Article: A Valuable Reputation by Rachel Aviv
Summary: Tyrone Hayes, a “PhD, ABM (Articulate Black Man)” takes on Syngenta (previously part of Novartis), in a battle against the herbicide atrazine and its hermaphrodic effects on frog test subjects. A good look at industry and commissioned science as well as race and culture in academia.
Verdict: So good. Worth the length. Hayes’ pursuit of truth, dogged determination, sass, pride, and colour… really set him up as a target for an economic take-down. It’s a bit sad because although the scientific facts are eventually sort of winning (nearly 20 years later), there really are no winners here. They say, let the science speak… he didn’t and they used his flamboyance as ammo… but isn’t that the problem with science? The lack of a more human touch to give data a story, to make itself accessible, to shock and awe into recognition and trigger change? I understand the implications of a scientist losing objectivity, but the need for better and more accessible science journalism is indisputable.
Quotes
Hayes had been promoted from associate to full professor in 2003, an achievement that had sent him into a mild depression. He had spent the previous decade understanding his self-worth in reference to a series of academic milestones, and he had reached each one. Now he felt aimless. His wife said she could have seen him settling into the life of a “normal, run-of-the-mill, successful scientist.” But he wasn’t motivated by the idea of “writing papers and books that we all just trade with each other.”
When I asked him what he would do if the E.P.A., which is conducting another review of the safety of atrazine this year, were to ban the herbicide, he joked, “I’d probably get depressed again.”
Citing a paper by Hayes, who had done an analysis of sixteen atrazine studies, they wrote that “the single best predictor of whether or not the herbicide atrazine had a significant effect in a study was the funding source.”
He explained that “on the one side I’m trying to play by the ivory-tower rules, and on the other side people are playing by a different set of rules.” Syngenta was speaking directly to the public, whereas scientists were publishing their research in “magazines that you can’t buy in Barnes and Noble.”
Orange Highlighters 