*?|

Author Affiliations

*Department of Zoology, National Food Safety & Toxicology Center, Center for Integrative Toxicology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824; †Centre for Toxicology and Department of Environmental Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada; ‡Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Ontario, NIG 2W1, Canada; §Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79409; ¶Department of Environmental Toxicology, and The Institute of Environmental & Human Health, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79416; ?North West University for Christian Higher Education, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa; ?|Department of Biology and Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR, China

1To whom correspondence should be addressed at 218c National Food Safety & Toxicology Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824. Fax: +1 (517) 381-1435. E-mail: heckerm@msu.edu.

Eric Higley and Amber Tompsett (Michigan State University) provided invaluable technical assistance. Larry Holden (Sielken & Associates Consulting, Inc., Bryan, TX) provided statistical support. We thank A. Hosmer (Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., Greensboro, NC) for many helpful comments on experimental design. We are grateful to Dr. Robert Yokley (Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., Greensboro, NC) for his analytical chemistry support. We also thank C. Bens, R. Bruce, and S. Williamson from ECORISC Inc., Ferndale, WA. This research was facilitated by the Atrazine Endocrine Ecological Risk Assessment Panel, Ecorisk, Inc., Ferndale, WA, and sponsored by Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. In addition, the research was supported through National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) training grant no. T32ES07255. Conflict of interest: none

Wildlife Ecotoxicology: Forensic Approaches

By John E. Elliott, Christine A. Bishop, Christy Morrissey

springer 2011

http://books.google.com/books?id=grkZKbBzzTMC&dq=hosmer+syngenta&source=gbs_navlinks_s

1/26/2001 panel: ron kendall, keith solomon, john g, earnest smith, jim carr, alan hosmer, chls breckenridge later, into's robert sielken and assoc consulting

erorisk drops, then peter hertl, janis mcFarland, syn VP Gary dickson,

tom steeger at epa said erocrisk wd crit p 306 (nrdc foia'd email betw steeger and hosmer)

syn said kloas 2009a defintive werner kloas toxicol sci 107, pp 376-384 (was sole basis for epa decision?)

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RESEARCH FELLOW

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.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

...

According to company e-mails, Syngenta was distressed by Hayes’s work. Its public-relations team compiled a database of more than a hundred “supportive third party stakeholders,” including twenty-five professors, who could defend atrazine or act as “spokespeople on Hayes.” The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for “Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.”)

In June, 2002, two months after Hayes’s first atrazine publication, Syngenta announced in a press release that three studies had failed to replicate Hayes’s work. In a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eight scientists on the EcoRisk panel wrote that Hayes’s study had “little regard for assessment of causality,” lacked statistical details, misused the term “dose,” made vague and naïve references, and misspelled a word. They said that Hayes’s claim that his paper had “significant implications for environmental and public health” had not been “scientifically demonstrated.” Steven Milloy, a freelance science columnist who runs a nonprofit organization to which Syngenta has given tens of thousands of dollars, wrote an article for Fox News titled “Freaky-Frog Fraud,” which picked apart Hayes’s paper in Nature, saying that there wasn’t a clear relationship between the concentration of atrazine and the effect on the frog. Milloy characterized Hayes as a “junk scientist” and dismissed his “lame” conclusions as “just another of Hayes’ tricks.”

Fussy critiques of scientific experiments have become integral to what is known as the “sound science” campaign, an effort by interest groups and industries to slow the pace of regulation. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, wrote, in his book “Doubt Is Their Product” (2008), that corporations have developed sophisticated strategies for “manufacturing and magnifying uncertainty.” In the eighties and nineties, the tobacco industry fended off regulations by drawing attention to questions about the science of secondhand smoke. Many companies have adopted this tactic. “Industry has learned that debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy,” Michaels wrote. “In field after field, year after year, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not reliable.”

In the summer of 2002, two scientists from the E.P.A. visited Hayes’s lab and reviewed his atrazine data. Thomas Steeger, one of the scientists, told Hayes, “Your research can potentially affect the balance of risk versus benefit for one of the most controversial pesticides in the U.S.” But an organization called the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness petitioned the E.P.A. to ignore Hayes’s findings. “Hayes has killed and continues to kill thousands of frogs in unvalidated tests that have no proven value,” the petition said. The center argued that Hayes’s studies violated the Data Quality Act, passed in 2000, which requires that regulatory decisions rely on studies that meet high standards for “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity.” The center is run by an industry lobbyist and consultant for Syngenta, Jim Tozzi, who proposed the language of the Data Quality Act to the congresswoman who sponsored it.

...

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.”

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 approach to environmental risks, choosing restraint in the face of uncertainty. In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling, the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible, demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”

In 2003, a Syngenta development committee in Basel approved a strategy to keep atrazine on the market “until at least 2010.” A PowerPoint presentation assembled by Syngenta’s global product manager explained that “we need atrazine to secure our position in the corn marketplace. Without atrazine we cannot defend and grow our business in the USA.” Sherry Ford, the communications manager, wrote in her notebook that the company “should not phase out atz until we know about” the Syngenta herbicide paraquat, which has also been controversial, because of studies showing that it might be associated with Parkinson’s disease. She noted that atrazine “focuses attention away from other products.”

...

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.”

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.”

...

Keith Solomon, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has received funding from Syngenta and served on the EcoRisk panel, noted that academics who refuse industry money are not immune from biases; they’re under pressure to produce papers, in order to get tenure and promotions. “If I do an experiment, look at the data every which way, and find nothing, it will not be easy to publish,” he said. “Journals want excitement. They want bad things to happen.”

frog of war

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.

...

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.

...

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.

Data Evaluation Report on Response of Xenopus laevis to Atrazine Exposure: Assessment of the Mechanism

of Action of Atrazine.

EPA MRID Number 458677-04

Data Requirement::

EPA DP Barcode D288775

Abcdef8

EPA MRID 458677-04

EPA Guideline 70-1(Special Study)

Test material: Purity: 97.1%

Common name Atrazine

chemical name: IUPAC

CAS name 6-chloro-N-ethyl-N’-(1-methylethyl)-1,3,5-triazine-2,4-diamine

CAS No. 1912-24-9

synonyms

EPA PC Code: 80803

Primary Reviewer: Thomas M. Steeger, Ph.D., Senior Biologist Date: March 27, 2003

Environmental Fate and Effects Division, ERB 4,

U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

Secondary Reviewer(s): Joseph E. Tietge, M.S., Research Aquatic Biologist Date:

Mid-Continent Ecology Division, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (Duluth),

U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

Stephanie Irene, Ph.D., Senior Advisor Date:

Environmental Fate and Effects Division, ERB 3, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

Mary J. Frankenberry, Senior Statistician Date:

Environmental Fate and Effects Division, ERB 3, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

EPA PC Code 080803

Date Evaluation Completed: 05/31/2003

CITATION: Hecker, M., K. K. Coady, D. L. Villeneuve, M. B. Murphy, P. D. Jones and J. P. Giesy. 2003.

Response of Xenopus laevis to Atrazine Exposure: Assessment of the Mechanism of Action of Atrazine.

Aquatic Toxicology Laboratory, Michigan State University, National Food Safety and Toxicology Center,

E. Lansing, MI. Sponsor: Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., Laboratory Study ID ECORISK Number MSU-

04.

Data Evaluation Report on Response of Xenopus laevis to Atrazine Exposure: Assessment of the Mechanism

of Action of Atrazine.

EPA MRID Number 458677-04

XB-ART-1476

Ecotoxicol Environ Saf. October 1, 2005; 62 (2): 160-73.

Effects of atrazine on metamorphosis, growth, laryngeal and gonadal development, aromatase activity, and sex steroid concentrations in Xenopus laevis.

Coady KK , Murphy MB , Villeneuve DL , Hecker M , Jones PD , Carr JA , Solomon KR , Smith EE , Van Der Kraak G , Kendall RJ ,Giesy JP .

Abstract

African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) were exposed to one of eight nominal waterborne concentrations including 0, 0.1, 1.0, 10, or 25 microg/L atrazine, 0.005% ethanol (EtOH), or 0.1mg/L estradiol (E2) or dihydrotestosterone (DHT) containing 0.005% EtOH. Frogs were exposed from 72 h posthatch until 2--3 months postmetamorphosis via a 3-day static renewal exposure regimen. Atrazine at concentrations between 0.1 and 25 microg/L did not significantly affect mortality, growth, gonad development, laryngeal muscle size, or aromatase activity in juvenile X. laevis. Male frogs exposed to 1.0 microg/L atrazine had lower E2 levels compared to controls, but this response was not consistent among other concentrations of atrazine. Male and female frogs exposed to DHT had larger laryngeal dilator muscle areas compared to controls. E2-exposed female frogs had decreased gonadal aromatase activity, and E2-exposed male frogs had statistically greater plasma concentrations of E2 compared to controls.

PubMed ID: 16112017

Article link: Ecotoxicol Environ Saf.

Genes referenced: cyp19a1

Antibodies referenced:

Minghua Nie

NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla

molecular biology

Verified email at scripps.edu

James Wohlschlegel

Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry, UCLA

Verified email at mednet.ucla.edu

Cited by 6062

AJAY VASHISHT

Postdoctoral Scholar

Verified email at mednet.ucla.edu

Cited by 849

John Prudden

The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA

Verified email at scripps.edu

Cited by 386

Perry JJ

The Scripps Research Institute & Amrita University

Verified email at scripps.edu

Cited by 1027

Drs. Gentile and Harwell were leaders in the development of the US Environmental Agency’s framework for ecological risk assessment. The concept of risk assessments became an organizing principle for US EPA in the mid-1980s, following the approach developed by the National Research Council’s panel on cancer risks to people from chemical exposures, known as the “Red Book” (NRC 1983). The NRC framework combined hazard (the inherent ability of a chemical to cause harm) and exposure (the amount of chemical experienced by humans) into a probabilistic assessment of health risk. However, it soon became apparent that this framework was inadequate to deal with ecological risk issues, for several reasons: a) there are many different types of ecological systems; b) each ecosystem has its own specific attributes of importance; and c) there are many different stressors, both natural and anthropogenic, where stressors are defined as any chemical, physical, and biological change that could affect an ecological system. Thus, the NRC approach, which was designed to deal with only one system (humans) and one stressor (toxic chemicals) and one endpoint (cancers), was insufficient to address the complexities of ecological problems.

Drs. Harwell and Gentile led a workshop of several dozen scientists from academia and government to develop the new ecorisk framework for US EPA (Harwell and Gentile 1992; Gentile et al. 1993). The central elements of this paradigm are: problem formulation, stress regime characterization, ecological effects characterization, analysis, and risk characterization.

Problem formulation identifies the stress regimes, ecosystem components of interest, selects ecological endpoints, and develops a conceptual model of stress-response relationships. Stress regime is more than exposure because it includes natural physical variability and time/space patterns of multiple natural and anthropogenic stressors. A stressor is defined as any chemical, physical, or biological change that can affect an ecosystem. Ecological effects characterization is more complicated than hazard because of the inherent diversity of ecosystems and extreme range of scales (time/space) that simultaneously operate in ecosystems. Thus, evaluating ecological health requires a suite of ecological endpoints spanning organizational scales (species, population, community, ecosystem, and landscape) (Harwell et al. 1990). The analysis phase is for development and testing of models, experiments, and data analyses to evaluate these relationships. Risk characterization integrates stress and effects into a predictive and probabilistic statement of the risks and uncertainties which is used along with societal and economic factors by the decision-maker.

Harwell Gentile & Associates, LC, has applied this ecological risk assessment framework to several large-scale ecological risk assessments. For example, we conducted two comparative risk assessments to evaluate the relative risks of spills of fuel oil vs. the emulsion fuel Orimulsion on Tampa Bay, Florida, and the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. The comparative approach allowed decision-makers to see the ecological risk reductions associated with conversion of existing power plants to Orimulsion. Another major ecological risk assessment has involved the Coeur d’Alene River basin, for which HGA developed a series of conceptual models to characterize the ecosystem and the exposure and effects risks from high levels of toxic metals resulting from mining operations.

References Cited

Gentile, J.H., M.A. Harwell, W. van der Schalie, S. Norton, and D. Rodier. 1993. Ecological risk assessment: a scientific perspective. J. Hazardous Materials 35: 241-253.

Harwell, Mark A. and Jack Gentile. 1992. Report of the EPA Ecological Risk Assessment Guidelines Strategic Planning Workshop, Miami, FL, May 1991. US Environmental Protection Agency, Risk Assessment Forum, Washington, DC.

National Research Council (NRC). 1983. Risk Assessment in the Federal Government. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sciences,

Environmental Sciences Institute and Environmental

Sciences Cooperative Center, Florida A&M

University. Research into ecological risk assessment,

ecosystem management, ecological modeling, and

environmental policy issues. Management of research

projects, staff, and funds.

Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry

Ecological Society of America

Society for Environmental Management

Society for Risk Analysis

Limnology Society of America

Man and the Biosphere - Human Dominated Systems Directorate

Biography

Dr. Gentile is an ecologist whose primary interest is the design and

implementation of watershed and regional-scale integrated risk

assessments and the use of this information in ecosystem

management and policy decisions. Dr Gentile held several

positions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where

he directed programs in: marine ecotoxicology: ocean disposal of

hazardous wastes; marine water quality criteria, and the disposal

of dredged materials. He was Senior Science Coordinator for

EPA/ORD’s Risk Assessment Forum where his primary

responsibility was the development of EPA’s Framework for

Ecological Risk.

Higher Education

Ph.D. Ecology, University of New Hampshire

M.A. Ecology, University of New Hampshire

B.A Biology/Chemistry, Northeastern University

Employment History

1997-Present Harwell Gentile & Associates, LC (Principal)

2002-2004t Woods Hole Group, Inc (Consultant)

2001-2005 Florida A&M University (Adjunct Professor)

1995-2002 University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine

And Atmospheric Sciences (Senior Scientist)

1990-1995 U. S Environmental Protection Agency,Senior

Scientist, Risk Assessment Forum, D.C.

1988-1990 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Visiting

Scientist)

1981-1987 U. S Environmental Protection Agency, Technical Director, EPA/COE Field

Verification Program

1977-1981 U. S Environmental Protection Agency, Chief,

Environmental Toxicology Branch

1966-1977 U. S Environmental Protection Agency, Aquatic

Coeur d’Alene Superfund Site: Mining operations over the last century have left over 10,000

square miles of heavy metal contamination in the Coeur d’Alene basin. In order to characterize

the magnitude and extent of contamination and risk, a risk-based framework was used to divide

the area into sub-units and to identify remedial source and ecological goals. Conceptual models

were developed for each sub-unit and for rivers within those units to identify the primary sources

of contamination and to allocate resources. This study involved EPA, NOAA, the Coeur

d’Alene Tribal Nation, and the Department of Justice. My role in this study was to conduct a

series (10) of workshops that resulted in setting goals for each sub-unit and developing

conceptual models to support remediation efforts.

Assessing the Ecological Significance of Residual Exxon-Valdez Oil: The Exxon Valdez oil

spill occurred on 24 March 1989, with more than 250,000 barrels (i.e., over 1 x 107

gallons or 4.2

x 107

liters) of Alaska North Slope crude oil released into northeastern PWS (cf., Galt et al.

1991; NOAA 1992; Stoker et al. 1992; US Coast Guard 1993; Wolfe et al. 1994; Page et al.

1995; Wells et al. 1995; Spies et al. 1996). Fifteen years after the spill the seminal question is

whether there is a significant risk or threat to biota from the residual Exxon-Valdez oil. Our

study involved expanding on the US EPA ecological risk assessment framework by applying

criteria for evaluating the ecological significance of effects. This was done by adding a

framework for assessing the ecological significance of the exposure regime, and use this ....

Dr. Mark A. Harwell CV

Dr. Harwell is an ecosystems ecologist with expertise in ecological risk assessments and ecosystem management.

Areas of activity:

—ecological risk assessment; ecosystem management; conceptual modeling; environmental decision-making; environmental consequences of global climate change; human-environmental interactions; ecological modeling

mharwell@ecologicalrisk.com

Dr. John H. (Jack) Gentile CV

Dr. Gentile is an ecologist whose primary interest is the design and implementation of watershed and regional-scale integrated risk assessments and the use of this information in ecosystem management and policy decisions.

Areas of activity:

— ecological risk assessments, ecotoxicology; conceptual modeling; environmental decision-making; human-environmental interactions; facilitation of science in support of decision-making

jgentile@ecologicalrisk.com

Affiliates

Dr. Jerald S. (Jerry) Ault CV

— population dynamics; fisheries ecology; ecological modeling; coupling of physical and biological systems; statistical analyses; ecological risk assessments

jault@rsmas.miami.edu

Dr. Wendell P. Cropper. Jr. CV

— mechanistic simulation modeling at multiple scales; analysis of ecosystem productivity and growth; applications of biologically inspired computing (genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks)

wcropper@ufl.edu

Dr. Kenneth W. (Ken) Cummins CV

— a stream and watershed ecology; aquatic ecosystem processes with emphasis on freshwaterinvertebrates.

kwc7002@humboldt.edu

Dr. Wenrui Huang CV

— 3D Coastal and estuarine environmental modeling (surface hydrodynamic, sediment, and water quality modeling); neural network applications in hydrological and environmental forecasting (river flow, water levels, salinity, etc.); computational fluid dynamics and model development.

whuang@eng.fsu.edu

Dr. David (Dave) Letson CV

— Dr. Letson’s research focuses on natural resource economics, with particular emphasis on the economics of extreme weather and climate variations

dletson@rsmas.miami.edu

Dr. Diego Lirman CV

— coral reef ecology and biology; ecological modeling; seagrass and macroalgal ecosystems; ecological consequences of tropical storms and hurricanes; ecological risk assessments

dlirman@rsmas.miami.edu

Dr. Michael A. (Mike) Reiter CV

— conceptual models and integrated assessment strategies for natural resource management, stakeholder-based methodologies; development of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary courses and programs with a focus on environmental issues; design, syllabi, workshops.

mreiter@desu.edu

Dr. John Schalles CV

— aquatic science, with an emphasis on biological production, biogeochemistry, and remote sensing of shallow systems (lakes, wetlands, estuaries, reefs, and near shore); hyperspectral imagery acquisition and geospatial analysis of coastal habitats (salt marshes, submerged aquatic vegetion, and open water); vegetation community structure, productivity, hydrology, and biogeochemistry of depressional wetlands; hydrologic optics and remote estimation of phytoplankton chlorophyll and accessory pigments

jfsaqua@creighton.edu

Dr. Michael Thomas CV

— resource and environmental economics; assessing the economic value of boating access in Florida and modeling the optimal placement of future boating access facilities; economic value of improved hurricane forecasting; economic impacts of the invasive pest, tropical soda apple, on the Florida cattle industry; assurance bonding as a tool to manage risks associated with intentionally releasing exotic species; economic loss modeling from environmental damage of the 1993 Tampa Bay Oil spill; modeling the economic impact and value lost to recreational boaters resulting from manatee speed zones in Florida.

michaelthomas@nettally.com

Dr. Hongqing Wang CV

— hydrodynamic and water quality modeling; spatially-explicit process-based ecosystem & biogeochemical modeling; Land use/land cover mapping/modeling/change detection; and application of GIS, remote sensing and GPS in ecosystem studies.

hxw7894@louisiana.edu

Dr. Anthony D. (Tony) Wilbon CV

— strategic management of science and technology; planning and management of science resources, with particular emphasis in areas of socioeconomic aspects of ecological and environmental science; teaching and consulting capabilities extend to technology and business related topics including management science, research methodology and design (qualitative and quantitative techniques), information systems application and technology, production and operations management, and business strategy in technology/science environments.

adwilbon@hotmail.com

Dr. Dreamal Worthen CV

— interdisciplinary agricultural and rural research focusing on environmental justice, the elderly, poverty and health issues in rural communities of color; research looking at how social decisions and responses impact the environment.

dreamal.worthen@famu.edu

HGA, LC 2006-2007

Prince William Sound

Fire Island - Montauk Point

Florida Department of Environmental Protection

Coeur d'Alene River Basin

ORIMULSION™ Comparative Risk Assessment

Biscayne Bay

South Florida/CERP

Apalachicola Bay

To request reprints or more information from these projects, please send email to: info@ecologicalrisk.com.

Prince William Sound - Exxon Valdez

A project presently underway by Harwell Gentile and Associates, LC, for the ExxonMobil Corporation is addressing the issue of the ecological significance of any residual effects from the Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) on Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred on 24 March 1989, with more than 250,000 barrels of Alaska North Slope crude oil released into northeastern Prince William Sound. Within two days winds in excess of 70 mph drove much of the surfaced oil to the southwest, forming mousse, a water-in-oil emulsion that affected the fate-and-transport and exposures of the spilled oil. About half of the spilled oil landed on the shoreline or the intertidal zone of the Alaskan coast, so that almost 500 miles of Prince William Sound (about 16% of the shoreline) and over 800 miles of the Gulf of Alaska (about 14% of the shoreline) were oiled to some degree. Because Prince William Sound is such a highly dynamic system, with extreme winter storms and wave/tidal action, most of the beached oil dispersed back into the ocean within three years after the spill, and only 2% of the volume of oil spilled remained on Prince William Sound beaches by the end of 1992.

Biological effects from the spill resulted from both toxicological responses from the chemicals in the oil (particularly PAHs) and physical oiling which caused smothering and hyperthermia. Especially visible was the significant loss of seabirds from oiling, with estimates of over 375,000 seabirds being killed. However, although the PAHs were readily detectable in the water, their concentrations were well below acute toxicity levels for marine animals, even right after the spill. In addition to the stressors from the crude oil itself, a massive clean-up operation was undertaken after the spill throughout the summers of 1989-91, and more than 11,000 people and 1100 boats cleaned over 1000 miles of shorelines and intertidal areas of the Sound and Gulf using high-pressure and/or high-temperature water removal, surfactants, and manual physical removal of oil. There was clear evidence that in many cases the clean-up efforts constituted a more significant stressor to shoreline and intertidal biota than the physical and toxicological stressors from the spill. For example, some of the intertidal cleaning essentially removed all of the macroalgal community from rocky surfaces, extending the time to recovery of those areas by about two years.

gulf of mexico

http://www.harteresearchinstitute.org/newsletter/spring2011/docs/gom_report_card_initiative.pdf

cape cod, hamock fl 2 tx a&m guys may 2011

setac 2004?

Effects of estradiol and atrazine on testicular

ultrastructure in

Xenopus laevis

Markus Hecker

, Wan Jong Kim, June-Woo Park, Daniel

Villeneuve, Margaret Murphy, Paul Jones, Keith Solomon,

and John Giesy

ecorisk, syngenta,

The National Institues of

Environmental Health Safety (NIEHS).gov legit

Hosmer at syn

brad smaple ikyn

http://www.ecorisk.com/resume.html CA

Effects of Atrazine on Adult

Xenopus laevis

in the

Wild and the Laboratory:

No Evidence for an Ar

omatase Based Mechanism.

Markus Hecker, Louis du Preez, Katie Coady,

Margaret Murphy, Daniel Villeneuve, Keith Solomon,

No evidence for an aromatase

based mechanism of action

• Environmental effects of ATZ on the endocrine system of

frogs cannot be excluded

• Need to clarify the remaining

uncertainties with a focus on

elucidating the...

Markus Hecker

National Food Safety & Toxicology Center

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan, 48824, USA

Tel: (517) 432-6333

Fax: (517) 432-1984

Email: Heckerm@msu.edu

Smith, Ernest E. -

Texas Tech University

• DuPreez, Louis -

Potchefstroom University

•Solomon, Keith R. -

University of Guelph

• Gentles, Angella B. -

Texas Tech University

• Tandler, Bernard A. -

Case Western Reserve

University

• Carr, James A. -

Texas Tech University

• Kendall, Ronald J. -

Texas Tech University

• Giesy, John P. -

Michigan State University

• Gross Timothy S. -

University of Florida

• Van Der Kraak Glen -

University of Guelph

Other Recent Studies to be

Presented at SETAC

• Du Preez, LH.

Exposure characterization and responses to

field exposures of

Xenopus laevis

to atrazine and related

triazines in South African corn

growing regions. Sunday,

11/17 (P001)

• Coady, K.K.

Effects of atrazine on developing

Xenopus

laevis

: Potential endocrine di

sruption. Sunday, 11/17

(P093)

• Villeneuve, D.L.

Aromatase activity in tissues from adult

Xenopus laevis e

xposed to atrazine. S

unday, 11/17 (P086

http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/12/1138.full.pdf

TYROME BIB

Effects of atrazine on metamorphosis, growth, laryngeal and gonadal development, aromatase activity, and sex steroid concentrations in Xenopus laevis Coady, K.K. Murphy, M.B. Villeneuve, D.L. Kendall, R.J. Giesy, J.P. 2005 Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 0

Plasma steroid hormone concentrations, aromatase activities and GSI in ranid frogs collected from agricultural and non-agricultural sites in Michigan (USA) Murphy, M.B. Hecker, M. Coady, K.K. Van Der Kraak, G. Giesy, J.P. 2006 Aquatic Toxicology 0

Effects of atrazine on metamorphosis, growth, and gonadal development in the green frog (Rana clamitans) Coady, K.K. Murphy, M.B. Villeneuve, D.L. Kendall, R.J. Giesy, J.P. 2004 Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health - Part A 0

Differential accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyl congeners in the aquatic food web at the Kalamazoo River superfund site, Michigan Kay, D.P. Blankenship, A.L. Coady, K.K. Jones, P.D. Giesy, J.P. 2005 Environmental Science and Technology 0

Differential accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyl congeners in the terrestrial food web of the Kalamazoo River superfund site, Michigan Blankenship, A.L. Zwiernik, M.J. Coady, K.K. Jones, P.D. Giesy, J.P. 2005 Environmental Science and Technology 0

Terminology of gonadal anomalies in fish and amphibians resulting from chemical exposures Hecker, M. Murphy, M.B. Coady, K.K. Kendall, R.J. Giesy, J.P. 2006 Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 0

Atrazine concentrations, gonadal gross morphology and histology in ranid frogs collected in Michigan agricultural areas Murphy, M.B. Hecker, M. Coady, K.K. Van Der Kraak, G. Giesy, J.P. 2006 Aquatic Toxicology 0

...

2008

Effects of Atrazine on Fish, Amphibians, and Aquatic Reptiles: A Critical Review

Keith R. Solomon a

; James A. Carr b Department of Biological Sciences,Texas Tech University,Lubbock, Texas

; Louis H. Du Preez c

; John P. Giesy def Mich

; Ronald J. Kendall g tx

; Ernest E

Smith g

Glen J. Van Der Kraak h

Department of Environmental Biology and Centre for Toxicology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario,

Canada

Department of Biological Sciences,Texas Tech University,Lubbock, Texas

School of

Environmental Sciences and Development, North West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Toxicology

Centre, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Department of Biology and

Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR, China

Zoology Department, Michigan

State University, East Lansing, Michigan

Institute of Environmental and Human Health and Department of

Environmental Toxicology, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas

Department of Integrative Biology,

University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Online Publication Date: 01 October 2008