Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. Photograph by Dan Winters.

It has been many months since we last read something that a company did that made us think–Really?–in this manner that we have on several earlier occasions. We are sparing in these kinds of posts because we still believe most companies, most of the time, want to do the right thing.  But when they clearly do not, they must be called out.

This post is a reminder to all of us to support public funding of science and private funding of journalism–subscribe to the New Yorker! Thanks to Rachel Aviv’s reporting, we see the fire behind the smoke, and it is not good fire. Two paragraphs of her story are shared here, but spend the 30-60 minutes digesting the whole story on the New Yorker‘s website, where thankfully it is not behind the subscription wall, and be sure to share it widely:

…Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. Continue reading →