Bioscience Warfare

According to the statement, Syngenta feels the EPA and a scientific advisory panel have reviewed all available research, and the company believes the EPA's conclusion that there is insufficient evidence to say whether atrazine is harmful or not. "Our focus continues to be the pursuit of sound science in this emerging area of study, and we are confident that the safety and benefits of atrazine will continue to be confirmed," the statement says.

So far, Hayes acknowledges, the attacks on his research and credibility have had no official effect on his status at UC Berkeley, but they have created enough stress and tension within the Berkeley faculty and administration that Hayes no longer wants to work there. He says he plans to accept an offer to relocate to Duke University.

In the meantime, he continues to submit papers to scientific journals explaining his experiments and challenging his opponents' research. Overall, though, he's severely disappointed in the reaction of the scientific community to what he believes is a campaign to stop research into atrazine's risks. "I thought only criminals and desperate people lied, not educated people," he says. "My 11-year-old looks over their experiments and sees that they have no controls. They can't be that dumb, so they're lying."

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Tyrone Hayes has unexpectedly found himself in the company of scientists around the world who say they have also experienced pressures related to university research alliances, and also seen the priorities of private sponsors influence what should have been impartial research findings.

John Losey, an entomologist at Cornell University, says he was extremely careful when publishing the results of his study of the effects of genetically modified "BT-corn" on monarch butterflies in May 1999. BT-corn, a grain variant genetically engineered to kill the European corn borer, is patented by Monsanto Corp. To test for possible unintended side effects from the pest-resistant BT-corn, Losey fed monarch larvae milkweed leaves dusted with BT-corn pollen. Losey noted that 44 percent of the larvae that consumed the engineered pollen died. The BT-corn produces pollen that contains crystalline endotoxin, which, as it turns out, poisons monarch caterpillars.

In the article he submitted for publication, Losey was sure to include a prominent disclaimer that his findings were preliminary and did not prove BT-corn to be harmful to butterflies. All the same, after Losey published his study, he says, he was attacked by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the world's largest international biotech group, with a membership that includes the multinational giants Syngenta, Monsanto, Genentech, Bayer CropScience, and DuPont. (Coincidentally, BIO holds its annual meeting in San Francisco this week.) BIO supplied misinformation to the popular media, Losey says, and the resulting maelstrom of press reports on his study was like nothing he had ever seen. "It was overwhelming, and certainly there were industry folks trying to denigrate what we found," says Losey. "We can't say whether [genetically modified organisms] are safe or not until we can study them."

Angelica Hilbeck had an uncannily similar experience. A native of Stuttgart, Germany, Hilbeck studied for her Ph.D. in entomology at North Carolina State University, where she developed an interest in genetically modified crops and their relationship to insects. She returned to Europe to work for the Swiss Federal Research Station for Agro-Ecology and began to study the environmental effects of crops that are genetically engineered to kill certain insects. Hilbeck wanted to find out whether insects that are not meant to be the targets of a plant's genetically built-in insecticide might unintentionally be killed. She decided to study a type of genetically modified corn produced by Syngenta; her main so-called "non-target organism" was the green lacewing fly, which feeds on the larvae of the target organism, the European corn borer. Hilbeck's research showed that the green lacewing was being poisoned by eating corn borer larvae that had fed on the genetically modified corn. Hilbeck basically proved that the genetically modified crops had broader environmental ramifications than first realized.

When her first publications came out in 1998, Hilbeck says, environmental organizations picked up the news and spread it through the media -- and, Hilbeck says, the biotech industry retaliated. "They [Syngenta officials] first of all tried to delay publications," says Hilbeck. "We had used their seeds, and they had the right to see the publications before we published, and they delayed."

Then, Hilbeck says, Syngenta sent out a press release claiming that the German researcher had fed dead larvae to the lacewing flies, and that the lacewings died not because of modified corn, but because the corn borer larvae were not alive when eaten -- a claim that Hilbeck calls ridiculous. "They were hoping that by discrediting the messenger, the message would die," says Hilbeck. "They went for our credentials as scientists, and with that of our work."