Tyrone Hayes is a biologist specializing in frogs and who is a professor at Berkeley University in California, where he got his PhD after completing an undergraduate degree at Harvard University.
Hayes is most well-known for his controversial research on the effect of herbicides (specifically the herbicide atrazine, the second most popular herbicide in the US) on the endocrine (or hormonal) systems of frogs. In 1997, he was recruited to join a consulting team to study the effects of atrazine on the environment by Syngenta, the company producing the herbicide. After his results reporting toxicity caused by the herbicide were doubted and then rejected by the panel, he left the consulting firm and continued to study the effects of atrazine as a professor. He has published multiple studies on the topic with other researchers in journals such as Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), including reports that the herbicide can cause male frogs to develop female characteristics or become hermaphroditic or chemically castrated, and that the herbicide can cause reproductive cancers in lab rodents and possibly humans.
Despite this, the herbicide has still not been banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States, which has done at least 3 reviews on the dangers of atrazine in less than 10 years, citing that there has not been enough sound research conducted on the issue.
Hayes believes that there has been an organized campaign by the manufacturer of atrazine to try to discredit his work and his credibility as a scientist in order to prevent the herbicide from being banned. He believes among other things that the company hired scientists to produce flawed studies to contradict his own, attempted to get journals to retract his research, flooded Google with webpages attempting to discredit him, and followed him to every public event he hosted in order to harass him and discredit him among the attendees. Other researchers also studying atrazine have also reported similar things happening to them as well.
The controversy has attained notoriety due to the casual and unrestrained nature of the conflict, especially in emails between Hayes and Syngenta over the years. In one email he wrote to the company, he sarcastically gave them advice for attempting to discredit him at his presentations, stating “you can’t approach your prey thinking like a predator”. When he found out a company lobbyist once described him as “black and quite articulate”, he began to sign his emails with “Tyrone B. Hayes, Ph.D., A.B.M.,”, “A.B.M” standing for “articulate black man.” In one article about Hayes published in Mother Jones, journalist Dashka Slater characterized this controversy between Hayes and the atrazine manufacturer as “one of the weirdest feuds in the history of science”.
I decided to write about this topic because I admire Hayes’ determination to stand by his results as a scientist and it is a fascinating story that demonstrates how science, politics, and industry can often conflict with each other.
Sources and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrone_Hayes
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/a-valuable-reputation
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 