Ecologists paid by industry to assess the effects of businesses on the environment are often accused of selling their souls. But isn't scientific expertise exactly what is needed? Michael Hopkin investigates.
Picture this: you are a talented research ecologist and you're evaluating whether a planned hydroelectric dam could damage the local ecosystem. Your findings lead you to believe that the fish in the river would not be significantly harmed by the dam. But when you publish your results, your colleagues refuse to believe them. Why? Because you work for the company that is building the dam.
At first glance, big business seems to be only bad for the environment. After all, industry has cut down rainforests and opened up huge mining scars on the landscape. Surely, it might seem, any ecologist who takes money from an organization that so harms the natural world must be putting concerns about the environment second to salary.
In fact, many ecologists take up industrial contracts to try to minimize the damage caused. But in doing so, they walk a delicate line between those who want to save the natural world and those who want to exploit its resources. Some face accusations from their peers that they've ‘sold out’. And conflicts often arise between their interests as researchers and those of the companies they work for. Faced with these challenges, many must question whether their decision to work for industry was worth it.
For some, such as Tyrone Hayes, the answer is no. Hayes is an ecological toxicologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has received funding from the agribiotech giant Syngenta in the past. “My view has changed a lot since working with Syngenta,” he says. “It's made me a lot more sceptical of scientists who get involved with industry.”
Hayes's work touches on one of the most politically charged areas of applied research: the impact of pesticides on the environment. Specifically, he is studying the effects on frogs of atrazine, widely used on transgenic crops. At Berkeley, Hayes took up a contract with Syngenta, brokered by a consulting firm. In his research, he found that exposure to atrazine leads to male frogs becoming feminized, as measured, among other traits, by larynx size1.
Culture of mistrust
But Syngenta asked him to divide his data on larynx size by the frogs' body weight, a procedure that he says was designed to make the key finding disappear. A Syngenta representative said that processing the information in this way is a common method for handling data from such studies, designed simply to control for the presence of naturally stunted frogs. Hayes eventually gave up the lucrative contract, and no longer works with industry colleagues, who are forbidden from discussing their results with him.
Hayes worries that many scientists in his field could come under similar pressure when working under industry contracts. “It's up to researchers to maintain the integrity to say: ‘No, I produce data in my lab and I have got to stand by them’,” he says. But that can be hard to do, especially when research funding is at stake.
People I barely knew — students, government regulators, and friends of friends — started questioning my integrity. Bill Streever
In general, big businesses, often forced by environmental regulations to investigate the impact of their activities on the environment, have the financial muscle to fully support such projects. Last year the BP Conservation Project, funded by the UK-based oil giant BP, awarded US$600,000 to 28 groups of conservationists. Overall, the company spends around $100 million each year on community-investment efforts. That amount of money can seem vast to researchers used to relying on academic funding (see ‘The lure of industry’).
References
Hayes, T. B. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 99, 5476–5480 (2002).
Streever, B. Frontiers Ecol. Env. 3, 407 (2005)
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Michael Hopkin is a reporter for news@naturecom.
- Michael Hopkin
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Hopkin, M. Caught between shores. Nature 440, 144–145 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/440144a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/440144a
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