By Peter Montague
Toxic Deception, the new must-read book by investigative reporters Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle, is subtitled, "How the chemical industry manipulates science, bends the law, and endangers your health."
The book documents a chilling story of corporate manipulation of science, government, the media and public opinion.
It paints a picture of the modern corporation out of control. Here we will focus on only one aspect: the way science is used and abused so that corporations can continue to sell dangerous chemicals to consumers.
Chapter 3, "Science for Sale", documents the following techniques used routinely by chemical corporations:
- Falsifying data.
- Subtly manipulating research results.
- Creating front groups to conduct PR campaigns.
- Coopting academic researchers to control the research agenda and get the desired results.
- Attacking independent scientists.
Falsifying data
"The U.S. regulatory system for chemical products is tailor-made for fraud", say Fagin and Lavelle. They tell the story (among others) of Paul Wright, a research chemist for Monsanto.
In 1971, he quit Monsanto and went to work as the chief rat toxicologist for Industrial Biotest, a laboratory which was conducting 35% to 40% of all animal tests in the US.
Wright then conducted a series of apparently fraudulent studies of the toxicity of Monsanto products. Eighteen months later, Monsanto hired him back with a new title, manager of toxicology.
When he was testing Monsanto's herbicide called Machete, Wright added extra lab mice to skew the results, according to Fagin and Lavelle.
In two studies of monosodium cyanurate, an ingredient in a Monsanto swimming-pool chlorinator, Wright replaced raw data with after-the-fact invented records, concealed animal deaths and filed reports describing procedures and observations that never happened.
Wright got caught because an alert FDA scientist smelled something fishy; a federal investigation ensued. According to Fagin and Lavelle, "In all three cases, the investigators wrote in an internal memo, there was evidence that Monsanto executives knew that the studies were faked ..."
If true, this would be a serious federal crime. The Monsanto executives were never prosecuted, and a company spokesperson claims this is evidence of Monsanto's innocence.
Manipulating results
Fagin and Lavelle document that this is "part of the everyday strategy of chemical companies enmeshed in regulatory battles".
In 1980, the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) released a study showing that rats that inhaled formaldehyde got cancer. Formaldehyde is a common glue in wood products such as plywood and particle board.
Kip Howlett, then director of safety and environmental affairs for Georgia-Pacific (a giant wood products manufacturer), laid out a strategy for countering the bad news:
- claim that rats aren't the right animal to study;
- claim that the exposure levels were unrealistically high (even if they were scientifically too low);
- pay for new studies that will produce different results;
- hire academic researchers to give "independent" testimonials to the safety of formaldehyde and to put a positive spin on any studies that show cancer in rats;
- attack any scientist who says formaldehyde is dangerous;
- fund universities and other research institutions to steer research in directions that play down formaldehyde's dangers.
It worked. Howlett then graduated to a much more important position: he now heads the Chlorine Chemistry Council, where he oversees teams that manipulate science for the purpose of keeping numerous dangerous chlorine compounds on the market.
Creating doubt
The keystone of the formaldehyde strategy was to get new data that cast doubt on the CIIT study. Once there is doubt, the regulatory process slows to a crawl or stops entirely.
Scientific doubt is relatively easy to create. In this case, the Formaldehyde Institute hired a small laboratory to conduct a new rat inhalation study. It limited the concentration of formaldehyde to 3 parts per million, whereas the CIIT study had used 15 ppm. EPA scientists said they believed even 15 ppm was too low.
In 1980, long before the 3 ppm study was completed, the Institute issued a press release saying, "A new study indicates there should be no chronic health effect from exposure to the level of formaldehyde normally encountered in the home".
When the study was published three years later, it showed that, even at 3 ppm, rats suffered from "severe sinus problems" and had early signs of cancer in their cells. Furthermore, they had decreased body and liver weights — sure signs of ill effects. The Formaldehyde Institute did not issue a press release about these findings.
The Formaldehyde Institute then entered into a contract with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to conduct a joint study of 26,000 workers exposed to formaldehyde.
The study eventually showed a 30% increase in lung cancer deaths among workers exposed to formaldehyde, but the Institute put its own "spin" on the results and got the NCI to go along: the excess cancers might have been caused by something besides formaldehyde, the NCI concluded. (The study design made it impossible to rule out other causes.)
What was never revealed (until Toxic Deception told the story) was that the contract between the Formaldehyde Institute and NCI contained the following clauses:
- the Formaldehyde Institute, not NCI, would select which workers would be studied;
- NCI researchers were denied access to the raw data: job histories, death certificates, information about plants, processes or exposures — in sum, the basic data needed to conduct and evaluate such a study.
Corporations assert their influence over academia as well. In the field of weed science, for example, there are few independent scientists. The federal government has 75 weed scientists on staff and the nation's universities have 180. The chemical corporations have 1400.
Furthermore, most of the university scientists are not independent researchers. Rather than seeking less dangerous alternatives, the vast majority conduct studies that promote the continued use of dangerous chemicals.
The chemical companies give at least a billion dollars to universities and foundations for agricultural research.
The uses of criticism
Criticising scientific studies is a standard, even a knee-jerk, corporate tactic. Often any criticism — no matter how far-fetched — serves industry's purpose of deflecting attention away from the real problem.
Fagin and Lavelle describe a study that carefully evaluated exposure to formaldehyde through inhalation, taking into account smoking and exposure through drinking water. Nevertheless, in scientific conferences, corporate scientists attacked the study for failing to take into account smoking and exposure through drinking water.
No-one wants to base a regulation (which will almost certainly be challenged in court) upon scientific studies that have been criticised. So criticism — whether valid or not — helps derail the regulatory process.
These corporate tactics have succeeded in tying up the chemical industry's only nationally visible adversaries — the mainstream environmental movement. The movement is caught up in endless unsuccessful attempts to regulate corporate behaviour around the edges, never tackling the central issue, which is the illegitimacy of corporate power.
Grassroots environmentalists, on the other hand, are usually engaged at the local level in a power struggle with one corporation or another, directly challenging the corporation's right to poison the local environment.
This is the key issue, but eventually it will need to be moved from the local level to larger arenas.
After more than 100 years of regulation, we now know without doubt that it does not work and cannot work. Yet the mainstream environmental movement seems unable to think of other, more fundamental, approaches.
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. Like Green Left Weekly, Rachel's is a non-profit publication which distributes information without charge on the internet and depends on the generosity of readers to survive. If you are able to help keep this valuable resource in existence, send your contribution to Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, Maryland 21403-7036, USA. In the United States, donations to ERF are tax deductible.]