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A Corporate War Against a Scientist, and How He Fought Back
AthanasiusKircher writes "Environmental and health concerns about atrazine — one of the most commonly used herbicides in the U.S. — have been voiced for years, leading to an EU ban and multiple investigations by the EPA. Tyrone Hayes, a Berkeley professor who has spearheaded research on the topic, began to display signs of apparent paranoia over a decade ago. He noticed strangers following him to conferences around the world, taking notes and asking questions aimed to make him look foolish. He worried that someone was reading his email, and attacks against his reputation seemed to be everywhere; search engines even displayed ad hits like 'Tyrone Hayes Not Credible' when his name was searched for. But he wasn't paranoid: documents released after a lawsuit from Midwestern towns against Syngenta, the manufacturer of atrazine, showed a coordinated smear campaign. Syngenta's public relations team had a list of ways to defend its product, topped by 'discredit Hayes.' Its internal list of methods: 'have his work audited by 3rd party,' 'ask journals to retract,' 'set trap to entice him to sue,' 'investigate funding,' 'investigate wife,' etc. A recent New Yorker article chronicles this war against Hayes, but also his decision to go on the offensive and strike back. He took on the role of activist against atrazine, giving over 50 public talks on the subject each year, and even taunting Syngenta with profanity-laced emails, often delivered in a rapping 'gangsta' style. The story brings up important questions for science and its public persona: How do scientists fight a PR war against corporations with unlimited pockets? How far should they go?"
The correct place is to battle it out in scientific journals. Corporations should not be doing this, but legion are the talking heads and book promoters tearing down things from GM food to Olestra to any number of other things with little or no science backing them.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you a shill or just stupid?
Neither. I am guesing (s)he is an IP lawyer. Used to thinking about how the company can get its way within the bounds of the law rather than asking whether things like investigating a scientist's wife in the hope of discrediting his research should be permissible in a civilized society. Maybe she does have a bias--maybe she got dumped by your company's CEO. But there's a big difference between *knowing* she has a bias and trying to cook one up.
The company's POV may be valid, but not all of the actions it intended in support of them--whether legal or not--are moral.
The real issue is that any reputable company in response to science that is bad for their products should be saying "this science showed that maybe there's a problem here, we'd better make sure we're not hurting our customers or their neighbors, let's do some research and legitimately see what the deal is." Resorting to discrediting the other guy should only come up, maybe, when and if you've established that his research is wrong, that the product is safe, that the guy's data is wrong, and that he's basically a crackpot. Unfortunately economic incentives make most people feel free to allow their product to poison or even murder despite the science. (See, e.g., cigarettes.) This is actually a good reason for broad diversification--the smaller a percentage of revenue is dependent on one product, the more willing a company is to do the right thing when one product proves unsafe.
damages based on the greater of $10 Milliion, and 5 to 10% of the perpetrating company's annual revenues.
We'll have shell companies created with zero revenue acting as harassing entities. So if you find them out and sue and win, you'll get no damages, other than the $10,000,000 awarded, and they'll just close the doors if it looks like that would happen.
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Not when those with the money make all the rules. Then the knife only cuts one way. People like Donald Trump argue that students shouldn't be able to wipe out student loans with a bankruptcy, while he's declared bankruptcy 5 or more times.
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