Poison Spring (20 page)

At its peak, in 1976, IBT had 230,000 square feet of space, a research farm of more than two hundred acres, and laboratories in three cities. Calandra was also in charge of some three hundred fifty people doing as many as two thousand new studies a year. In 1966, Calandra sold IBT to Nalco, a large chemical company. But he remained president of IBT until IBT went bankrupt in the late 1970s.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 numbers 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Calandra was a pillar in his community, his philanthropy well known.
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