Over 80 percent of Americans support "mandatory labels on foods containing DNA"

[proverbialwisdom]

42. January 15, 2015: "Tyrone Hayes on crooked science and why we should shun GMOs"

http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2015-articles/15881-tyrone-hayes-on-crooked-science-and-why-we-should-shun-gmos

Tyrone Hayes on crooked science and why we should shun GMOs
Scientist who exposed the dangers of atrazine explains how scientists get corrupted and how the GMO industry is really the agrochemicals industry

17 January 2015



This interview with Tyrone Hayes, the scientist who exposed the dangers of Syngenta’s pesticide atrazine, is worth reading in full. He covers GMOs at the end.

http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-agriculture/tyrone-hayes-misfortune-frogs-crooked-science-and-why-we-should-shun-gmos.html

Tyrone Hayes on the misfortune of frogs, crooked science and why we should shun GMOs

Melissa Breyer (@MelissaBreyer)
Science / Sustainable Agriculture
January 15, 2015

The life and work of biologist Dr. Tyrone B. Hayes, PhD, reads like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster: Scientist whistleblower takes on global agribusiness responsible for environmental havoc; a web of lies, corporate shenanigans, and mystery ensues. So it’s somehow fitting that Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme took on Hayes’ story for a segment in the Amazon Original TV series pilot, "The New Yorker Presents."

Co-produced by Jigsaw Productions and Conde Nast Entertainment, "The New Yorker Presents" is a nifty collection of vignettes in which pieces from the The New Yorker magazine – from fiction to poetry to non-fiction and beyond – have been recast as short films. In the segment on Hayes, Demme brings to life Rachel Aviv’s article about the biologist. Aviv's story becomes Demme's launching point into the investigation of the curious case of frogs changing genders and other deleterious effects of the herbicide atrazine on our ecosystem – told through the lens of Hayes’ life story and his enduring crusade to educate people about the dangers of this widely-used chemical.

We had the good fortune to talk to Hayes, here’s how it played out:

TreeHugger: (Sparing you the warm-up chitchat and cutting straight to the chase here.) So first of all, can you tell us about what led you to a career in amphibians and biology in general?

Tyrone Hayes: I was born and raised in South Carolina; I lived there until I was 18 years old. My interest in amphibians and the environment and in biology has been with me since I was a young child. I spent a lot of time in the swamps in South Carolina, both in and around my neighborhood and my grandmother’s house, but also in what’s now Congaree Swamp.

After South Carolina I moved to Harvard. I was a biology major there and I continued working with amphibians as an undergraduate and did my thesis on environmental regulation and effects on development and growth in amphibians. After graduating Harvard I came to Berkeley in 1989 for my PhD, where I again studied the role of environment and effects on amphibians and the role of hormones in development. Shortly after obtaining my PhD, I started a professorship at Berkeley where I continued to study amphibians and branched out into studying environmental chemical contaminants that interfere with hormones. At that stage I was hired by Syngenta to study atrazine and that's what the film is about.

TH: It seems kind of crazy that Syngenta sought you out; an expert in the field for a product that clearly had problems. Were the findings a surprise to them? Did they know what they had on their hands or was it a coincidence that they happened to come to you?

HAYES: No. They knew what the compounds did and I think that by hiring scientists ahead of any independent group or any government agency, they then had control over the data and how the data would be presented – or`whether the data got presented at all – and how much of the data got to the EPA. Individuals within the organization certainly knew about atrazine’s endocrine disrupting properties, from conversations that I had when we started the work. I think the goal was to be in control of the finances and the research and the data.

I don’t think it was a surprise at all. If you read some of their own handwritten documents that have been released, there are other chemicals in their arsenal, so to speak, that they know have environmental health and public health problems. They know that as the compounds are being released. So, for example, they replaced atrazine with a chemical in Europe [the European Union announced a ban of atrazine in 2003 because of ubiquitous and unpreventable water contamination] called terbuthylazine. And in the same year that terbuthylazine became available in Europe you see in their handwritten notes that it's more active than atrazine, it causes the same problems as atrazine; it causes testicular cancer and a number of other similar problems that may be associated with atrazine.

TH: It’s remarkable not only that they would seem to lack concern about the environmental and health effects, but also the hubris of fearlessly bringing these chemicals to the attention of enlightened researchers. Is this typical?

HAYES: I think what they do, in my experience, is they prey on young scientists. I was an up-and-coming scientist at the time, a brand new assistant professor and I didn't have tenure. What they can offer, especially in this funding climate, is a significant amount of funding to a young scientist and the promise of funding for life. They have control over that science and control over the career of a scientist, but the scientist will still have their own independent reputation. So for example, if I worked my way up through the ranks at Berkeley with their funding I would be free to really do any kind of science I want, and at the same time they'd have control over the science I was producing relative to their product.

So it's not much of a surprise with a chemical like atrazine that eventually a lot of people started to study it, but as long as they had control, they had some control on how it was regulated and what information became available.

<>

TH: So you’ve obviously distanced yourself from the company, but how was it when you were actually working for them?

HAYES: At first it was a little bit strange, I was a brand new assistant professor, I had never really been hired as a consultant and I didn't know how it worked or what it meant and I treated it just like I would any other academic pursuit. I assumed they really wanted the information. We did literature reviews, we wrote papers, some of the scientists there seemed respectable. But some of the other scientists seemed like they were really out to say whatever the company wanted them to say for money … I heard people use the term "biostitutes." I watched scientists who knew better – who I know knew better – say “oh yeah this is safe, oh yeah this doesn’t mean anything” or perform experiments very poorly on purpose, or so it seemed to me.

It really became clear that some of these guys would just do poor experiments over and over again to get the results that the company wanted and then continue to be paid. So I started to become skeptical about whether or not I wanted my name associated, and worried about my reputation. Then when they actually started to bury data and manipulate my data and play these kinds of games, then I knew it was not a situation that I wanted to be involved in. I've said before, I could have stayed home and been a drug dealer or a pimp, I didn't need to get a PhD to do that kind of work!

I realized I've got a conscience and a sense of ethics that just won't allow me to operate that way. In a more practical way, I went to Harvard on scholarship. So somebody paid for me to go to school, and now I can't turn around and take money to do something like that.

<>

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/a-valuable-reputation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024479039