IBT went bankrupt because of Adrian Gross.
One of the most significant documents in any laboratory testing on live subjects is the log a technician keeps in order to record observations of what is happening to each animal throughout the course of the experiment. The animals eat food that has been poisoned, so if the poison causes serious toxic effects, a careful observer is likely to see how the toxins affect the behavior and body of the animals he has been watching. When an animal is “sacrificed” for autopsy, the visual inspection of an abnormal growth, for example, is taken a step further with a microscopic examination to determine the nature of that growth. From all that “raw data,” the lab issues a report about the chemical tested and gives it to the company or organization that paid for the testing. Typically, that organization then uses the lab’s findings to convince the government that its chemical product is safe for people and the environment and to “register” it for sale and general use.
Though it is far from a perfect system, and it is in many ways morally objectionable, animal testing does provide a reliable picture of what happens when toxins contaminate living organisms. Government regulators are crippled and blind without that picture. But they are far worse off if the picture they are shown is fake.
Inside IBT, scientists with advanced degrees in chemistry, toxicology, biology, pharmacology, and medicine engaged in a criminal conspiracy for close to twenty-five years. IBT executives falsified test data in order to hide the fact that their laboratory was in a shambles. Animals were escaping. Huge numbers of them were dying. Lab techs forgot to run tests on some of the animals. Researchers simply made up page after page of data and put it in the reports. They backdated documents in order to hide the scheme.
Throughout this time, IBT’s services were being contracted by some of the country’s largest and wealthiest chemical companies, who showed no obvious concern for rigorous, objective scientific testing. Monsanto, for example, had one of its own men in the halls of IBT faking the testing of TCC (trichlorocarbanilide), a toxic antibacterial substance that in the 1950s and 1960s began to appear widely in soaps, laundry detergents, rinse additives, and softeners. This compound was hardly benign; in 1962, a number of premature infants in California were struck with methemoglobinemia, an extremely dangerous disease originating in diapers laundered with a softener made from a mixture of quaternary ammonium and TCC.
Yet by the mid-1970s, Monsanto was still having IBT labs conduct “tests” of TCC so that it could keep using it in deodorant soaps like Dial. Scientists carried out these “studies” in the most infamous chamber of IBT—a cement cauldron of filthy water, disease, and slaughter known, appropriately enough, as “the swamp.” Workers were reluctant even to step into that room because many lab animals were out of their cages. The animals in the swamp were hungry, thirsty, and mean, drowning in pools of water and excrement, rotting with disease in overcrowded quarters.
So many rats died during the study that the study should have been canceled. Instead, late-started animals were substituted into the study, and the data from the new rats was mixed in with the data for the original rats. The study lied about that data.
Monsanto’s man at IBT, who was in charge of the rat toxicity studies, knew about the mixing of the data. He knew that new animals were being ordered and that they were being substituted in, and he did nothing to disclose it. After the scientist went back to Monsanto, he tried to make sure that the report was clean enough so that it could pass approval with the FDA.
And the fraud continued. Dr. Donovan Gordon, IBT’s pathologist, concluded that even the lowest doses of TCC were harmful to rats’ testicles. But Gordon would learn the hard way what happens when you contradict corporate “science.”
Before Calandra hired him at IBT, Gordon had been a young scientist earning very little at Abbott Laboratories, a Chicago-based pharmaceutical firm. Calandra made Gordon his right-hand man in IBT’s pathology lab. But he did much more than that. He helped Gordon buy a nice house in Chicago’s suburb of Northbrook. He gave Gordon a car. Gordon was African American, and he was paid a good enough salary that he could, at a time of civil rights strife between blacks and whites in Chicago, put his children in private schools. That way, Calandra put Gordon in a golden cage of subservience and indebtedness. The tragedy was that Gordon was one of the first African-American pathologists to make it in the United States.
When Calandra first read Gordon’s report that Monsanto’s TCC caused testicular degeneration in rats even at the lowest dosage, he invited him to his office and told him that the company (and therefore Gordon) could go on doing the things they liked in life only because of the goodwill of companies like Monsanto. Why don’t you look at some more TCC slides? Calandra asked. Gordon did and, the second time around, he found TCC clean and safe.
Monsanto itself then hired an independent pathologist named Dr. William Ribelin to examine rat testicle slides. But when Ribelin reached the same conclusion as in Dr. Gordon’s first report, Monsanto knew this would cause problems with the FDA, so Ribelin’s report was never submitted to them.
In early 1975, Calandra himself took personal control over all report writing at IBT, and he directed changes in the TCC report. Calandra conducted most of the important meetings regarding the changes, and he made the ultimate decisions on what lies were going to be included in the report.1
Word of this fiasco reached the EPA when Manny Reyna, an IBT technician from Latin America, told Adrian Gross how the lab was cutting corners with its testing. The entire laboratory, one of the largest in the country, was a nightmare, Reyna said.
In a corrupt place like IBT, nothing was sacred. Intimidated scientists and technicians did everything to make sure their studies found nothing that would raise questions with the government.
Here’s what Gross learned: Technicians used the acronym TBDs for animals that were “too badly decomposed.” When animals escaped from their cages—and they did by the dozens nearly every day—IBT men hunted them down with “little spray bottles of chloroform.” IBT technicians cut tumors from the experimental animals and dumped their carcasses in the garbage. They disposed of all animals that showed any effects from the tested chemical. And if IBT researchers completed a two-year study in, say, fourteen months, they just invented all the data from the missing ten months. Meanwhile, IBT managers cut corners with lab workers; they did not train them well, and they did not pay them well. Most techs worked long hours in an unhealthy environment of brutality and alienation.2
IBT had been allowed to manage this swamp for twenty-four years without anybody on the outside, especially in government agencies, doing anything about it. It’s not that people didn’t know. On March 1, 1978, Edwin Johnson wrote a memo noting that “evidence is accumulating which suggests prior knowledge of those practices by the sponsor(s) of the [fraudulent spray] studies . . . I know that you share my deep concern regarding the seriousness of the regulatory ramifications of these recent findings of falsification of data upon which national and international regulatory decisions have been made.”
Adrian Gross and his government colleagues finally confronted Gordon with the fake science Calandra was purchasing from him. Government lawyers wanted to indict him, but Gross argued successfully for giving him immunity so the full depth of the corruption at IBT could be exposed. Gordon managed to tell his story, but his experience at IBT ruined him.3
IBT lawyers discovered that Gordon had suffered a nervous breakdown, which made it necessary for him to be treated with hypnosis by a Northwestern University psychologist. The IBT lawyers tried, unsuccessfully, to discredit Gordon’s testimony and have the court declare a mistrial. Even Monsanto dumped its man at IBT the minute the trial in Chicago came to an end.
“It was easy for me to smell the filth of IBT,” Gross explained to me. “Don’t forget, I was dealing with crooks who were too greedy, who were not satisfied to make a buck. And when you cheat, you are bound to make a simple error like recording all the fake numb
ers in neat columns at the same time with the same pencil.”
Throughout the years that IBT was pulling off an enormous (and dangerous) fraud on the public, only one senior EPA official thought seriously of doing something about it: Richard D. Wilson, deputy assistant administrator for general enforcement. Wilson wanted to use the case of two nerve pesticides, acephate and orthene, made by the Chevron Chemical Company, to demonstrate what the government would do to companies that benefited from the crimes of IBT. The EPA had discovered that Chevron had submitted “inaccurate” testing data, Wilson wrote, and “the inaccuracies may have been the result of a deliberate falsification of the original test results by IBT.”
Wilson told the EPA’s pesticide boss, Edwin Johnson, that he knew that IBT had faked the information and that Chevron had nonetheless used this data to convince the government that it would be safe for people to eat food contaminated with acephate. What was needed, Wilson wrote, was “strong legal action against those responsible.”4
For the government to retain any credibility, the EPA should have withdrawn Chevron’s license to continue contaminating our food. But the agency did no such thing. The EPA’s ears were attuned to signals from the White House, and when senior officials could (and should) have followed Dick Wilson’s reasonable advice, they did not.
In fact, officials in both the EPA and the Department of Justice who were responsible for investigating and prosecuting the IBT felons made a deliberate decision not to go after corporations like Monsanto and Chevron that had benefited from IBT’s crimes. If they had, the IBT case could have shut down a large segment of America’s chemical industry.
Instead, the Carter administration ordered the EPA to focus only on the IBT lab in Chicago and to leave the larger fish alone. The EPA told anyone asking questions about the “safety” of the IBT chemicals that the EPA had “supplementary studies” supporting the continued registration of the IBT-sanctioned chemicals.
It wasn’t as if IBT was the only bad actor. In 1977, an FDA inspector had discovered that a lab in Missouri was also making things up; in the diplomatic language of the FDA, inspectors “uncovered significant deficiencies in several animal toxicology studies.” Monsanto was the lab’s principal client.
EPA scientists and a FDA inspector paid a visit to a lab in Northern California that they suspected was generating data that was “very incomplete.” The lab, which tested pesticides for Shell Oil Company, refused to admit the federal officials into the lab. Another FDA-EPA team of auditors visited a toxicology lab in Florida and discovered “possible data fraud.” The lab was “apparently falsifying results of studies” and was “suspected of fabricating data.” In Chicago, meanwhile, the Velsicol Chemical Corporation was indicted in court in 1977 for refusing to notify EPA that their best-selling pesticides, heptachlor and chlordane, “induced tumors in laboratory animals.”5
Such cases made it hard to trust in the reliability of any EPA studies—especially when EPA scientists themselves (or their contractors) indulge in their own IBT-like “cutting and pasting” of a company’s own “scientific” information. Such studies are unreliable “because EPA toxicologists don’t really review them,” Adrian Gross told me. “Instead, they go straight to the company’s summary and lift it word for word and give it as their own evaluation of those studies.”6 This is what makes the EPA “so rotten,” Gross said. Scientists earn good money to serve the public, but instead, “they end up covering up for the chemical industry.”7
In 1983, seven years after Adrian Gross revealed that IBT was faking results in its multimillion-dollar testing, Joseph Calandra and three other IBT officials were brought to trial in the U.S. District Court in Chicago. The criminal trial lasted for six months and filled seventeen thousand pages of transcript.
The fact the trial took place at all was remarkable. On the one hand, you had the powerful interests of the chemical industry, and on the other hand, you had a White House and federal bureaucracy bent on doing nothing contrary to the interests of the chemical industry. This was particularly obvious during the Reagan administration, when the government was so clearly siding with industrial giants. The IBT-Nalco executives knew that, so they hired one of Chicago’s most prestigious lawyers, George Cotsirilos, to get them off the hook.
Cotsirilos came close to doing just that. Calandra’s lab, after all, was meeting a great need in the chemical industry, so throughout his career, both his business and his personal fortunes had soared. The grand jury sent the Justice Department lawyers in Chicago a sealed indictment of Joseph Calandra, IBT’s chief executive, along with indictments of three other IBT officials.8 Calandra was a pillar in his community, his philanthropy well known.9
Despite Nalco’s paying George Cotsirilos hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Chicago jury found all four IBT executives guilty of fraud. Three of them were given brief jail sentences. Calandra stayed out of prison, indicted but free because his lawyer argued that Calandra had had an aneurysm of the aorta that threatened his life.
In the end, the IBT trial—as dramatic as it was—was a rare moment when such corruption was actually brought to light. For pesticides alone, IBT faked the information the government used for the registration or licensing of at least 212 ingredients. This fact is deeply troubling if you realize that the thousands of products made from these 212 “pesticide active ingredients” represent many acutely toxic and widely used sprays in the United States and throughout the world.10
In 1981, five years after the IBT scandal became public, EPA calculated some of the damage. Nearly 65 percent of the company’s studies were deemed invalid. Data from eighteen laboratories, or about 20 percent, was considered “questionable or unacceptable for regulatory purposes.” The rate of invalidity of pivotal studies “was so high that reliance on the data is risky.”11
Some time in late 1981, EPA prepared a “fact sheet” on the IBT disaster in which the agency gave credit to the FDA for the discovery of the fraud. “FDA uncovered problems so serious that, after documentation and review of the reports, they refused to accept further IBT studies and insisted that the 40 or so studies submitted to FDA be replaced,” the report said.
“Raw data” (basic information on the material tested and its effects on the lab animals) was “missing” and “shredded.” For some of the data that survived, it was impossible to make certain that it was authentic. It went on. Those who worked at IBT did not fit their job descriptions. The inspectors found “undocumented changes [in study protocols], [and]several protocols [were] used interchangeably.” The inspectors also found very little information on what the lab animals ate, how much, when, or what the food was mixed with. Not only that, but the lab kept “extra animals for the entire test.” This is because it was common in the IBT for the animals to “die twice.” The lab workers used “gang caging” for the animals.
The fact sheet also summarized the frequency of invalid IBT data. For example, in June 1980, all the two-year rat studies were invalid; in December 1981, the failure rate was 95 percent. In other words, of 41 studies reviewed, 39 were invalid. In general, the percentage of invalid studies in December 1981 ranged from 29 to 95.12
Far more worrisome than this laundry list of tawdry revelations was this simple fact: for about a quarter of a century, thousands of farm sprays that had been “tested” by IBT ended up in the food and drinking water of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. It is impossible to assess the damage of this massive poisoning, but it must surely have been a considerable factor in human disease and death.
IBT’s betrayal of the public trust was spectacular largely because of its magnitude, involving as it did a company carrying out roughly 40 percent of all tests for industrial agribusiness and the chemical and drug industries. But even as this fraud was going on, other, smaller laboratories were engaged in their own versions of faking data and manipulating science.
Around this time, a female scientist told me of atrocious conditions at a
veterinary, toxicology, and entomology research laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in College Station, Texas. The woman referred to Dimilin “tests” that took place in a USDA lab farm experimenting to see whether Dimilin had any effect on male chickens’ levels of testosterone, a hormone vital for normal reproduction.
Dimilin belongs to a group of chlorinated diphenyl poisons known as “insect growth regulators.” Growth regulation is essentially biological warfare: a chemical like Dimilin poisons (and thus inhibits) an organism’s growth or development, often resulting in the disfigurement or premature death of the organism. When industry (and EPA scientists) say Dimilin “decreases testosterone levels in roosters,” what they really mean is “Dimilin sterilizes roosters.”13
Dimilin, it turned out, was especially deadly during molting. The compound made it impossible for insects and arthropods such as shrimp, crayfish, lobsters, and crabs to build a new exoskeleton; young animals would die because they had no hard tissue in their bodies for walking, flying, swimming, or protection.
But Dimilin also neutered both insects and warm-blooded animals, and in very small amounts. It takes only 75 parts per trillion of Dimilin in water, for instance, to sterilize mysid shrimp, an organism at the very base of the ocean’s food chain.
In the laboratory, scientists had discovered unsettling results: feeding roosters and hens food mixed with even tiny amounts of Dimilin made them different birds. The hens grew fat and huge, the roosters became thin and small with practically no secondary sex characteristics left in their combs and wattles and nearly no sex hormone left in their testes. These remarkable discoveries came out into the open thanks to another USDA man, James E. Wright, an entomologist who published the lab’s findings in 1976 in volume 14 of Environmental Health Perspectives.
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