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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA real scientist has to battle Corporate America:
https://www.facebook.com/GMOFreeUSA/photos/a.468695639837571.108816.402058139834655/759946790712453/?type=1&theaterhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all
From the article in The New Yorker:
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 didnt 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 Hayess 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 Hayess 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 didnt 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 hes white.
SNIP
Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayess accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngentas internal records. Hundreds of Syngentas 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 atrazines true dangerous nature and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, Tyrones work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)At one point in time, Novatris, which was the parent company to Sygenta, offered up 50 millions of dollars to University of California, Berkeley. American companies have a way of expecting results from university laboratories to help their profit margin, not detract from that bottom line.
Theo Colburn, the top notch researcher mentioned in the article, she understood quite a while ago how very risky American herbicides and pesticides are, and she ended up living in a bucolic part of Colorado. Bucolic, that is, until the Big Energy Fracking Concerns moved in. Her plight is covered (somewhat) in the documentary "Gaslands." What a travesty that one of the very voices trying to alert us to dangers of chemicals ended up losing her health on account of the nasty fracking industry.
littlemissmartypants
(22,852 posts)KT2000
(20,601 posts)who tried to reveal the hazards of formaldehyde. I think they gave him an office in a broom closet and told him to shut up.
Know of another scientist who found a non-pharmaceutical product stopped the spread of cancer, reduced tumor size and decreased pain - did not cure cancer. For that his 60 year career was trashed.
Know of another scientist who found damage in the stomachs (some tumors) of mice fed GMO potatoes. His career was trashed.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)America's "Corporate-run" science programs.
We are the only nation out there that lets the manufacturer tell its Environmental Protection Agency what happens to be inside a product. (And of course, the companies do lie. Including how Monsanto conveniently forgot to tell the EPA that formaldehyde was in its mix of glyphosate, water and polyoxyethalenamine that makes up RoundUPp. Without the aldehyde, RoundUp would not be a sprayable product but would be in cake-form.)
Then our EPA relies on the tests that the manufacturer comes up with for the product, as the only investigation into the safety of the product.
BTW, I am not at all familiar with -- Know of another scientist who found a non-pharmaceutical product stopped the spread of cancer, reduced tumor size and decreased pain - did not cure cancer.
I'd like to know more. Do you happen to know this fellow's name?
pnwmom
(109,021 posts)pnwmom
(109,021 posts)on the crops that we eat -- the GMO plants can withstand herbicides that destroy other plants and make us sick.
And companies like Syngenta profit from making both.
Victor_c3
(3,557 posts)and farmers need to purchase the rights to plant new varieties and use new herbicides.
It's a nice perpetuating cycle for their corporate profits.
I read a great article several years back in National Geographic that in India they found that when farmers reverted back to more traditional agricultural practices that they were getting more stable and better results than continuing the current practice of overfertilization and excessive application of herbicides and pesticides. The so called "green revolution" of the 60's may have seemed in the short term to lead to actual improvements, but in the long term it has proven to be unsustainable.
pnwmom
(109,021 posts)because the "weed" they depend on is getting killed by Monsanto's herbicide.
Uncle Joe
(58,506 posts)Thanks for the thread, truedelphi.