Bioscience Warfare

To be sure, corporate largess has sometimes created a new dynamism in staid academic research quarters, catapulting cures and medicines quickly to market.

But sometimes, the relationship has raised suspicion. At UC Berkeley, for example, Novartis Agribusiness, now merged into Syngenta, gave $25 million to fund basic research in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology over a five-year period that ended in November 2003. The deal, which was not renewed this year, gave Syngenta some rights to research findings and was an issue of great political contention within the university and the state. The Atlantic Monthly published a disparaging article titled "The Kept University" criticizing the relationship.

And sometimes, corporations try to control the research they fund. Sometimes, information and research that are intended to benefit the public are intentionally kept from the public. Sometimes, a lack of attention to critical research on risk assessment -- or to research on risk of any kind -- undermines the ends of scientific research itself.

Sometimes, the facts and data are drowned in spin, and scientists who bear "bad" news are buried in pseudo-science and innuendo.

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Tyrone Hayes grew up in South Carolina, where his summers were lush and full of adventure in the reeds and mud of the great Congaree Swamp. Since boyhood, he's been fascinated with catching tadpoles and watching them change into entirely different creatures that breathe air, hop, and absorb their own tails. His parents nourished the interest. Hayes recalls when his mom gave him the first book he really treasured. It was called What Is a Frog?

"Everybody has this fundamental interest in little crawly things and animals, and some of us grow out of it, and some of us don't," Hayes says, laughing as he leans back on his lab stool.

Hayes' father laid carpet in Columbus, and his mother stayed at home with Tyrone and his two brothers, who are now both teachers. Hayes worked hard in school, competing for state and national science awards, winning many of the contests and developing a passion for science. The passion paid off, and he was admitted to Harvard University, where he studied biology on full scholarship. One night at a Harvard party, Hayes met his future wife, also a biology major; they were married two days after his graduation, and in short order had two children. Hayes' speaking tours include a slide show. At one point in the show, he flicks to a slide of his two children standing by a waterfall, holding hands, and says, "This helps remind me why I am doing this. For the future."

Hayes began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1994 after finishing his Ph.D. there. A rising star in his field, he was tenured at the remarkably young age of 30, and six years later remains Berkeley's youngest full professor. He has published some 40 papers in scientific journals. His students and lab environment seem to froth with the infectious enthusiasm that he projects. He has managed to rapidly build himself a reputation as one of the country's leading experts on endocrine research. Almost every major college biology textbook carries his work, and, often, his picture. He thinks his picture gets used because he doesn't look like a typical scientist. For one thing, he's black; for another, he braids his hair and wears long, dangling earrings.

Hayes also says "yes" to invitations other scientists wouldn't bother with, and thus finds himself keeping to a fanatical schedule of speaking tours all over the world. He was recently invited to speak at the National Water Security Board of Nepal and at the Integrative Pest Management Conference in Sacramento. At the latter event, the talk that preceded his detailed how to safely blow up gophers with a gas gun.

"The things that mean the most to us [scientists] here mean nothing to 99 percent of the public," Hayes says. "We're arguing in front of the EPA, but the farm workers and the public don't ever know about it. The most important people aren't getting the information. To me, that's who we should be talking to.

"When a woman concerned about her family asks her water board about levels of atrazine, it sure isn't because she read my paper."

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Four years into his burgeoning career at UC Berkeley, Hayes made a move he would regret. Like many scientists, Hayes decided he would dabble in the private realm and make extra money for his growing family.

In 1998, he joined a private research consulting group, Ecorisk Inc., to explore atrazine's effects on frogs. Ecorisk is an independent company regularly hired by Syngenta, the firm that manufactures atrazine, to provide risk assessment on its products and chemicals. Hayes assumed that he'd been hired because Syngenta wanted to assess the risks of its herbicide. But when Hayes found alarming abnormalities in frogs that had been exposed to trace levels of atrazine, the group was not excited about the results; in fact, Hayes contends, quite the opposite.