The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: manipulation and corruption 51The study published in 1983 by Judith Zack and William Gaffey, bothMonsanto employees, was supposed to compare the state of health of 884 ofthe factory’s employees, including those working on the 2,4,5-T productionline (the “exposed” group) and “all the others” (the control group), including“employees holding a job having plant-wide responsibilities with the potentialfor exposure to 2,4,5-T were, for the purposes of this study, consideredto be non-exposed,” as the two authors acknowledged. 9 The result was thatrates of cancer were lower in the exposed group than in the non-exposedgroup. The trick was having included in the study only employees workingin the factory and/or having died between January 1, 1955, and December31, 1977. In other words, those who had worked at Nitro between 1948 and1955 were excluded, as were those who died after 1977. This arbitrary protocolmade it possible to exclude from the study twenty workers who Monsantoknew had been exposed (notably in the 1949 accident), nine of whomhad died of cancer and eleven of heart disease. Furthermore, four workerswho had died of cancer and had been classified as “exposed” in the 1980study were placed in the control group in the 1983 study. 10But it was the last study, the one published in 1984 by Raymond Suskindand Vicki Hertzberg, a colleague at the Kettering Laboratory, in the prestigiousJournal of the American Medical Association that crossed all bounds. Ata hearing in the Kemner case, Roush acknowledged that instead of the fourcases of cancer recorded in the exposed group, there were twenty-eight (theother twenty-four had been omitted for some reason). 11 When Suskind wassubsequently questioned, he was, according to the plaintiffs, “shown to besuch a fraud that he refused to return to the State of Illinois for completionof his cross-examination.” 12Hunting Down the Whistle-BlowersMeanwhile, Greenpeace sent its file to Cate Jenkins, a chemist who hadbeen working at the EPA since 1979. At the time, her assignment was to detecttoxic industrial wastes and develop regulations to control them. Knownfor her intransigence toward polluters, this undisputed expert on dioxin hadalready clashed with her superiors, who thought that she had pushed a littletoo hard in her investigation of Penta, the wood treatment product. The pro-