I'll tell you up front, I am not a big fan of chemicals.
It's not that I'm chemophobic, or have any science-phobia, I instead have that special sort of elitism that is available to people who have just been lucky enough to not need chemicals. I don't even like to take aspirin and I have that luxury because I haven't needed to take any drugs for a recurring condition, so it's really easy for me to embrace such naturalistic posturing. When if comes to food, if I had my way, nothing my family eats would be grown, processed, killed, cleaned or cooked by any hands but mine.
Yet I know the bulk of the world is not lucky enough to live in one of the most agriculturally rich places on earth. For the rest of the world, there is one great equalizer: science. Science can make things grow where they otherwise might not, science can prevent pests and weeds from ravaging yields on small farms. That's a good thing, and yet most people who benefit from it know little about it.
Where I live in California, one of the most agriculturally knowledgeable areas in the world and the state capital of America's largest food-producing state, if I ask most people to name a pesticide, they can only name one - DDT. They don't know why they can name it, they can't name Rachel Carson or "Silent Spring", they just know it must be bad because they have heard of it.
That the only pesticide people know of hasn't been used here in over 40 years is a testament to modern science. In the vast, complicated narrative about science and our culture, where people assume if they have heard of a chemical, it must be bad, few people can name the two most popular herbicides that increase agriculture yields dramatically.
While efforts to take down the most popular herbicide are rather predictable in our sue-and-settle modern culture, it is in the effort to make sure people have heard of the second most popular herbicide where things really get bizarre. It involves threats, sexual harassment and Tupac Shakur.
What criticisms don't involve is any science.
A few months ago, a journalist in The New Yorker wrote an article about a reproductive biologist who is convinced that one of the most successful herbicides in history is bad for us. It was good timing. The herbicide, atrazine, is undergoing re-registration with the Environmental Protection Agency and the EPA is run by political appointees who have an uncanny tendency to make science decisions based on New York media coverage. In 2009, the New York Times did an article and the EPA was told to convene a special panel on atrazine again, after they had just completed a study on it in 2007, which was done after they had re-registered it in 2006, which was done while they were finalizing a new study requested in 2003, which was done based on a journal paper in 2002 claiming that frogs were being damaged by atrazine.
Were those frogs damaged? We have no way to know, the EPA doesn't have the data, nor does anyone else except the researcher, Professor Tyrone Hayes, who made the claim. He says the EPA and others verified him but in 2005 Anne E. Lindsay, deputy director of the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, settled the issue while testifying at the Minnesota House of Representatives, "Dr. Hayes claims not only that his laboratory has repeated the findings many times in experiments with thousands of frogs, but that other scientists have also replicated his results. EPA, however, has never seen either the results from any independent investigator published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or the raw data from Dr. Hayes' additional experiments."
Usually, a lack of raw data places a study in a suspect camp - people outside science think a journal is some sort of trump card for validity but people inside the system know how easy journals are to to game. Gilles-Eric Seralini claimed that genetically modified food caused cancer, for example, but refused to show his data, and that still got published in a journal. Andrew Wakefield refused to show his data when he claimed a link between autism and vaccines in a journal article. When a court order forced him to, it was found to be fraudulent.
The New Yorker article was not about science or health, it was more about what we in science media call The Myth Of The Oppressed Underdog - that journalistic narrative where some maverick beacon of truth is trying to fight an entrenched constituent, be it a company or dogma. At the time, I was uninterested, for the same reasons I am not interested when some underdog claims that a diet plan can prevent Alzheimer's or that cold fusion is being bought by Big Oil and stuck in a warehouse to protect profits. The writer, Rachel Aviv, was weaving a tale about a biologist trying to convince the world of something the data did not show and she did a fine job. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it.
But a giant chunk of America no longer trusts scientists - you can figure out the voting record of people by asking if they don't trust chemists or climatologists - and so this story took hold with the political demographic that dislikes chemicals and agriculture and, most importantly, corporations. Suddenly this researcher was on NPR and Democracy Now and being quoted in various other outlets. People like vast corporate conspiracies and so no one 'asked the awkward questions' of Professor Hayes about his claims of racism and threats and dirty tricks.
But then he said he had the science to back his beliefs about how atrazine was harmful.
That got me willing to ask the awkward questions. So I decided to find out. And you should too. You can do the research, just like anyone can, because unlike claims about frog gonads being feminized, EPA data is public record.
The reason a giant swath of the public no longer trusts journalists is because a lot of modern journalism reads like a defense attorney's plea for Pulitzer Prize consideration. Too often they write about individuals and not issues.
If the issue is atrazine and public health, you can feel pretty safe.
*****
Atrazine is an herbicide primarily produced by a company named Syngenta. They're big - really big - $14 billion, yet they are not so big that they can even manage the position of their product name in Google. If you search for atrazine, rather than get the actual atrazine site, the first entry is for Wikipedia and the very first citation in their entry is for that New Yorker article. Atrazine has been around since 1958 but the first citation in Wikipedia is a New Yorker article from February of 2014 that has no science? More strangely, that same article is cited three times before you even get to the table of contents.
That a piece with no science is the very first citation for a product pushing 60 years old tells you one important thing; there may be no health issue, but there is certainly a public relations one.
Since the Wikipedia entry had clearly taken over by someone promoting that New Yorker article and not atrazine studies, I then searched Source Watch and other places that claim to find secrets (still no science but they assure us that Syngenta is not a nice company) and then went to the Environmental Protection Agency. They must really hate atrazine, I thought, they hate everything. This the group that had to be ordered by a Federal court to not blame fracking for environmental issues without doing a study, they declared water a pollutant when too much of it annoyed canoers, and they recently had to defend themselves against the charge that they do 'secret science' and don't disclose the methodology or studies related to greenhouse gas emissions.
They love the environment, so the EPA must have really hammered this atrazine stuff.
Well, no, they didn't. Rather than the caricature of science like in the examples I listed above, I instead found details about one of the most rigorous studies imaginable. Yet what did the Wikipedia entry have to say about career scientists at EPA, who are not political appointees and who know they will be there long after administrations have faded away? It said the EPA study has "been criticized". What was the citation for that? That New Yorker article. And that old Boogeyman "industry-funded" was invoked - the source for that? Also the New Yorker article.
Clearly, The New Yorker is far better at controlling information about atrazine than Syngenta is.
Conspiracy stories about funding are often unsatisfying; they mobilize activists but are a head-scratcher for actual scientists. Scientists know something Wikipedia editors and apparently many journalists do not; studies are "industry-funded" because that is a legal requirement.
All safety studies are "industry-funded" because if a company has to pay for studies, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, no corporation is going to keep developing a product they are not convinced is safe and that works. Taxpayers should not have to pay to find out if a product is safe or not, if a company wants to sell something, they should prove it is safe. The EPA and the FDA and everyone else is right for requiring industry-funded studies.
In the case of atrazine, if you like irony you will like that the EPA told Syngenta they had to try and prove their own product was harmful - and Syngenta had to pay for the privilege of doing so. The EPA was going to monitor the work, they got to pick the parameters and the methodology, and it was going to be duplicated and part of the public record, none of this stuff where someone gets a friend to rubber-stamp a peer-review and include no data.
In doing so, the EPA not only settled a safety issue, they pushed back the frontiers of science.
The Kloas Study
Not all studies are created equal. The EPA knows some researchers do boring, methodological, comprehensive work while others are just chasing the next paycheck or media appearance. Scientists are no different than in any job that way.
So when trying to tackle the issue of whether or not atrazine was leading to this feminization of frogs, they outlined what a good study construct would be. Then they got all of the relevant studies out there and weighted them according to best practices.
I was able to get an introduction to Dr. Tim Pastoor, chief scientist at Syngenta. Obviously since this was after the New Yorker article and after some bizarre allegations against Pastoor by Professor Hayes, going the normal route through a corporate communications group would have taken forever.
We arranged a time to talk. Though I expected to reach a scientist under siege, who had to be wondering if I was a writing a me-too article similar to the New Yorker piece or, worse, "Plague of Frogs II" starring atrazine, what I got was something different - a writer who prides himself on asking the awkward questions found someone who didn't regard any question as awkward.
He just answered everything. After that first discussion, I got off the phone thinking, 'I could ask him if atrazine created Hitler and vampire babies and he would have patiently explained for 15 minutes that atrazine did not actually create Hitler and vampire babies, and then explained why.'
Instead, I just wanted to talk about science. He clearly knew I was not an expert in reproductive biology, much less in amphibians and chemicals, but the mark of a quality scientist is the ability to discuss complex topics without making them complicated.
So the EPA created a metric for quality and said that would be how studies were weighted in regards to the issue of damage to frogs. Studies without raw data were obviously not highly regarded but one study, done independently in two labs in two different countries, got the highest rating. It's no surprise, it used 3200 frogs and it was verified by career scientists at EPAverified all study protocols, data, records, specimens and audited the final results. Under these stringent conditions, the Kloas study found atrazine has no impact on amphibian reproductive health. This study data is available to the public through EPA.
Just the EPA White Paper alone is a 300 page read. If you are not an expert, studies with raw data can be a bit much but the EPA is writing a distilled version that has to be manageable for everyone from staffers in Congress to scientists, so it is not arcane. The EPA recognizes that they don't need to underestimate the intelligence of a reader but they should underestimate the vocabulary. They keep the arcane jargon-y colloquialisms to a minimum.
On page 114, I finally really noticed something that upon re-reading I found I had seen over and over again; they couldn't find any problems.
And then I realized why no one writes about the science of atrazine; it's boring.
There's a political issue, there is a cultural issue, and there is a litigation issue - but there is no science issue. So why does the EPA keep studying it?
The quick answer is that is what the EPA does. It's why they require re-registration of products, so they can look at products again using the latest methods. The real answer is, as I found out, a lot more complicated.
A lot of the nuts and bolts are part of a separate science article about atrazine specifically rather than about studies of atrazine, but a few things stuck out. One, was the size of the studies, and another was the scope. The work done in creating all this data was, in my opinion, something of a benchmark for how science studies should be done. When it came to the modeling, systems biology, mode of action, kinetics, dynamics, the studies were thorough. They included water monitoring, ecosystem monitoring and ecological levels of concern.
Why? Isn't that the opposite of what companies were supposed to do. I played Devil's Advocate and said I thought the EPA had a valid hypothesis in 2002 when they decided to look into, basically, frog gonads.
To my surprise, he agreed. They had created what they considered a real blue-ribbon panel of up-and-coming researchers and Dr. Tyrone Hayes, the subject of the New Yorker piece, was an early member, and when he found that laryngeal muscles in frogs were not enlarged like in a 'true' male, they were intrigued.
"The panel wanted to reproduce it because it was provocative," Pastoor said, so they were for it when the EPA said they wanted to tackle it, except with more rigor, because another study claimed there was an intersex/transgender effect, at low doses, but had no laryngeal effect.
The EPA said they wanted a study with a sufficient number of animals, a positive control, orders of magnitude dosing and clean analytical standards.
"We had an option to do or not do that study," Pastoor said, "and you can imagine what a throw of the dice that was going to be. What if we found effects, particularly at low dose levels? One of the things I admire about this company is that, after not a whole lot of debate, we said 'yeah, we've got to to that study' even though it could result in absolutely cutting the legs off of atrazine. We needed to know and EPA was asking for it, so we did it."
I circled back to orders of magnitude. As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. Weren't you certain to find a problem with enough orders of magnitude? It's a lot more complicated than that, and some of the methodology the EPA used in examining atrazine not only pushed back the frontiers of science in a few ways, but have settled the issue in a way that leaves little to argue about. A study usually has 2 or perhaps 3 orders of magnitude and even that has to be done with gavage dosing, where they use a syringe with a stomach tube to get the chemical into the animal.
It's controlled but not a real-world condition. We've all read outrageous claims by environmentalists who dunked some critter in a bucket of goop to see what happened. Real scientists dismiss them as 'spray and count' people.
One of these studies had 5 orders of magnitude. That's quite broad. If you try hard enough, you are going to cause an effect. Except it turns out, you are not.
"We have done all of these other studies on looking at the mode of action for atrazine in mammals, we've done one of the largest kinetic studies ever done to determine how atrazine gets into the body, where it goes, what it does and so on," Pastoor said.
One of the largest studies ever done? Give me a metric, what does that mean? I asked.
This was done in rats. So typically what you'll do, you'll take maybe 200 datapoints in a rat study to get your kinetics - I am generalizing the numbers when I say 200 - in the study we did we had 1800 data points to clearly delineate how atrazine entered the body, what the quantities were, what disappeared and went away. And then we looked at three metabolites of atrazine and how they appeared and disappeared from the body in time. And we had a very clear idea that atrazine quickly enters the body, it quickly is metabolized and its metabolites are quickly excreted.We also knew very clearly that if you gave it by a stomach tube you had different sorts of dosing than you did if you gave it by water or through the feed, as you might expect, but now you had the data to show that.
"We paired that up with actual effects.; if you get the effects by jamming it down their throat in one fell swoop but you couldn't get it if you fed the same does through water or the feed."
So gavage dosing in high enough quantities may show an effect but...?
"I don't know if you like Scotch or not," he said.
With a name like Campbell, Scotch and headbutting are part of my cultural heritage but I am really more a Scotch wanna-be. Still, I am all about the perfect metaphor so I was happy to play along. I own Scotch.
"Here's the kinetics and I dynamics I am talking about. You and I sit down, we have a nice two fingers of Scotch and that's fine, and maybe a little bit later in the evening we have another two fingers and eliminate later we do it again. Now imagine taking all three sets of those drinks and putting it in a tube and jamming it into your stomach. That's the kind of studies that have been done until now and we showed that if you distribute the dose the way you typically do in your consumption of anything, you just don't get the effects. With alcohol, you can be nice and mellow but if you have it all at one shot, you are going to be pretty well hammered.
"What we discovered was that a lot of the studies done over time were really not valid because you're doing gavage dosing and popping it all in one shot, but once you do that in a distributed way, the way we drink water, eat food and so forth, you simply cannot get the effect.
"On the basis of that, I came up with a statement that I own and I have said a million times; no one has, no one will and no one can get enough atrazine into them to cause an adverse effect. That's an extreme way of saying that these miniscule amounts in water that you occasionally see are totally irrelevant to the biological system. Period."
Now, this ain't a New Yorker profile piece with a veneer of a science issue and I pride myself on asking the awkward questions when someone says something startling.
That's a bold statement, I said.
"It is a bold statement."
So I asked him for bold proof.
"In a SAP meeting in April of 2010, I showed the levels of detection of water in the mid-West, averages were less than 1 PPB, and I showed the gap between 1 PPB and the no-effect levels in animals and then I drew a line across the middle of the graph, showing it from low to high, and I said This is the solubility limit for atrazine, 30 parts per million, and all of the effects in animals were above that line. I said, you can't get enough into animals by water in order to cause that effect. You'd have to dissolve it in surfactants, you'd have to give it by stomach tube, you have to go to heroic efforts to get enough into an animal in order to cause the effects on which the EPA's adverse effects are based.
"Again, you can use Scotch as an analogy. So 1 shot of Scotch..."
"10,000 shots of Scotch!" I said, and laughed.
"Right, if you're going to see it, you're going to see it, you're going to see it across that dose range."
You know how they say you can't actually do a census in China because so many people are being born that you can never get an accurate number. Scotch is powerful stuff and you'd never be able to drink 10,000 glasses of it. You'd die if it went into a feeding tube into you.
In actual conditions, there was no way get a harmful effect. No wonder the EPA did a special study, then declared it safe in a normal registration again, then did another special study, passed it again, and is now doing another re-registration and doesn't expect to find anything.
"The effect, the dynamics, where it occurs specifically in the body, all of this information is better known with atrazine than virtually any molecule on the planet," Pastoor said.
He followed up with the actual graphic he referenced and it is included below.
Atrazine solubility in water, about 30,000 ppb as a horizontal line. The EPA’s No-Effect Levels (NOELs) from animal testing pertain to the water sampling timeframes. Source: Syngenta/Tim Pastoor
"How come I never see that?" I asked. "In all of the things I read preparing for this, I never once saw that."
"No matter how many times I say it, they don't pick up on it. And I have done interviews every time we have had an SAP," he replied.
"Do journalists just not get it?"
"Either that or they say it's such a bold statement it can't be true."
"Well, I get that," I said. "In science, it's usually a world of qualifications - 'may be shown to' and 'suggests' and possible associations - so when someone makes an assertion that is really, really specific...I don't even know how to calibrate that. That is like Muhammad Ali talk, it's as bold as it gets, because in science you just don't do it unless the issue is truly, truly settled."
"Yep," he said.
I gave him another chance to back down from that, just in case.
"Because your friends are scientists," I said, "Saying no one has, no one can, no one will get an adverse reaction...they are going to make goat noises at you if they think you are just being outrageous and saying stuff for dramatic effect."
He chuckled. "Most scientists will spend an hour explaining the kinetics and dynamics and the linkage with effects and no effects and you're just about ready to fall asleep and they say, 'on the basis of that, no one has, no one will'...so I'd rather start out with that and then explain why that is absolutely true.
"I think we get distracted by claims there is a science issue with atrazine and there's just not. It's a political, and it's a litigation, and it's a self-aggrandizement story. But the actual science is boring because there's nothing going on."
Of course, that can't be the end of it. My next article is going to delve into the weird world of frog gonads and One Study To Rule Them All.
