NewYorker | 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.”
Hayes,
who had gained more than fifty pounds since becoming tenured, wore
bright scarves draped over his suit and silver earrings from Tibet. At
the end of his lectures, he broke into rhyme: “I see a
ruse / intentionally constructed to confuse the news / well, I’ve taken
it upon myself to defuse the clues / so that you can choose / and to
demonstrate the objectivity of the methods I use.” At some of his
lectures, Hayes warned that the consequences of atrazine use were
disproportionately felt by people of color. “If you’re black or
Hispanic, you’re more likely to live or work in areas where you’re
exposed to crap,” he said. He explained that “on the one side I’m trying
to play by the ivory-tower rules, and on the other side people are
playing by a different set of rules.” Syngenta was speaking directly to
the public, whereas scientists were publishing their research in
“magazines that you can’t buy in Barnes and Noble.” Fist tap Rohan.
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