Rachel Aviv: The Scientist Who Took on a Leading Herbicide Manufacturer : The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv: The Scientist Who Took on a Leading Herbicide Manufacturer : The New Yorker:

 In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

 

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.