The New Yorker
details how Syngenta, a multi-national company with a large Greensboro presence, led an all-out charge to take down a critical biologist, Tyrone Hayes.
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and
during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his
findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects
in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while
Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long
suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four
goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook,
Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by
his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data
by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of
conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit
Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop
him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that
wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred
for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”
Syngenta's campaign continued
According to company e-mails, Syngenta was distressed by Hayes’s work.
Its public-relations team compiled a database of more than a hundred
“supportive third party stakeholders,” including twenty-five professors,
who could defend atrazine or act as “spokespeople on Hayes.” The P.R.
team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search
word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s
material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was
later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine
frogs,” and “frog feminization.”
Imagine how much good Syngenta could do if it devoted these resources to researching it products instead of researching how to undermine its critics.
