circulatory_system_disorder
The grandfather of alt-science.
Art Robinson has seeded scientific skepticism within the GOP for decades. Now he wants to use urine to save lives.
Arthur B. Robinson, renegade chemist, failed politician, grandpa of the climate skeptics — and maybe, just maybe, our nation’s next scientist-in-chief — padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks. “This room, everything you see here, was built by my own sons with their own hands, including the concrete,” he said. Robinson raised and home-schooled six children in this tawny valley scratched into the hills near the town of Cave Junction, Oregon. Now his wife is dead and one of his daughters has moved away, but the rest of his kids — two veterinarians, a biochemist and a pair of nuclear engineers — remain nearby. They’ve got a lot to do: Feed the animals; maintain the lab; ward off cougars; publish their popular home-school curriculums; manage Robinson’s repeated, unsuccessful congressional campaigns; and, of course, perform high-stakes research into medicine and biochemistry.
A stuffed antelope with curly horns stares across the lab at a bank of instruments with flashing lights. “That’s a rectifier, and this machine measures the rotation of light,” said Robinson, a spritely 75-year-old in pleated khakis and a button shirt, with white hair parted neatly on his small, round head. Then he pointed at a massive cylinder, about the size of a hippopotamus and groaning like a locomotive. “And this,” he said, beaming — “this is our miracle in a box.”
Lo, the Robinson family spectrometer — a $2 million, 7-tesla magnet super-cooled by liquid helium and used for analyzing chemicals. It’s not the sort of thing one would expect to find in private hands, let alone in a DIY laboratory on a modest sheep ranch in a rural corner of the Pacific Northwest. But Robinson and his scientific colleagues — that is to say, his children — have big plans for the hulking, gray device with strands of a cobweb tethered to its back. They believe it will provide a novel way to diagnose disease and then, perhaps, to extend the human lifespan.
Here at what Robinson calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the family has been assembling an archive of human urine. Eventually they hope to gather 50,000 samples, drawn from 5,000 volunteers across a five-year span. The pee is kept in cryogenic vials and stored in dozens of military-grade, minus-80 freezers on the property. Robinson and his kids have already started placing tiny urine samples, each not much bigger than a raindrop, into the family spectrometer, so they can record its chemical fingerprint — the set of peaks and valleys corresponding to its thousands of component parts. Once their catalog of prints has gotten big enough, they’ll start sifting through for hidden patterns in the data, anything that might provide a hint about our health. According to Robinson, these records could contain the telltale marks of, say, early-stage breast cancer or an approaching heart attack, or they might allow him to track the effects of treating those conditions in real time. Once the details have been worked out, he said, this cheap and noninvasive test — a tiny dab of urine fed into the hippopotamus — could spit out a dossier of diagnostic information.
Whatever you think of this endeavor, let alone its chances of success, the mere fact of its existence is remarkable. At a time when almost all biomedical research flows from either major public grants or industrial R&D;, Robinson has made the choice to strike out on his own. Instead of taking money from bureaucrats in Washington, he’s been raising millions for his big-data research from a set of ultra-wealthy donors who share his conservative values and wariness of government intrusion.
That is to say, Arthur B. Robinson is not some lonesome crank tinkering in his garage. He’s something more unusual: an extremely well-connected crank, with ample funding and an influential perch at the wild outskirts of both politics and science. If he once seemed destined for a respectable career in academia — 45 years ago, he was a young professor on the tenure track at the University of California, San Diego, working side-by-side with the legendary double-Nobelist Linus Pauling — he’s long since cut all ties to conventional research institutions and remade himself as a cowboy chemist, if not an oracle frontiersman for what might be termed America’s “alt-science” movement.
One could view his setup with idle curiosity: the science maverick on his ranch, with a seven-figure budget for his indie urinalysis. But the movement in which Robinson belongs (as a member, if not a shepherd) has nudged a few steps closer, in recent months, to the center of our national politics. Alternative theories of climate change — that is to say, those at odds with mainstream science — are now ascendant at the highest level of government, along with deep suspicion of environmental regulations. And other alt-science points of view — on vaccination, nuclear power, intelligent design — have been showing signs of purchase in the Trump administration. Even Robinson himself may soon be making tracks for Pennsylvania Avenue. Chief among his financial backers are the Mercers — hedge-fund billionaire Robert and his daughter Rebekah — who are better known these days for their avid right-wing activism and sponsorship of Steve Bannon. In March, reports emerged that Rebekah Mercer had made the case for Robinson to be the nation’s new national science adviser. “It would be an honor to do it,” he told me.
“He’s one of the founders of this whole movement,” says Joseph Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, which has served for 20 years as the leading think tank of the push to challenge climate science. Last year, when Robinson joined Heartland’s board of directors, Bast called him “as bold and brave a person as I have ever met.” Now Bast says that courage has been vindicated. “Time will tell,” he promised, “but it certainly seems like Robinson’s views are winning the day.”
“I’m ordinarily smart,” Robinson likes to say, as if that means he were no more clever than the average man. In fact, he has an extraordinary gift for selling average men on his ideas, and for making even subtle science seem like common sense. He’s been raising private money for his research since the 1970s, mostly on the basis of his grit-and-wit appeals to reason. Robinson is, if nothing else, a master simplifier. It’s a skill he learned from Linus Pauling: He’s the sort of guy who can flatten any topic, no matter how abstruse, into a pair of axes hand-drawn in the air. He mimes the X and Y dimensions with his fingers as he talks, explaining, for example, how samples of a person’s urine, taken over time, could yield a running readout of their health. “When you hear about a scientific subject that is said to be very, very complex, with lots of things to know, and only the expert can approach it,” he tells me, “you know they’re blowing smoke in your eyes.”
In the late-1990s, when Robinson first got into questioning the evidence for human-caused climate change, he spent six months reading through all the science he could find on atmospheric carbon dioxide. His final report, written with his son Zachary (the veterinarian) and two other scholars, cited about 150 academic papers and concluded — in a characteristic plain-spoken manner — that human activity “has not harmfully warmed the Earth.” In fact, Robinson and his colleagues went further still, claiming both in their review and an attached petition that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 would produce “a host of beneficial effects” for the planet. (His belief in the likely benefits of global warming makes Robinson somewhat unusual even among his cohort of contrarians.)
That review of climate science has been hugely influential among climate skeptics, says Bast, precisely on account of its simplicity. “It was a standard reference tool and an important publication,” he explains. “Art was one of the first to say, ‘This isn’t too hard for the layman to figure out.’ … You can go through it, even though you’re not a scientist, and say, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t make sense.’”
The same approach — simplify, clarify, persuade — has been on display for more than 20 years in Access to Energy, a libertarian newsletter that Robinson writes for 3,500 annual subscribers. (Robert Mercer is a reader.) The publication’s subject matter ranges far beyond the power grid: Robinson says it’s meant to serve as his corrective for all manner of irrational and unscientific thought; to counteract panics over pesticides and freak-outs over global warming; to teach its readers, as he puts it, “not to ‘trust and parrot’ the politically motivated statements of the press, politicians, and other self-interested parties” on scientific matters; to preach data directly to the people, so they can reach their own conclusions instead of being force-fed their ideas by science-policy elites in Washington. That is to say, Access to Energy has functioned as the house organ for Robinson’s peculiar brand of science populism — as if Breitbart had been crossed with Discover.
“Science is entirely a populist subject,” he tells me. If we don’t need some expert committee to tell us whether the atmosphere is warming, then we certainly shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied by whatever “custom and culture” happens to prevail in any other scientific circle. Custom and culture: these are dirty words for Robinson, representing the creaky machinery of public science, funded by the government through rusted peer-review committees and indifferent to nonconformists like himself. We can cast aside the custom and the culture, he says, and learn about the science for ourselves. That’s alt-science in a nutshell: It’s the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions from the facts.
Robinson has made ample use of that freedom. He currently serves as vice president of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness — an outré association of science-minded nonconformists, conspiracy theorists and dissenters (also funded by Robert Mercer). “Art is revered by those people,” says Bast, who has attended several of DDP’s annual meetings. At this year’s event, which took place in August on the theme of “Restoring Greatness in American Science and Health,” presenters spoke about the bullying of climate skeptics, the widespread use of phony global-warming models, scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the story of Chernobyl and other “radioactive fairytales.” Robinson himself gave a talk on the “vaccine controversy” — he believes they’re given too early in a child’s life, as a rule — and there was a banquet reception for the infamous anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Earlier meetings have attacked the science linking HIV and AIDS and questioned claims that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.
Several of these radical positions were aired in a contentious interview between Robinson and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2010. Four years later, Maddow said Robinson “currently leads for The Rachel Maddow Show hall of fame balloting for weirdest interview on this show ever.”
“Science is entirely a populist thing,” Robinson says again. “It’s a way of using the individual human mind. That means one man can be right, and everybody else can be wrong.
“And if he’s right?” he continues. “Well, then, their ideas are going to fall.”
In a dusty and defunct building on the Oregon ranch, what used to be a mouse room now is home to a handful of flies. In the old days, Robinson would irradiate his lab animals, frying their backs with ultraviolet light until they developed squamous cell carcinoma. Then he’d check to see how their cancers might respond to changes in their diets. “We could vary the growth rate of cancer by tenfold, according to what we fed ’em,” he said, describing the results of some 40 experiments going back to his time on the faculty of the Salk Institute at UC-San Diego in La Jolla.1 “The poorer you feed ’em, the poorer the cancer grows.”
Robinson’s elfin face perks up whenever the subject turns to science, and he likes to punctuate his stories with a wheezy, blurted exclamation of delight. It wasn’t just that poor nutrition stopped the cancers’ growth, he said; according to his research, a wholesome diet seemed to make the mouse tumors more robust. “Take a gram of vitamin C per day, and it improves your health, but it’ll make your cancer grow faster, too. Heeeh!”
This alarming result — that eating well can feed the thing that kills you — all but wrecked Robinson’s career, he said: “I worked with Linus Pauling for 15 years, and then he and I got in a fight over those mice.” Pauling had been insisting that a daily mega-dose of vitamin C could prevent or cure three-quarters of all cancers; now Robinson had data that pointed in the opposite direction. “That experiment was the end of our collaboration. The 15 years were over.”
One can say the break with Pauling set the stage for much of what followed: Robinson’s decampment with his family to this secluded ranch; his turn toward radical conservatism; his reinvention of himself as a cowboy scientist; his pursuit of longer life in freezers full of urine; and now, finally, astoundingly, the prospect of his going to the White House.
It took only the slightest interrogatory nudge for Robinson to launch into a wistful account of his relationship with his former mentor, starting with the moment when they met, while Robinson was still an undergraduate at Caltech in the early 1960s.
It was right around the time that Pauling won his second Nobel Prize. The first had been for chemistry; the second, a Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Pauling’s anti-nuclear activism. In 1958, the world-famous chemist had submitted a petition, signed by 9,000 scientists (including 35 other Nobel Prize winners), to the United Nations, calling for a ban on nuclear-weapons testing.
But Pauling’s activism — and sympathy for left-wing politics — had repercussions for his career. Though he was still a member of the faculty, Pauling didn’t have access to a lab at Caltech. So instead he found a bunch of undergrads to run experiments for him while school was not in session. And in 1962, he hired Robinson — a young man from Texas with a natural gift for laboratory work — to supervise the summer research.
Back then, Robinson never read the newspaper and paid no mind to Pauling’s politics, nor in fact to politics of any kind. He’d been “raised a normal American,” he said — the only child of a homemaker and a senior engineer for Union Carbide: “My father was in love with petrochemical plants, and my mother was in love with him, and that was it.” When he got to California and started taking classes, he found himself ensorcelled by Professor Pauling’s brilliance and enthusiasm.
A few years later, their paths would cross again at UC-San Diego, where Robinson had been hired to the faculty as a biochemist. Pauling, who arrived there in 1968, was about to make a sharp left turn in his career, to pursue an alt-science theory of his own: Though his ample expertise had been in biophysics, he’d lately grown obsessed by the healing power of vitamins. One day he came into Robinson’s office with a paper that he’d written for Science magazine. Pauling already held a strong belief that large doses of vitamin C would yield enormous benefits for health; now he was proposing, in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, that nutritional supplements might also be a salve for mental illness.
Robinson’s idol, and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, was asking him for help in pursuit of this unusual idea. Pauling would be the theoretician and Robinson the experimentalist. The two began by running simple tests to figure out what happens to your body when you mega-dose with vitamins. Robinson would analyze samples of his subjects’ urine so he could figure out how much of each nutrient would be excreted — and thus how much had been absorbed. What he and Pauling really wanted, though, was a global readout of well-being — a yardstick they could use to optimize their dosing. That’s when Robinson had the thought to measure all the metabolites in urine that he could and to try to use the pattern as a master-code for diagnosis, a “metabolic profile” that could serve as a holistic estimate for health.
The two would spend so much time together on this project, hashing out ideas at Pauling’s ranch in Big Sur, that Robinson — whose parents had passed away quite suddenly and tragically just a few years prior — began to think of Pauling as a second father. Eventually the two men hatched a plan to start a private institute where their out-there studies could be financed through direct appeals to donors. For Pauling, at the end of his career, the move off-campus was not so risky. For Robinson it would be a leap of faith. At just 31, he’d already been told by his department head in San Diego that he was close to getting tenure. Yet the promise of the work with Pauling, and of their search for gold in human urine, proved irresistible. So in March 1973, Robinson resigned from UCSD and kicked in $100,000 from his family inheritance to rent out a small, brick building on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. This would be the site of the duo’s new nutrition labs, at what they dubbed the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine.
Robinson and Pauling had always been a mismatched pair: the older man, a brilliant theoretician from the Pacific Northwest, and his earnest protégé, a whiz-kid experimentalist from Houston. Pauling wore a beatnik’s black beret; Robinson favored jeans and button-shirts in situations where others might be wearing suits. Their differences went still deeper: Pauling leaned toward socialism; Robinson turned out to be a vocal libertarian. Pauling was an atheist, Robinson a faithful Christian.
The polar split extended even to each one’s fundamental sense of purpose. Pauling saw the world in pain and said it was his mission to diminish human suffering. Robinson arranged his goals around the sanctity of human life and any means that he might use to increase its quality, quantity and length. The bylaws of their institute tried to span this philosophical divide: The purpose of its research, they declared, was both to extend people’s lives and also to make those lives less miserable.
For a time, the rival forces of their personalities seemed to foster a productive tension, like the pulling of the cables on a suspension bridge. Then their partnership collapsed. Robinson claims the falling-out began with that mouse experiment — the one in which he showed that too much vitamin C could make a tumor grow instead of shrink. In contemporary press reports, Pauling called that work “amateurish.” Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Pauling was convinced that he could save her with 10-gram doses of ascorbic acid — more than 150 times the recommended daily amount. (She died of the disease in 1981, five years after her diagnosis.) Others say the rift between the men had nothing much to do with those experiments or with Ava Helen’s cancer; rather it arose from administrative disagreements. In any case, in late-summer 1978, Pauling had Robinson removed from his position as the president in Menlo Park.
The man who once felt like Pauling’s surrogate son now found himself orphaned for a second time. He responded to his firing with a $25 million lawsuit that would drag on for another half-decade, while his work on metabolic profiling — the reason he’d quit his job at UCSD and the centerpiece of his plan to save the world — came to a sudden halt. According to Robinson, a thousand cryogenic urine samples drawn from newborn infants, along with 200 magnetic tapes and 15 filing cabinets full of paper records, were summarily tossed out. “We lost everything,” he told me.
***
By the age of 36, Robinson had turned his back on academia and been evicted from the institute he’d helped create. Now he set off into the wilderness with a plan for starting over.
The more he tried to pull away from Pauling, though, the more it seemed their fates were drawn together. It was as if the falling-out had left Robinson with a driving need to be his former mentor’s mirror-opposite — a Pauling anti-particle, flung into a rival orbit. In 1980, Robinson took his family to Oregon — where Pauling had grown up — and built a lab so he could finish up their research on his own. He brought along the sign that had been out in front of his and Pauling’s place on Sand Hill Road: The same letters that once spelled out INSTITUTE OF ORTHOMOLECULAR MEDICINE were now scrambled and affixed (with a few new ones added) to the front wall of his homemade laboratory: OREGON INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE.
Robinson’s politics,2 like his science, also seemed to bloom in Pauling’s shadow. Pauling and Ava Helen had been terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war, and they’d spent a major portion of their later years organizing to abolish nuclear testing. Robinson and his wife (and research partner) Laurelee were also scared of nuclear devastation, but took a different tack: Starting in 1985, they became involved in “civil defense” and the disputed notion that a war with the Soviets would be survivable in shelters. From their ranch in Oregon, they started building these shelters in trailers and selling them to FEMA. They also worked on developing a nuclear-fallout diet and distributed a book on “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” which gave instructions for how to make a radiation meter from an old beer can, among many other patched-together doodads.
And where Pauling had been vocal on the health risks posed by radiation — in 1958, he participated in a famous televised debate on this topic with the theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project pioneer Edward Teller — Robinson spoke out in favor of nuclear energy. He forged his own, more cordial relationship with Teller and became an advocate for the unconventional theory of “radiation hormesis,” which holds that small doses of ionizing radiation are actually a boon for public health.3 It’s not coincidental that half of Robinson’s children have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering: As the years went by, the Robinsons have been exactly as devoted to atomic power as the Paulings were against atomic weapons.
Then there was the Paulings’ influential 1958 petition, signed by 9,000 scientists, calling for an end to nuclear-weapons testing. (This would be the activism for which Pauling won his Nobel Peace Prize.) In 1997, Robinson organized his own petition, applying Pauling’s method to a different cause — that of climate-change skepticism. Robinson sent around his take on atmospheric science with the petition, with a cover letter from the well-known physicist, contrarian and tobacco-industry consultant Frederick Seitz. Eventually this mailing would yield 31,000 signatures, including that of Pauling’s adversary, Edward Teller, and many of the nation’s other leading skeptic scientists. Among these were a set of deregulatory pundits, the so-called “Merchants of Doubt,” who had spoken out for years on behalf of conservative think tanks and big business: Seitz, as well as Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Robinson’s petition would be just as influential, in its way, as Pauling’s work on nuclear testing. Sen. James Inhofe, author of “The Greatest Hoax” and the Capitol’s leading climate-change skeptic, has described the document as “one of the first things [he] looked at” as his doubts developed, and he’s referenced it repeatedly on the floor of Congress, in claiming that the notion of “consensus” on the matter is a fraud.
“I think [the petition] was tremendously important,” another signer, the Princeton physicist and noted climate-change contrarian William Happer, told me recently. “It showed there are lots of highly credentialed scientists who really know a lot about the details of the science and don’t agree with the alarmists.” (In the past few months, Happer, like Robinson, has been short-listed for the job of science adviser to President Trump.)
Those climate skeptics are still in the minority: In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 87 percent said climate change was mostly due to human activity. But Robinson’s work has been instrumental to the others.
“Art Robinson is the reason many of us are in this room,” the Heartland Institute’s Bast told a conference of climate skeptics several years ago, in reference to the 1997 review paper and petition. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here.”
***
The Robinsons served me lunch across the gravel road from their homemade lab and urine freezers, in the home where Robinson still lives with his two unmarried sons, Noah and Matthew. There’s an embroidered sign posted on the wall beside the kitchen: “The more laws, the less justice.” The living room feels somewhat wedged between a large wood stove that heats the house and a full-size church organ, about 15 feet wide with lanky pipes that loom into the rafters where dust bunnies dangle to their metal tips from a skylight.
“This was made in 1878,” Noah told me. He bought the instrument for several thousand dollars from a beautiful stone church in Vermont after he’d come across a listing on eBay. “It’s a little out of tune, but it plays.”
Matthew gave a demonstration, briefly banging out a spell of dirge-like music that reverberated throughout the house. “It’s a nice hobby,” Robinson said when his son had finished playing. The boys have been picking up colossal and unwanted instruments from churches all across the country; by now, they’ve accumulated six or seven, toting them back to Cave Junction in pieces, then assembling them on-site. “Laurelee loved the pipe organ,” he added. “She would have loved to have had a pipe organ.”
The loss of Laurelee was the next of Robinson’s misfortunes, following his falling-out with Pauling. In the fall of 1988, not so many years after Ava Helen succumbed to cancer of the gut, Laurelee started feeling ill. One night she felt a pain inside her abdomen before she went to bed. By sunrise her pancreas, diseased and inflamed, had secreted digestive enzymes onto a nearby artery, boring through its wall. Laurelee bled to death before anyone had any idea of what was happening.
The tragedy left Robinson a hypochondriac. With every minor ache, he worried that he might die and leave his kids as he had been, without a parent. Again, it seemed to him there ought to be a simple diagnostic tool — a quick and easy way for people to obtain a global readout of their health. “My wife was sitting here with a very bad stomachache, and any profiling tool could have immediately diagnosed her, and surgery would have saved her,” he said, referring to the technology that he’d been working on with Pauling and which he’s once again pursuing on the ranch. “I brought Laurelee up here and we built this place,” he said. “I don’t know where she got that disease, but my guess is that if we’d stayed in La Jolla, she’d still be alive. It would have been a different life. So I look at all this, and I know I’m lucky — I’ve got six wonderful young people working here, and they’re all brighter than me so I’m having fun. But she’s dead and the profiling was delayed for many, many years. So if I could do it over again …”
He paused. If he could do it over again, he might have kept his job at UCSD and tried to to do some work on profiling on the side. Or else he might have figured out a way to stave off Pauling’s “self-destruction” and continued with their work in Menlo Park.
That’s not what happened, though. The split from Pauling, and the death of Laurelee, sent Robinson hurtling further out into the fringe, where he found a small but ardent caucus of contrarians: scientists, like him, who had abandoned — or been ejected from — the normie, left-leaning research community and who made common cause in puncturing prevailing views on smoking, DDT, radiation, depletion of the ozone hole and changes to the climate. When his old life fell apart, Robinson had to find a new and different one, and a new and different way of doing science.
***
After lunch — a plate of watermelon slices, with cream of mushroom soup poured over white rice — Robinson told me more about his urine project. It sounded like the end point of his long, peculiar journey as a scientist and the knotty nexus of his life’s loose ends. While much of Robinson’s philosophy and many of his scientific views are informed by his politics, the work on profiling seems to float above all that, buoyed mainly by the goal that he put forth so many years ago when he started work with Pauling: to increase the quality and quantity of human life. But then it’s also anchored in the grief and grievance that cast him out into the wilderness, almost 40 years ago.
We headed back across the gravel road, past the schoolhouse building where Robinson used to sit and do his work, after Laurelee had died, while his kids did theirs with barely any supervision. When it got too cold in there, he put UV lights above the children’s heads to keep them warm. From there we strolled by a dilapidated chicken coop and a truck-sized billboard for one of his congressional campaigns, and then back into the lab with its hippopotamus spectrometer.
Other, more mainstream biochemists have been far too conservative in their attempts to do profiling, he told me, showing off some sample data on a poster, a broad array of spectrographic peaks. Instead of looking at all the different compounds in a sample, and a dataset with thousands of dimensions, they play it safe and study just a handful. “Their papers have one foot in what we’re doing, but they also have one foot in the past,” he said. “I’m sure the field will move, until 50 years from now, it will just be this” — he gestured at his poster — “but the move will be a slow one, because of custom and culture.”
Robinson’s “custom and culture” would seem to be a product of what he sees as the present, fallen age of science, if not of society at large. He likes to talk about the time before “the bureaucracy got control of science,” back when the nation’s “wild cards,” its humble and inventive folks, could still puzzle out their theories over many years of private work. They’d toil in a basement on their own, he said, solving problems for themselves, and then they would appear one day, blinking in the light, to share their big discoveries.
“Progress in science requires freedom to do what you want,” Robinson declared.
Standing there beside him in the hills of Oregon, I was tempted by the epic sweep of this idea. If the government won’t pay to build a giant urine archive, Robinson will build one on his own. Maybe sifting through those drops of pee really will extend our lives, or maybe it won’t. Why not celebrate the fact that someone has the guts to try?
Robinson’s plan isn’t even so far-fetched, at least in principle. Other, more mainstream scientists have pursued the same idea, skimming diagnoses from body fluids using giant reams of spectrographic data. This approach has at times been perilous: In one prominent case from 2002, a team of researchers claimed to have discovered a data pattern in patients’ blood showing whether they had ovarian cancer; that finding, published in The Lancet and cited several thousand times, turned out to be an artifact of statistical noise. Yet many still see promise in this grand approach to data-driven medicine: In April, the life-sciences division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began a major trial along the lines of Robinson’s. “Project Baseline,” which involves both Stanford and Duke universities and is likely to cost more than $100 million, will follow 10,000 people over four years to see what clues about their health might be gleaned from samples of their blood, saliva, tears and feces.
Indeed, several of the contrarian arguments that alt-science types have championed now seem pretty reasonable, and certain beliefs in Robinson’s portfolio have won out, in a sense, even among environmentalists. It’s no longer off the wall, for example, to suggest that DDT should be used in fighting malaria in Africa, or that we might benefit from greater use of nuclear power (which, after all, is carbon free).
But then, how are we to know which refutations of consensus science will end up seeming more or less correct, and which are nothing more than dangerous denialism? Which diversions from the mainstream path might lead us somewhere fruitful, and which are guaranteed dead ends? Can we really trust Art Robinson to help us make these weighty judgments, just because he’s plain-spoken and persuasive?
Or put another way: If science really is a populist phenomenon, then aren’t we at risk from science demagogues? Take Pauling, another master simplifier. In the 1950s, he convinced a lot of people that nuclear testing was a major risk to public health, based on data that Robinson now claims was “entirely incorrect.” And later on Pauling was nearly as persuasive, for a time, on his theory that vitamin C could eradicate all cancers. What if a great scientist’s skill as a communicator leads us into ruin?
“Linus was a very convincing individual,” Robinson admitted. “This is a failing of human nature that people can be driven by the most effective speaker, and that’s something we have to live with.” But if the wrong guy wins a debate or two, he said, that’s OK, because usually, the truth will come out in the end.
“Suppose I’m a charlatan, but a convincing charlatan,” he continued. “Then some people will voluntarily provide money for my work, and that’s perhaps a loss because they were fooled. But that’s not a big loss. When they earn money, it’s their privilege to spend it as they wish. … That’s a different thing than imposing something from above, something that diminishes the freedom of scientists.”
It occurred to me that the movement Robinson helped create often presents itself as free and independent — as embodying pure and populist resistance to a groupthink status quo, imposed by the elites. Yet I’ve also learned from past experience that scientific-skeptic views are often nurtured with specific ends in mind. Scientists who took tobacco money had a stake in saying cigarettes were not so bad. The Heartland Institute takes aim at mainstream climatology, while critics note its links to ExxonMobil and other companies that benefit from fighting regulation.4 All this to say: Alt-science often doubles as a beachhead for self-interest, if not a vehicle for greed.
Robinson’s ties to Heartland connect him to big business, at least indirectly, and it’s possible that the Mercers, or other wealthy donors, are in his ears on certain matters. (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Still, I get the sense that he’s secured a different kind of independence. It’s hard to figure how his plans to study pee would carry water for his funders. Working only with his family, raising money as he does, Robinson seems to have walled off a space in which he can set his own alt-scientist’s agenda. On this sheep ranch in the hills, strewn with scrap metal and iron horseshoes, kitted out with electronics purchased second-hand, taxidermy animals and reconstituted pipe organs, his views do not appear to be controlled by any corporation. His way-out research is his own.
That doesn’t mean he’s free, exactly; only that his constraints come from within. His work is tied into a lifetime’s worth of trauma, and a long-held tendency to flout convention. I don’t mean to flatten out a complicated life into a pair of X-Y axes, but sometimes it does make sense to simplify: Robinson has tried to build a private fortress up in Oregon; he’s tried to break apart the shackles of consensus science; he’s tried to liberate his thinking from the so-called experts’ point of view. But in the end, he’s just as stifled and constrained as all the rest of us, wrapped up in the conflicts of his past.
Daniel Engber writes about science and culture. @danengber
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Wildfires: How they form, and why they're so dangerous.
Everything you need to know about wildfires.
As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.
HOW A WILDFIRE STARTS
Though the exact source of Sonoma County’s wildfires is unclear, authorities have pointed to the fact that 95 percent of fires in the state of California are started by people, according to CNN.
Meteorologists aren’t yet able to forecast wildfire outbreaks, but there are three conditions that must be present in order for a wildfire to burn. Firefighters refer to it as the fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. Four out of five wildfires are started by people, but dry weather, drought, and strong winds can create a recipe for the perfect disaster—which can transform a spark into a weeks- or months-long blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.
Another possible cause of forest fires is lightning. Scientists have found that every degree of global warming sets off a 12 percent bump in lightning activity. Since 1975 the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent.
A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP
Historically, wildfires are actually supposed to be beneficial to certain natural landscapes, clearing underbrush in forests and triggering the release of seeds in some plant species, such as the Jack pine.
Unfortunately, the suppression of naturally occurring, low-intensity forest fires has actually aided in the ability for high-intensity wildfires to run rampant. (Watch a time-lapse of the beauty and danger of wildfires.)
In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from what historian Stephen Pyne calls “pyrophobia,” or the desire to suppress all wildfires (even the good ones). Since the science of forestry first took root in temperate Europe, which is home to a vastly different forest ecosystem than those found in the United States, fire was seen by early U.S. foresters as a problem caused by people.
In some places, the path toward a safer, more ecologically sound relationship with fire is being blazed with prescribed fire, and what’s being called by officials as “managed wildfire.” Fire crews put their efforts to suppress wildfires around the most fire-prone areas, such as communities, municipal watersheds, and sequoia groves. Otherwise they are learning to let some fires burn themselves out, as nature intended.
WILDFIRES CAN HAVE LONG-LASTING IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PLANET
Forest fires actually have the ability to heat up the entire planet, a NASA study from 2016 revealed. In ecosystems such as boreal forests, which store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, the effects of climate change are playing out twice as fast.
Fires ravaged the boreal forests of Canada’s vast north woods in May 2016 and continued for months, consuming millions of acres of trees, and scorching the rich organic soil on the forest floor, which serves as a large reservoir for carbon. For every degree that our planet warms, the forest needs a 15 percent increase in precipitation to compensate for increased dryness. (See how megafires are remaking American forests.)
Similar to the case in Northern California, investigators believe that Canada’s boreal forest fire was caused by humans.
Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 to highlight the dangers of climate change, calling up images of the hundreds of wildfires that burned across the state just that summer. At the time, 2014 had been the warmest year on record, a milestone that has now been surpassed by 2016.
THE EFFECTS OF FIRE ON PEOPLE
Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.
Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart. (Learn wildfire safety tips.)
Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.
HOW FIRE IMPACTS WILDLIFE
Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.
Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.
For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.
A year-old forest will have a different set of flora and fauna inhabiting it than a forest that is 40 years old, and according to wildlife biologist Patricia Kennedy, “a lot of species require that reset,” which comes from a fire.
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Warming oceans may make ‘Nemo’ harder to find.
Heat bleaches sea anemones, too, causing the iconic clownfish to stop laying eggs. Here’s how.
Like coral reefs, sea anemones—with their flashy, tentacle-like polyps that waggle and wave in vibrant reds, greens, pinks, and yellows—provide homes and hiding spots for dozens of fish species, most memorably the orange clownfish made famous in Finding Nemo. Also like coral, rising water temperatures associated with climate change can severely weaken these anemones, causing them to expel the tiny symbionts that keep them alive and lend them color, a process known as bleaching.
That, it turns out, is just where trouble starts.
When anemones bleach, Nemo and pals get stressed out and simply stop laying eggs, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. And scientists suspect that pattern may hold for untold numbers of other fish nurtured by either corals or anemones.
In other words, the mere stress associated with bleaching may be enough by itself to drive down many fish populations.
And, of course, bleaching no longer happens by itself.
Scientists also working with baby clownfish already have shown that shifts in ocean chemistry as the seas absorb excess carbon-dioxide—a process known as ocean acidification—can be unusually deadly. It scrambles juvenile fishes' brains, hampering their ability to see, hear, and smell. All that causes confusion, often leading them to swim toward—rather than away from—predators. The end result: they die far more often.
While few if any longterm studies have yet looked at just how bleaching and acidification may work in concert, scientists say they certainly aren't likely to somehow cancel each other out.
"Both bleaching and acidification are really stressful events separately," says Danielle Dixson, with the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, who spent years researching clownfish and acidification, but wasn't part of the new bleaching study. "I can't imagine that when they both happen it's going to somehow be any less stressful." (Learn how breeding aquarium fish can help reefs.)
THE CRITICAL ROLE OF HORMONES
The most recent research began when an ocean heat wave washed across French Polynesia in 2015 and 2016. A team of scientists tracked 30 different species of anemones in a lagoon off the island of Moorea. That warmth didn't just cripple corals. For more than four months, it attacked and bleached roughly half of those sea anemones. So scientists sampled the fish living among these overheated anemones and compared them with fish living in healthy ones nearby.
The release of hormones is known to affect how everything from sea birds to marine iguanas weather the rapid upheaval associated with climate change. That's true for fish, too.
The team found that the creatures associated with bleached anemones were chronically stressed, showing high levels of cortisol in their blood, says study co-author Suzanne Mills, with the Center for Insular Research and Observatory of the Environment in French Polynesia. Reproductive hormones dropped in both males and females. Fish pairs from bleached anemones spawned less and ultimately produced far fewer viable young.
That could have longterm implications that could ripple through entire marine systems.
"The cascading effects of bleaching at the community and ecosystem levels will, and may have already, played an important role in population impacts," Mills says.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Mills and her co-authors figured out that of 464 coastal fish species in French Polynesia, 56—about 12 percent—depend on species susceptible to bleaching for food or shelter from predators.
"If these species suffer even a fraction of the impact found for anemone fish, then a short-lived bleaching event could decrease the reproductive output of at least 12 percent of species," the study authors wrote. Ecosystem-wide impacts "may be considerable."
Dixson says Mills' findings are "really, really solid." And while they may not be terribly surprising to marine scientists, it should be an eye-opener for the public.
And, of course, that's only one part of the equation.
"Unfortunately, we're never going to have a world where the oceans are acidifying but not warming," Dixson says. "And all of the data suggests that won't be good."
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'Shocking' spike in Hunter Valley's coal-linked air pollution fails to prompt action.
Air pollution from the Hunter Valley coal mines gets so bad for Wendy Wales on occasion that she has called neighbours warning them of a bushfire, mistaking the dust for smoke.
'Shocking' spike in Hunter Valley's coal-linked air pollution fails to prompt action
Peter Hannam
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Air pollution from the Hunter Valley coal mines gets so bad for Wendy Wales on occasion that she has called neighbours warning them of a bushfire, mistaking the dust for smoke.
Wednesday was another day of heavy haze in her region as the high school science teacher drove into the upper Hunter town of Muswellbrook where she lectures.
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The Wambo open cut mine in the Hunter Valley. Photo: Anita Jones
"It looked like the whole place had been blown up like a bomb," Ms Wales said. "It was really shocking."
Pollution monitors in the area earlier picked up readings of 103.4 PM10 – particulates of 10 micrometres or less in diameter – at midnight at Warkworth near some large open-cut coal mines.
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The Hunter Valley has many open cut coal mines that residents say should be more tightly regulated. Photo: Dean Osland
Residents received an air quality alert from the NSW Environment Protection Authority at 5am, warning PM10 levels had exceeded the national air quality standard of 50 PM10 per cubic metre averaged over 24 hours.
According to James Whelan, spokesman for Environmental Justice Australia, the EPA has issued about 190 such alerts in the Hunter this year. Last month's tally of 72 of the most he had seen in the five years he had been tracking the pollution readings.
"September was extraordinary," Mr Whelan said, adding the jump does not appear to have prompted any steps by the EPA to curtail mine production or seek other remedial step. "It wouldn't make any difference if there were no alerts, or there were 100 a month."
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Health impacts
PM10 particulates affects health at any level, with the material absorbed into the blood or lungs. Coal mining is responsible for about 90 per cent.
Coal and Allied's Mount Thorley-Warkworth mine reported emitting 9.2 million kilograms of PM10 in their most recent National Pollution Inventory report, up 12 per cent on the previous year, while nearby Bulga mine emitted more than 5 million kilograms of PM10, up 32 per cent, Lock The Gate said.
Stockton in the Lower Hunter had the worst pollution with its daily average PM10 concentrations exceeding the national standard 36 times so far this year.
Camberwell, Mt Thorley, Singleton NW and Maison Dieu recorded the most exceedances in the Upper Hunter, accounting for 65 of the region's 80 breaches.
Cumulative effects
Fairfax Media asked the EPA whether the September alerts were a monthly record and what steps it had taken to press mines to alter operations.
"The EPA has also required all coal mines to implement best management practice measures to minimise dust emissions via the Dust Stop program," a spokeswoman said.
Mr Whelan said the government's own 2011 commissioned report into best practice stated emissions from material dumping could be minimised by ceasing or modifying activities on dry windy days – weather most of NSW including the Hunter has frequently endured in recent months. Water sprays were another option.
If miners and the EPA had been taking steps, "they were not enough to bring pollution levels down below the [national] standard", he said.
The EJA and Lock the Gate say it is time EPA and NSW's Department of Planning acted on long-overdue recommendations – accepted five years ago – to address and prevent cumulative impacts of open-cut coal mining on air quality.
They say the agencies should tackle the effects of adding more mines when they assess the United Wambo super pit coal and the expansion of the Hunter Valley Operations near Singleton.
"Why is the government still considering more open-cut pits in the worst affected area when they still haven't set basic thresholds to protect people from cumulative health damage?" Georgina Woods, Lock the Gate spokeswoman, said. "There has to be a limit, and we've reached it."
The Department of Planning is currently assessing United Wambo's development application and has commissioned an independent review of its Air Quality Impact Assessment that will include the cumulative mining impacts in the area, a spokesman said.
'Megamine'
Jeremy Buckingham, NSW Greens resources spokesman said the government was failing to account for mining's cumulative impacts from particulate pollution to greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction or water.
"The scale of modern open-cut mining turns the surrounding landscape into an industrial area, which is incompatible with sustainable agriculture and healthy communities," he said.
For Ms Wales, efforts to curb develop further down the valley are likely to bring little benefit to her area near Aberdeen where the nearby Mount Pleasant mine is rapidly expanding.
"It's just opening up – it's going gangbusters," she said. "It's a megamine."
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Should we be having fewer children for the sake of the planet?
Supporters’ contributions to our podcast on population and climate change show exactly why we need to talk about this issue.
Supporters’ contributions to our podcast on population and climate change show exactly why we need to talk about this issue
Listen to the podcast here
Many readers ask why childless lifestyles are not more actively promoted by politicians and celebrated in societies.
Many readers ask why childless lifestyles are not more actively promoted by politicians and celebrated in societies. Photograph: Sergei Fadeichev/TASS
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Vicky Frost and Guardian supporters
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Saturday 7 October 2017 07.41 EDT Last modified on Saturday 7 October 2017 08.08 EDT
Last month, on these pages, I asked if you might get in touch with your questions and thoughts on population and climate change. You did – in some numbers. These generous contributions form the heart of the latest edition of We Need to Talk About …, our podcast featuring supporters’ voices, in which your concerns are addressed by a panel of Guardian journalists and experts.
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As a starting point, we used a Guardian article with an arresting headline: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children. In the podcast, we hear from one of the academics who produced the research which this article refers to, but equally interesting were your responses to this issue, and the discussions they prompted in our studio.
That’s why we’ve decided to publish some of them here. While we aim to hear from lots of voices and include differing points of view on the podcast, a lack of time means we sometimes have to cut people short, or use one person to represent the views of several who have contacted us making similar points. Here, we can give members a bit more space to air their views.
You can listen to the panel respond to them – our line-up is Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor; Lucy Lamble, the Guardian’s executive editor for global development, who often writes on and takes part in debates on global inequality; John Vidal, the multi-award winning former Guardian environment editor and Afua Hirsch, a writer and broadcaster for the Guardian and SkyNews among others, who has also worked in international development and the law.
But first gain a flavour of the concerns of your fellow readers below. Many of these questions appear in the podcast, while others influenced the direction in which we headed.
Poor allocation of resources is the problem – Kevin, Canada
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The issue isn’t overpopulation – it’s poor resource allocation. We do not live in a world of lack, but of extreme waste and inefficiency. This is true of food, energy, land use and the financial system. The overpopulation argument is a way to once again deflect from real societal change that is needed, and instead focuses the discussion on families, usually poor families, having too many children.
While it is likely that the Earth does have some sort of maximum carrying capacity, even that is not guaranteed with recent technological advancements such as vertical farming. The question is whether those technological advancements will be put to use to raise the standard of living for every human being on the planet, or are put towards continuing to line the pockets of the wealthiest individuals and their investors.
We consume without asking where these things come from – Cristina, Brazil
To my mind, it is not the countries in Africa, or groups with a more traditional and much simpler way of life – such as Native people in North and South America, for instance – that have caused so many environmental problems, but the irrationality and consumerism of our western society. It is the fact that we consume without truly asking ourselves where all these goods come from, how they were produced, what the environmental impact is of producting all these mostly useless things. Unless we seriously address these questions, I cannot see any significant change or serious solution to climate change.
A convenient way to blame others – Marc, France
I‘ve often noticed that some westerners, who have no agenda at all on any environmental question, are keen to invoke “overpopulation” as the main and only threat to survival on Earth. Is overpopulation just a convenient way for westerners to put the blame on Africans for the environmental threats we face?
Entitlement to reproduce - Clare, UK
How can those with the largest carbon footprint be encouraged not to reproduce, when they are ones who make the greatest impact and have the greatest sense of entitlement?
Access to contraception faces a barrier: the church – Angela, UK
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Pope Francis recently condemned climate change sceptics. He is passionate about protecting the planet and has called on everyone to care for creation, particularly as climate change disproportionately impacts the poor.
The Catholic church runs 25% of health and education systems worldwide and therefore, through its direct teaching and management, significantly reduces safe access to contraception for millions of women. No debate on controlling population growth and subsequent pollution can therefore exist without tackling this institutional barrier to action. Last year over 170 theologians issued a statement saying there was no reason for the Catholic church’s position against “artificial” contraception.
How does the panel feel the church can continue to do great work on this issue, yet continue to block safe access to contraception for some of the world’s poorest women?
Women are being denied choice about pregnancy – Sally, Hong Kong
I am a gynaecologist working in Hong Kong, occasionally counselling women considering having another child. If someone is ambivalent about doing so, I add into the decision-making the idea that having more children impacts climate change.
Since I was a teenager in the 1970s, I have believed it is a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. Working as a volunteer in an African country where abortion is illegal, I have seen women saved from death after trying to procure an abortion themselves. They were lucky – the hospital was nearby, there were good doctors, antibiotics, surgery, and blood transfusion.
2017: the year we lost control of world population surge?
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In African countries where abortion is often illegal, an unmet need for contraception is also common. I applied for a volunteer job in northern Uganda where women having five to six children is the norm; when asked, they say they would have preferred three or four .
Donald Trump’s global gag rule which removes US aid from any NGO providing contraceptive advice, is a huge problem. Not only because maternal mortality due to abortion deaths will rise in Africa, but also because the UNFPA [UN population fund] will stop training midwives, and the resulting reduction in maternal mortality will diminish. In addition, there will be greater unmet need for contraception.
With good information couples will do the right thing – Dave, US
Do you think our society can reach the point where choosing to have fewer children as an essential carbon-cutting strategy is as widely understood as conserving energy?
As a parent I would take a bullet for either of my two children. I’m certain almost all parents would do just about anything to ensure their kids have a decent life. Knowing this, I cannot help but feel that if young couples around the world have good information they will do the right thing. If they understand the ramifications of their family-size decisions on the quality of life – chance of survival even – of their children, then they will make the most loving, compassionate decision possible: to conceive no more than one child.
We are failing to get the family-size issue across – Alison, UK
I joined Population Matters, an organisation that promotes smaller family size and reduced consumption, to find like-minded people and put my energies into a worthwhile organisation. I appreciate the impact we are having on the environment, and am mindful of that. However, I have found people around me such as family, friends and colleagues are largely not interested, or suggest they should have the freedom to do as they please.
How do we start making a difference? Also we seem to have failed with high-profile individuals, royals and celebrities in particular. So what happens now?
What will persuade people? Money? – Gwyneth, UK
We have to reduce the population, hopefully not by severe climate change, war or disease. China’s one-child solution would not be accepted by most people. What do experts suggest? It seems money has the only power over most people. Should we pay people not to have children?
Politicians don’t talk about this – Mike, UK
How do we get politicians to talk seriously about the links between population and climate change? The last three elections in the UK have barely mentioned the environment. Is there an agreement between the political parties to avoid this discussion?
Childless lifestyles need promoting – Michelle, UK
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I like children, but have never felt that I would like to have my own.
I am very regularly treated as odd for this decision, and feel that if we don’t open up the discussion about not having children, people will never consider this decision thoroughly, whether for the environment or other reasons.
In the past three years, I have made a number of lifestyle changes in order to reduce my carbon footprint – which has only further cemented my feeling that I don’t want children. I often feel like I need to keep having what can be sometimes difficult conversations with people about this choice, so as to build conversation momentum around the subject. Alternative lifestyles need to be promoted. I would like to focus on supporting and improving the lives of people already on the planet.
Can we ditch our pro-reproduction stance? – Tet-Wo, New Zealand
I have made the decision to be childfree, largely due to environmental reasons. As a childfree person, I am constantly surprised how this decision is commonly questioned by others as being a poor or “selfish” choice when the evidence suggests that it is anything but.
Given the evidence that having fewer children isthe greatest decision one can make to combat climate change, do the panel think that society can switch from having a pro-reproduction stance, where policies promote reproduction and society views having children as the “correct” choice, to a neutral stance, where having children is considered optional and policies are made to promote other means of having a fulfilled life?
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Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment leveled at noted scientist.
Years ago, two women allege, their team leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica. Now they are taking action.
A COLD CASE Years ago, two women allege, their team
leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica.
Now they are taking action
In 1999 at Pivot Peak in Antarctica, Jane Willenbring (right) was the only woman on a four-person team including David Marchant (center) and his brother (left).
ADAM LEWIS
Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at noted scientist
By Meredith WadmanOct. 6, 2017 , 12:45 PM
Editor’s note: This article includes crude language and disturbing details.
Boston University (BU) is investigating sexual harassment complaints made against a prominent Antarctic geologist by two of his former graduate students. The women allege that David Marchant, then an assistant professor, harassed them during different research expeditions starting 2 decades ago, while they were isolated in small groups in the Antarctic. In supporting documents and interviews, several other women report similar treatment from Marchant in that period.
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.
The second complainant, Deborah Doe (a pseudonym), who was in Antarctica for two austral summers during this era, reports that Marchant called her a “c--t” and a “bitch” repeatedly. She alleges that he promised to block her access to research funding should she earn a Ph.D. She abandoned her career dreams and left academe.
A third woman, Hillary Tulley, a Skokie, Illinois, high school teacher, describes her experience in a supporting letter filed with BU investigators. “His taunts, degrading comments about my body, brain, and general inadequacies never ended,” she writes. She claims Marchant tried to exhaust her into leaving Antarctica. “Every day was terrifying,” she says in an interview with Science.
Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.
“This is one of the only real regrets I have in my whole life,” says Adam Lewis, who as a graduate student was in Antarctica with Willenbring and Tulley. “I had the chance to stand up for people. And I didn’t.”
David Marchant has led dozens of field expeditions to Antarctica’s Dry Valleys.
COURTESY NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Science is unaware of any additional formal complaints from more recent students. Marchant supervised two women who earned Ph.D.s in 2009 and 2016. Both women, contacted repeatedly by Science, declined to comment on their experiences with him.
Marchant, 55, now a department chair at BU, declined by email to be interviewed or to provide his written rebuttal to Willenbring’s complaint. Other documents related to the investigation suggest that he denies the allegations. He was scheduled to be honored as a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) at the society’s meeting in Seattle, Washington, this month, but last week his name was removed from the GSA website listing of new fellows.
Some other women who have worked with Marchant at BU and in the field stoutly defend his character. Emily Jacesko, who as a 21-year-old undergraduate worked with Marchant and others in Antarctica in 2002, says she never witnessed or experienced sexual harassment from him. “I … sincere[ly] support … him as an upstanding and professional individual,” says Jacesko, a senior staff geologist at a consulting firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. She has filed a letter of support for Marchant with BU.
The allegations come at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in science. Scientists are also becoming more attuned to the potential dangers women face in isolated field camps, where they may depend on senior men for food, water, and shelter. In one online survey published in PLOS ONE and covered by Science in 2014, 71% of 512 female respondents reported being sexually harassed during fieldwork; 84% of them were trainees.
He said, ‘I noticed someone hasn’t cried today.’
Jane Willenbring, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The allegations against Marchant raise the question of whether women can successfully press complaints many years after allegedly abusive incidents. “I have seen claims up to 4 years after the last incident had happened. But I haven’t seen anything with quite that amount of time,” says Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an attorney with Hopkins Way in Phoenix who specializes in gender discrimination.
Tracy-Ramirez, who read Willenbring’s complaint at Science’s request, says the case likely “will be a fairly important part of a larger conversation schools are having about ‘What are we required to do?’ and ‘What is the right thing to do?’”
Two portraits of a man
Those who know Marchant describe him as often charming and charismatic, a very good scientist, and an excellent teacher. He made his name documenting landscape evolution in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, and he is known as an experienced field geologist, making more than 30 research trips to the frigid continent.
Jennifer Berglund, 33, a science communicator based in Somerville, Massachusetts, who was a field assistant for Marchant in 2012, recalls her first, windy night in Antarctica, when she and her tentmate had set up their tent with only small rocks holding down the guy lines. “In the middle of the night, we heard some rustling around outside of the tent. It was Dave lugging and placing giant boulders atop our small, scrawny ones, and tightening the guy lines.”
Marchant also made his mark on the BU campus, winning two teaching awards including, in 2004, one of the university’s highest teaching prizes. In 2014 he was named a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); his $1 million, 5-year award is part of a program to improve science teaching. Marchant was “an excellent professor,” says Rachel Watsky, now a law student at BU. She took a class with Marchant, who was also her undergraduate academic adviser, and she worked for him as a lab assistant on campus in 2011–12. She told Science he was a “great boss … eager for my input.”
Jane Willenbring (in Antarctica in 2008) switched her Ph.D. thesis research to the Arctic after working with Marchant.
ADAM LEWIS
The allegations against Marchant in the complaints and supporting documents paint a different picture, and read like a riveting survival novel unfurling in unforgiving, isolated terrain. In her complaint, Willenbring, now 40, describes her first Antarctic field season as a master’s student starting in December 1999, when she was 22.
Marchant, Willenbring, Lewis (then a graduate student at the University of Maine, Orono), and Marchant’s brother Jeffrey, who was working as an assistant, lived and worked in the arid, boulder-strewn Beacon Valley and in the shadow of 2470-meter Pivot Peak. They slept in unheated tents in temperatures as low as –40°C, walked long distances in rugged terrain, and dug deep holes to find ancient ice and volcanic ash. Dropped by helicopter with supplies, for weeks the four had only radio contact with the main base at McMurdo Station.
Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.
One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.
“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.
As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.
In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.
Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.
Lewis had also been in Antarctica with Marchant the previous season, when Tulley was there with a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic. Tulley writes in a letter supporting Willenbring’s complaint that she had not yet cleared the rotors of the helicopter that dropped them at their field site when “I was aggressively grabbed by Marchant and wheeled around, while he yelled and called me a ‘dumbass, lazy c--t … who did not know that we had to set up camp immediately.”
She alleges in her letter that Marchant failed to teach her or include her, the only woman present, in the research. “Talk during [group] meals … always included relentless, snickering mentions of my advanced age (I was 43), my small breasts, and other failings, always initiated by Marchant. All my attempts to steer the conversation to science were shut down.”
The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.
Jacquelyn Hams, Los Angeles Valley College
Lewis’s letter supports much of Tulley’s account. He writes that Marchant repeatedly said to the other men that an older woman in the field “will slow us down.” He adds in his letter: “On multiple occasions while walking without Tulley, Marchant made grotesque sexual comments about her body.” At other times, Lewis writes, Marchant “clearly stated that he did not believe women should be field geologists.”
Andrew Lorrey, then a student at the University of Maine, Orono, was also in the field that season and was interviewed by BU investigators last year. Contacted by Science, Lorrey says he also remembers Marchant’s mealtime disparagement of Tulley and her body. Marchant’s relationship with Tulley was “not positive,” says Lorrey, now a climate scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Auckland, New Zealand. However, he says: “I did not necessarily attribute [this] to her being a woman as much as … an outsider.”
Doe, a third woman, alleges that she was harassed by Marchant in field seasons in the late 1990s, in a supporting letter for Willenbring that she later converted into a formal complaint on her own behalf. (She authenticated this letter in an email to Science, and requested anonymity.)
When she was a student at BU, she writes, Marchant told her “less than two weeks into my graduate career, that I was lazy, less than intelligent, and incapable of meeting even the basest expectations.” She adds in the letter that, “My every action or social interaction was scrutinized and remarked upon, usually with a belittling comment, followed by … that blinding smile that he deployed to make it seem as if he hadn’t just cut you to the core. … I began to believe the things he told me.”
Once in Antarctica, the abuse escalated, Doe writes. “He repeatedly called me a ‘c--t,’ among many other insults … (bitch being the most common) that were invoked on a daily basis or more. … He would crow that he could say absolutely anything he wanted to because we were ‘in his domain.’”
Marchant told her that if she completed her Ph.D., he and another scientist would ensure she never got NSF funding, Doe alleges. (NSF is the major source of funding for Antarctic field research.)
“I distinctly remember standing there, aghast, in my red down jacket and black wind pants, watching my career and life plans dissolve as Dr. Marchant smiled triumphantly at me,” she writes.
Four women who all worked in the Antarctic with Marchant at different times report him saying close variations of the same words: “I’m going to break you down and build you up in my image.”
Keeping quiet
Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”
Simpson, who has since retired, wrote in an email that she could not comment on the ongoing investigation. She wrote that she would have “dealt quickly and decisively” with allegations “approaching the seriousness indicated” in Doe’s letter.
Doe writes that “it took years, literally, to overcome the damage to my self-worth. I slowly … rebuilt a career grounded in scientific inquiry” outside academe. She writes in her complaint: “For [many] years I have carried the weight of knowing” that she stayed quiet “rather than speaking up and saving those who would follow me from the torment and anguish I had experienced.”
Tulley writes that she contacted one of the directors of NSF’s polar program for teachers upon her return, and was promised “a private, confidential meeting with an administrator.” The meeting did not materialize, and she did not pursue her complaint, she tells Science, because Marchant’s alleged treatment had “knocked me for a loop psychologically.…I wimped out.” When she spoke to other teachers on NSF’s behalf, she relayed only the positive aspects of her experience.
Back at BU, Willenbring, too, did not speak up. She writes in her complaint that, “I believe that I would not be where I am today if I had said something” at the time.
In 2002, as Willenbring finished her master’s degree with Marchant, another professor asked her to write a letter of evaluation for Marchant’s tenure and promotion file. She alleges that Marchant threatened to ruin her career if she did not write a positive letter. She wrote one. “I kept it to the science because he is a very good scientist,” she tells Science.
To avoid Marchant, Willenbring switched her Ph.D. research to the Arctic and moved to another university. She promised herself that when she got tenure, she would speak out.
Speaking out
In July 2016, Scripps hired Willenbring as a tenured associate professor. She filed a Title IX complaint with BU in October 2016. Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex at universities that receive federal funding. Institutions can lose federal funds if they do not comply with the law. (Willenbring also filed complaints with NSF and NASA, which fund Marchant’s research, in December 2016. However, Title IX complaints against individuals are typically handled first by the institutions where the alleged harassment occurred.) Schools are unlikely to dismiss a years-old complaint out of hand, says Tracy-Ramirez, the Title IX lawyer, “but rather to ask ‘Did a hostile environment occur at that time?’ and ‘Is there reason to suspect there is a hostile environment happening now?’”
BU’s Equal Opportunity Office has interviewed numerous people, elicited a 200-page rebuttal from Marchant, and received at least four letters in his support plus at least five letters supporting Willenbring. It has also begun investigating Doe’s complaint, which was filed 7 months later, in May. BU told Willenbring last month that it expects to finish its report soon. The university declined to discuss the investigation with Science, citing privacy concerns.
Willenbring had also sent her complaint to GSA in December, because Marchant edits a GSA publication. The society declined to comment, or to say why Marchant’s name was removed as a GSA fellow.
Marchant, contacted repeatedly by Science, wrote in an email: “Boston University’s investigation into these allegations is ongoing. I have cooperated fully in that investigation. I do not wish to compromise the integrity of that investigation by making any comments before the investigation has been completed.”
Marchant’s defenders tell Science they do not recognize the man described in the complaints. “I find the allegations against Dave of physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment beyond comprehension given my field experiences with him in Antarctica as a female” in 2008 and 2012, Jacquelyn Hams, chairperson of the earth science department at Los Angeles Valley College in California, wrote in an email. “The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.”
Others praised his character. Marchant is “a person completely absent the stain of misogyny or unchecked anger,” wrote Berglund, who in addition to working with Marchant in Antarctica, administers the HHMI-supported BU science education program that he leads. Shivani Ehrenfeucht, 26, a second-year Ph.D. student in Marchant’s lab who has not been to Antarctica, says she was “completely shocked” by the allegations. “Nothing that I have heard lines up with the man that I know.” She calls Marchant “kind and genuine.”
Some scientists note that extreme isolation and the absence of institutional support at remote camps create conditions where abuse can flourish. “On campus, I can go speak to a trusted faculty member, the department chair, the ombudsperson,” says Meredith Hastings, an atmospheric chemist at Brown University and co-principal investigator on a $1.1 million NSF grant aimed at curbing sexual harassment in the geosciences. “Who do you go talk to when you are in the field?”
Lewis, who earned his Ph.D. with Marchant, noted in his letter: “In the office and classroom setting, Marchant’s behavior toward women was much less outrageous … he was careful and measured in his tone when others were present.” He adds that he never again saw from Marchant “the extreme behavior” of those early seasons, and says Marchant’s “attitude shifted to simply being distrustful” of women.
What is an institution’s responsibility when confronted with decades-old sexual harassment complaints? “The evidence is that the people who perpetrate this kind of behavior, it’s a pattern,” Hastings says.
Billie Dziech, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and an expert on sexual harassment on college campuses, argues that even if an abuser has changed over time, they are not absolved of responsibility for acts committed decades ago. “I have a moral responsibility to the young people I teach,” she says. “I don’t care if I did damage 10, 20 years ago: What I do today and what I did yesterday matters.”
In concluding her complaint against Marchant, Willenbring writes that her goal is to prevent “another young, female student bearing the brunt of his misogyny.” She added, in an interview with Science: “I just don’t want it to happen again.”
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Hurricane damage in Puerto Rico leads to fears of drug shortages nationwide.
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, manufacturers are rushing to get their plants on the island back on line to avoid production problems.
Hurricane Damage in Puerto Rico Leads to Fears of Drug Shortages Nationwide
By KATIE THOMAS and SHEILA KAPLANOCT. 4, 2017
A factory owned by the pharmaceutical company Mylan, which makes the childhood leukemia drug methotrexate, in Caguas, P.R., is one of 80 drug manufacturing plants struggling to stave off shortages of critical medicines in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Federal officials and major drugmakers are scrambling to prevent national shortages of critical drugs for treating cancer, diabetes and heart disease, as well as medical devices and supplies, that are manufactured at 80 plants in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
Pharmaceuticals and medical devices are the island’s leading exports, and Puerto Rico has become one of the world’s biggest centers for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Its factories make 13 of the world’s top-selling brand-name drugs, from Humira, the rheumatoid arthritis treatment, to Xarelto, a blood thinner used to prevent stroke, according to a report released last year.
With business of nearly $15 billion a year at stake in Puerto Rico, drug companies and device makers are confronting a range of obstacles on the island: locating enough diesel fuel for generators to run their factories; helping their employees get to work from areas where roads are damaged and blocked, electricity is down and phones don’t work. Companies have taken out radio ads pleading with workers to check in. The pharmaceutical and device industries contribute to the employment of nearly 100,000 people on the island, according to trade groups.
“Some of these products are critical to Americans,” Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told a congressional panel this week. “A loss of access could have significant public health consequences.”
Dr. Gottlieb, who visited F.D.A. staff in Puerto Rico last week, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on Health: “We have a list of about 40 drugs that we’re very concerned about. It reflects maybe about 10 firms.”
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Thirteen of the drugs, Dr. Gottlieb said, are “sole-source,” meaning the product is made only by one company. Those include H.I.V. medications, injectable drugs and sophisticated medical devices, although he did not name the products. The biggest problem, he said, was not damage to the factories, but the instability of the electric supply. Manufacturers are worried that a long-term lack of connection to a major power grid could jeopardize their products, and are also wary of relying on the more limited electrical grids that the territory is likely to activate as a first step to restoring power.
One of the drugs F.D.A. officials said they were concerned about was methotrexate, which treats childhood leukemia and other diseases. It has been scarce, off and on, for several years. Mylan makes the product in Puerto Rico, and all five manufacturers of the injectable form of the drug have reported shortages of the product, according to a list maintained by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
In a statement, Mylan did not address the methotrexate shortage but said it was “working closely with F.D.A. to help address drug shortage concerns.” Its plant has sources of water, electricity and communication, and the company said it is “working on ways to make them sustainable for manufacturing purposes.” Like other companies, it said it was focusing on helping employees and other residents of the island with basic needs, including chartering a cargo plane carrying essential goods to deliver to them.
Several pharmaceutical and medical device companies said that their factories were coming back on line with the assistance of generators and that they did not anticipate supply shortfalls. But others said the situation was precarious. Drug companies depend on consistent refrigeration to avoid shortages. And device makers are wondering when the power grid would be back up, which some officials have predicted could take months.
“Everybody is struggling to get diesel fuel — that’s just widespread,” said Antonio Medina, an independent consultant who until last year was executive director of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, a government-run group that promotes manufacturing.
Wilberto Maldonado, a pharmaceutical consultant in Puerto Rico, said drug and device makers were navigating a logistical “nightmare,” especially when trying to get access to fuel for their generators.
With phone lines down, “many employers have people still unaccounted for,” Mr. Maldonado said in a message through LinkedIn. “This may not improve, as telecom service providers are also depending on backup generators.”
Industry officials have sought to strike a delicate balance in making their case for help without appearing to divert precious resources from hospital and other emergency services. Returning the drug and device industry to its feet, however, is crucial for ensuring the island’s economic recovery as well as safeguarding the supply of medicines and devices to the rest of the United States.
If the manufacturing plants are slow to fully recover, some companies could shift their production elsewhere, said Deepak Lamba-Nieves, research director at the Center for a New Economy, a nonpartisan economic think tank in Puerto Rico. “That may have medium and long-term consequences for an island that is going to be hugely and severely impacted by this hurricane for many years to come,” he said.
Lobbyists and executives from health care companies met Tuesday with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make their pitch for assistance.
Photo
Fallen wires hung just outside the Mylan facility on Wednesday. Challenges to getting the drug manufacturers up and running again include locating diesel fuel to power their generators and helping their employees get to work in areas where roads are blocked, electricity is down and phones don’t work. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
AdvaMed, the trade group for the device makers, said its requests included priority access as the electricity grid is restored.
“Even if companies are fine now with diesel fuel, we want to make sure we’re in the queue in terms of priority,” said Greg Crist, a spokesman for AdvaMed. “Because if there is an electricity shortage well into November, for example, how can we as an industry make sure we are in line for those priorities, once you’ve taken care of hospitals and essential needs?”
While AdvaMed has outlined its members’ challenges, its pharmaceutical counterpart — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — provided fewer specifics and referred questions to Healthcare Ready, an industry group that is coordinating the recovery operations in Puerto Rico.
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Several drug companies said that while their plants lost power and were forced to shut down, they were not anticipating a disruption in supply. “We have a strong local team working through incredible logistical challenges, and we’re seeing progress each day,” said Ernie Knewitz, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson. Tylenol and Prezista, an H.I.V. drug, are among the products that the company manufactures in Puerto Rico. “We are also closely monitoring our product inventory levels and will work to ensure all critical needs are met.”
The industry’s rosy outlook, presumably offered in part to assure nervous shareholders, contrasted with the concern expressed by Dr. Gottlieb.
“We know that the grid is going to be unstable for a long period of time,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “The generators were never meant to operate for months and months on end.”
Erin Fox, a drug shortage expert at the University of Utah, said she and other hospital pharmacists were monitoring the situation, and were worried that the storm’s impact could exacerbate the United States’ already dire drug-shortage problem.
Ms. Fox said companies typically do not disclose where they manufacture their drugs because it is considered a trade secret. Several companies declined to list which products they made in Puerto Rico.
“Because we have no transparency around that,” she said, “it’s actually hard to know the true impact of this.”
Baxter, a medical-supply company, has said that it is limiting shipments of products made in Puerto Rico to conserve its supply, including small bags of dextrose and saline, which are used by hospitals to prepare medication. Hospitals will be limited to their typical monthly shipment to prevent some institutions from stockpiling the products.
Ms. Fox said hospitals rely on these small bags of saline solution to mix medicines for patients, and “an allocation doesn’t guarantee that you will get some.”
A few years ago, Baxter was at the center of a shortage of large saline bags that led to state and federal investigations into its business practices.
Baxter said that its three manufacturing sites in Puerto Rico sustained “some damage,” and that “limited production activities” had resumed at all of its plants.
Puerto Rico has been a hub of drug manufacturing for decades — companies were lured to the island because of tax breaks and its access to the United States market, along with skilled employees who worked for lower wages. About a decade ago, expiring tax incentives led to a wave of factory closings, stoking fears that the industry was in jeopardy.
Today, the drug and device industries remain a mainstay of the Puerto Rican economy. Pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing accounted for nearly three-quarters of Puerto Rico’s exports in 2016, of $14.5 billion, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“These are some of the best jobs,” Mr. Medina said.
Dr. Gottlieb hopes the companies stay there.
“A highly skilled, highly dedicated and highly productive Puerto Rican work force enables the success of the industry,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “If they decide to relocate after this disaster, it would jeopardize the island’s economic future.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Drug Shortages Are New Concern In Wake of Storm. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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RECENT COMMENTS
Steve 4 hours ago
Its plant (Mylan) has sources of water, electricity and communication, and the company said it is “working on ways to make them sustainable...
Kittredge White 4 hours ago
How generous, how sweet! It's really funny how no one gave a hoot about PR until corporate bottom lines were at risk...
Mountain Dragonfly 4 hours ago
Great time to put some money into getting these operations back up and running. Would be a political win as it would provide JOBS!!!! and...
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