Bioscience Warfare

Hayes believes the EPA's risk review process, which not only allows but requires companies to study the dangers of their own often highly profitable products, leads, inherently, to biased results. "There has to be some way to police what the company is doing," he says. "If the company is required to study the safety of its own product, no one else is going to do it."

Seven countries in the European Union -- France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Italy -- have banned atrazine. These countries have a policy of banning pesticides that occur in drinking water at levels higher than 0.1 parts per billion.

After the initial phase of an ongoing review in the United States, and even though it did not take atrazine off the market, the EPA did recently acknowledge that "there is sufficient evidence to conclude that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs." There apparently is not enough evidence, however, to stop farmers from dumping 80 million pounds of atrazine per year on U.S. farms.

And, actually, Tyrone Hayes is not attempting to have atrazine banned from use. He is, he says, just trying to protect the scientific process from being perverted by those with huge financial incentives to do so. If banning atrazine (or some other pesticide) would cost the manufacturer too much money for regulators to contemplate, Hayes says, then regulators should feel free to leave the pesticide on the market -- if they explain that the reason for doing so is financial, rather than scientific. "Atrazine is not going to go away," says Hayes. "What I would like to see is, I would like to see honesty. Atrazine earns $500 to $800 million per year, and it increases corn yield by only 1.2 percent. We need to acknowledge that it makes a lot of money, and we can't afford to take atrazine off the market.

"It's that simple."

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Alison Pierce is an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting.