![]() ![]() He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of residents finish high school. In academic settings, it seemed to him that his colleagues were operating according to a frivolous code of manners: they spoke so formally, fashioning themselves as detached authorities, and rarely admitted what they didn’t know. In another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”įor years, despite his achievements, Hayes had felt like an interloper. some say even my life, for what I thought (and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had “risked my reputation, my name. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents in sealed boxes. To confuse them, he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while he was travelling. ![]() He was still in touch with a few Syngenta scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at a different hotel each night. He complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back of the room, taking notes. He worried that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. Hayes continued studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta representatives were following him to conferences around the world. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. ![]() Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.” Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. 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. 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. ![]()
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