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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?"
Every single scientist should fight it. Make them execute every single scummy plan they have on the books. If hundreds of thousands of scientists fight back, you'll see just how "unlimited" corp's pockets actually are. When the majority revolts, the corporate overlords quickly discover pushing their agenda gets costly and isn't worth it anymore...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Go for it! Or ignore it. Your call. If they're not breaking the law, what are you going to do?
Using corporate resources specifically to attempt to attack or discredit the character, or interfere with the business of an individual should be made actionable.
Damage by a corporation to an individual's peace of mind should be assigned statutory damages based on the greater of $10 Milliion, and 5 to 10% of the perpetrating company's annual revenues.
In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its independent Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) examined all available studies on atrazine and concluded that "atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development based on a review of laboratory and field studies."
Yeah, except... from TFA:
By that point, there were seventy-five published studies on the subject, but the E.P.A. excluded the majority of them from consideration, because they did not meet the requirements for quality that the agency had set in 2003. The conclusion was based largely on a set of studies funded by Syngenta and led by Werner Kloas, a professor of endocrinology at Humboldt University, in Berlin. One of the co-authors was Alan Hosmer, a Syngenta scientist whose job, according to a 2004 performance evaluation, included "atrazine defence" and "influencing EPA."
After the hearing, two of the independent experts who had served on the E.P.A.'s scientific advisory panel, along with fifteen other scientists, wrote a paper (not yet published) complaining that the agency had repeatedly ignored the panel's recommendations and that it placed "human health and the environment at the mercy of industry." "The EPA works with industry to set up the methodology for such studies with the outcome often that industry is the only institution that can afford to conduct the research," they wrote. The Kloas study was the most comprehensive of its kind: its researchers had been scrutinized by an outside auditor, and their raw data turned over to the E.P.A. But the scientists wrote that one set of studies on a single species was "not a sufficient edifice on which to build a regulary assessment." 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."
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.
I thought I was being obviously over-the-top, but Poe's Law strikes again; it's impossible to satirize people who actually think that way.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That is funny because it is so inaccurate;
1. Hayes is not a government scientist. In fact the EPA disagrees with him completely.
2. The fight is not against regulation but against statements being put out by Hayes
3. The environmental lobby has nothing to do with it. Hayes's quest for fame by bringing down a big corp might be.
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.
You might be interested in Last Call at The Oasis: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...
It streams on Netflix.
Hayes was one of the interviewees in that documentary. He shows off some of the mutant frogs too.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
Learn to love Alaska
In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its independent Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) examined all available studies on atrazine and concluded that "atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development based on a review of laboratory and field studies."
It's called regulatory capture motha f**kers.
The knee jerk reaction of "big companies bad, individuals good" is not always accurate.
But it's more likely true than not.
Learn to love Alaska
Look man, I hate the beta in its current form as much as the next guy. I was going to participate in the boycott, but they did respond in a positive way to user feedback. Classic will still be available for the foreseeable future, and that's good enough for me. When they fix the comments system in beta I'll be fine moving there as well. Nothing lasts forever. Be happy they're not forcing shitty beta on you now, and enjoy slashdot as you always have.
Tyrone Hayes [...] began to display signs of apparent paranoia over a decade ago. [...] But he wasn't paranoid
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you”
-- Joseph Heller (?)
“Paranoia is just having the right information.”
-- William S. Burroughs
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.
Learn to love Alaska
How far? The full distance. Anything less, and it shows you don't really care in the long run.
Is there anything wrong with having the correct knowledge, and not really caring?
Depends on what you risk losing by fighting or risk losing by not fighting, so you need to pick your fights. I've seen a couple times colleagues got into some fight for more personal reasons or feelings. It is sad to see things go downhill when they make a mistake when too concerned with feeling good instead of the big picture, or because they mistakenly made the assumption " your opponents have consciously taken up the role of the bad buy." Even if their original science still stands solid, the opponents try to make the fight about other things, and now have some actual ammo to fight with once the scientist is caught saying the wrong thing or making things personal. Even if the opponents have made dozens of mistakes and the majority of their attacks are not scientific in nature, it is an asymmetric fight that expects the scientist to not make a single mistake.
Doesn't have to be a big corporation either, it can be a single person with a pet theory and too much free time, or some small company that is trying to defend a borderline scam. I guess it might depend on your field, but I've never had research that runs afoul of big corporate interests, but have had to deal with the obsession of a couple crackpots, and legal issues from a one person business selling a single (non-functioning...) product.
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
It's called a company intentionally undercapitalized, and it's a cause of action for the judge to pierce the corporate veil, and hold the company's shareholder's liable in proportion to their percentage of beneficial ownership, AND base the 5 to 10% penalty on the owners' assets.
US tax payers aren't on the hook for most of the loans that students have. It's not just government loans that are "protected". "Smart" students would get as many of those credit cards offered like candy they can, advance or buy stuff to sell (gift cards, iTunes cards), and declare bankruptcy the moment they graduate.
There's nothing stopping you from borrowing for other reasons, using the cash to pay off loans, then bankrupting youself out of the new debt. That would be the appropriate civil disobediance for the non-dischargeable loans.
Learn to love Alaska
The non-dischargability of loans pre-dates the ACA, so your assertion that they are linked, and pointing them all to Democrats, when it was the Republicans who removed the dischargability seems odd to me. Are you sure you have your facts straight? Or did you align your recollection to justify your politicla stance?
Learn to love Alaska
How much did the habit of fining the shareholders of a company for the criminal actions of the companies executives do to prevent the British Petroleum disaster in the gulf? You can bet your bottom dollar if they started sending corporate executives to jail for life when their decisions illegally kill people a whole bunch of disasters would be avoided. Time to stop fining the shareholders and start holding the psychopathic killer executives responsible for their actions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Since bankruptcies are public record, they will show up on a background check, and a number of the negative consequences can be lifelong.
They don't seem to have hurt those with 5+, like Donald Trump and others.
Personally I think that there should be a return of the WPA. How many city halls were built under that, giving jobs to people that needed/wanted them, and gave us results around for almost 100 years? Instead, our modern idea of a bailout is to pay a private company to do something they would have done anyway. Paying a real estate developer to build a building, or paying a telco to pay cables. That's not stimulus, that's welfare for the rich.
Want to saddle a student with a lifetime of debt? Give them a job, so they at least have a chance to pay it off.
Learn to love Alaska
Actually, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, the law which makes federally backed student loans not dischargeable through chapter 13 or 7 bankruptcy, was first conceived in 1997 and muddled around congress until 2004. Then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa submitted it in its current form, with strong support from Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from Texas. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on April 20, 2005.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
Once they start writing memos like "investigate his wife" it's probably not about fame anymore. If it was me it would be about making sure that whoever drafted that memo doesn't get a chance to work again without adult supervision.
I used to farm... A bit of information that's kind of interesting about atrazine. Locally, at least, it was only ever used on corn, and would pretty much wipe anything else out. It's residual effects are pretty striking, and if we sprayed it on a field of corn, then corn would be the only thing that would grow on the field the next year as well. Anecdotally, I've known some farmers who could only grow corn for *five years* on land that had been sprayed too heavily. It pretty much made the ground sterile for anything else.
I'm off to boycott... FUCK BETA
Because welfare for people is socialism and welfare for corporations is free market.
The merger of government and corporate power is fascism per Mussolini, and
I'd say he might know a thing or two about it while he was around.
We have not had a free market in the US for a very long time if at all.
The monopolies and cartels crush any competition they consider a real threat
if they do not sell out a price considered reasonable by the Robber Barons.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Timeline:
Company has a pesticide, second in use only to Monsanto's roundup.
Concerns begin to grow about the chemicals effect
Scientist is hired by company to join panel of scientists evaluating chemical
Scientist notes that frogs are being born hermaphroditic, or with multiple (excess) malformes testes.
Scientist begins to feel uncofortable, held back, and pressured at company
Scientist leaves, returns to university lab, and replicates experiment, getting same results
Scientists presents findings to company again
Company disputes findings as flawed, by using flawed arguments
Scientist is warned to be paranoid because giant companies with billions in revenue have no problem squashing annoying bugs (pun intended)
Company begins smear campaign against inconvenient scientist, buying search terms, following him, harassing him
EPA holds hearings
17+ studies are presented.
12 from the company, all show no effect on frogs
Scientist presents his fidnings, showing effects on frogs
Other independent scientists present findings, corroborating the scientists findings
Company settles class lawsuit, where details about its smear campaign come out
Sorry, there's more here than just someone trying to get famous.
Essentially ANY STUDY done by a company with a financial stake in the result, showing the outcome the comapny favors must be considered suspect.
Logically, it isnt automatically (100% certainty) invalid...but historically they have consistently been invalid more often than not,as companies attempt to buy out the scientists and fund fraudulent studies. Tobacco is the most famous example.
And btw, when the hearings were over? The EPA proposed further study must be done...and told the company with a finanical stake in the outcome to do it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.