Bioscience Warfare

Instead, Syngenta halted funding for Hayes' Ecorisk study. At the same time, Hayes alleges, the company insisted he repeat his previous experiments. Syngenta refused to let him publish the data from his first study, suggesting he complete the repeat experiments in a "private" setting, essentially offering to pay him to keep the results secret, Hayes and others who are close to the situation (and who have asked not to be named) claim.

In 2000, Hayes quit the Ecorisk panel that was studying atrazine in protest. "It will appear to my colleagues that I have been part of a plan to bury important data," he wrote in his resignation letter. "This fear will be particularly realized when independent laboratories begin to publish data similar to data that we [Syngenta and my laboratory] produced together as early as 1999."

Hayes says that he tried to give the U.S. EPA information alleging that Syngenta knew atrazine was harmful but did not take proper action, as required by FIFRA, the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. According to the act, Hayes contends, Syngenta should have immediately notified the EPA of the results of his research and taken steps to review the environmental and health risks of its chemical. EPA spokesman Dave Deegan says that he is not familiar with Hayes' allegations, but that the agency has bent over backward to look publicly at every piece of information on atrazine's risks.

Ronald Kendall, director of the Ecorisk study of atrazine and a professor and chairman of the Department of Environmental Toxicology at Texas Tech University, has said Hayes' charges are untrue and any delay in releasing the atrazine findings was based on the desire to test the data further. "We felt it prudent, as a panel, that the experiments be repeated," Mr. Kendall told the Chronicle of Higher Education in October 2003. "That's just good science."

Another biology professor at Texas Tech University, who also worked with Ecorisk and published an atrazine study that contradicted some of Hayes' work, says he considers Hayes a credible scientist. "I think my experience with Ecorisk was probably more positive," he says. The scientist, who asked not to be identified in this article, suggests that scientific issues, like those surrounding atrazine, ought to stay in the scientific realm, and not be debated in the popular press. "The science will sort itself out, that's pretty certain," he says. "The issue is not, 'How does the public find out?' It is, 'How do you decide when you have that information?'

"The question of whether or not you want to get people frightened about something prematurely is a concern as well."

The argument over the merits of Hayes' research was and is being conducted in a situation rife with strong appearances of conflict of interest that, Hayes believes, are connected to attempts by Syngenta to discredit him.

Shortly after starting work at Ecorisk, Hayes ran into a conflict of interest that seemed almost too obvious to be true; it involved Ronald Kendall, the environmental toxicology professor who runs the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. Kendall was, at the time, director of Ecorisk, the consulting company that had a $600,000 research contract with Syngenta to review atrazine. He was also on the boards of the two EPA groups -- its scientific advisory panel on atrazine, and its endocrine disrupter screening committee -- that would be involved in any decision on whether atrazine should be reapproved by the environmental agency. And as president of the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Kendall edited the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, in which Texas Tech professor James Carr's study on atrazine -- a study that Kendall was involved with that concluded the chemical was not toxic to frogs -- was published.

In summary, then, Kendall simultaneously headed an academic institute where atrazine research was done; directed Ecorisk, the private consulting group funded by Syngenta to study the chemical; sat on the EPA boards reviewing atrazine and advising the EPA on its reapproval; and edited the journal publishing the research that supported reapproval of atrazine for use in the United States.

Kendall did not reply to a request for comment.

Hayes says that the conflicts surrounding atrazine research played into what he views as a concerted effort to discredit his findings and ruin his career. After completing his research showing atrazine to have astonishingly harmful effects on frog reproductive organs, Hayes tried to continue without funding from Syngenta or other private companies. He began another study, this one focusing on frogs' reproductive systems; it was published in the journal Nature in October 2002. He is now working on a third study that involves the reaction in frog endocrine systems to mixtures of pesticides; he contends such reactions have already resulted in at least one loss of an entire species of frog in the Midwest. That study should be made public in the next few months, he says.

Hayes' research has been questioned by leading members of the Ecorisk panel, attacked in the popular press by a conservative Fox News commentator, and blasted by the Kansas Corn Grower's Association and the Triazine Network, a collection of about 1,000 growers and herbicide manufacturers named after the family of chemicals that includes atrazine. Both the Kansas Corn Grower's Association and the Triazine Network receive some funding from Syngenta. In November 2002, the Kansas Corn Grower's Association and the Triazine Network petitioned the EPA to ignore Hayes' studies when considering the reapproval of atrazine.