10.20.2004

Pollution: Too hot a topic at MN pollution conference:
Incredible:
A scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, was to be keynote speaker at an upcoming conference sponsored by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Then state officials learned the topic of his speech: his latest research linking the herbicide atrazine to frog abnormalities.

Now, Prof. Tyrone Hayes has been uninvited -- by order of the agency's commissioner.

Hayes, an endocrinologist who studies how chemicals affect amphibians, won't address the annual environmental conference in February even though his research is of particular interest in the state where schoolchildren discovered frogs with extra legs and other deformities nine years ago.

Hayes said his removal from the program is an act of censorship by a state agency bowing to agricultural interests and pesticide companies that don't like his findings. "Initially, before the MPCA uninvited me, they asked if I would remove the words 'atrazine' and 'pesticide' from the title of my talk, and of course I refused to do that because that's what I work on," said Hayes....
Full story here. (Thanks, Adrienne.)

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