Sound science on trial

It is unusual in the peer-review process for reviewers to have access to the raw data presented in the paper, and study authors can and do decide for themselves whether or not to respond to all the comments and questions submitted by the reviewers. Authors certainly do not respond directly to reviewers, or have any direct dialogue with them.

The absurdity of dismissing industry funded studies in favor of peer review is highlighted in the case of atrazine. On the one side are a handful of controversial studies by a scientist at UC Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes, claiming to have found that the compound produces adverse effects on amphibian development. He has become a favorite speaker on the anti-pesticide, activist circuit.

In 2005, EPA published a 95-page white paper concluding that Hayes’s work and other studies on atrazine were “scientifically flawed.” Referring to Hayes’s claims that his own previous studies and others confirmed his findings, the Deputy Director of the Office of Pesticides testified that the EPA “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 that confirm Dr. Hayes’ conclusions.”

In an abundance of caution, however, the EPA asked the primary producer of atrazine to fund two of the most extensive and far-reaching studies of their kind to look into the issues that had been raised. Carried out in two separate labs in the United States and Germany, these massive studies were thoroughly audited and inspected, data point by data point, by the EPA. Both studies refuted the Hayes’s conclusions.

This hasn’t slowed Hayes down, however. Just last year, a member of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry expressed serious concerns about some of Dr. Hayes’ talks given at professional and public meetings, noting that they included “inflammatory and libelous attacks,” and that he gave audience members the dangerous impression that “it is okay to present provocative conclusions without supporting data.”

None of this has given the activist community any pause, however. And their steady drumbeat is even having its effect on the EPA itself, which cited a recent NRDC report on atrazine as the reason for instigating the new and hurried review of the chemical, only a few short years after the previous positive review.

In this way, “inflammatory” accusations and “provocative conclusions without supporting data” may ultimately trump science-based regulatory policy as it has always been practiced in the United States and open the door up for a very different kind of regulation — one based on which activist group screams the loudest and is most effective at instilling unjustified fears in the name of “precaution.”

Amy Kaleita, Ph.D., is a senior environmental policy fellow at the California-based Pacific Research Institute.