To understand why atrazine remains on the U.S. market today — and why the lawsuits against Syngenta look so similar to the lawsuits against Monsanto over Roundup — you have to understand a piece of history that the chemical industry would prefer you forget. It is the story of Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, known as IBT.

The Largest Scientific Fraud of Its Kind

Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories was an American product-safety testing laboratory headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois. At its peak during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, IBT operated the largest commercial toxicology testing facility in the world. The lab conducted approximately one-third of all toxicology testing in the United States and performed roughly 22,000 studies for chemical companies seeking to register their products with U.S. regulators.

IBT was unprecedented scientific fraud designed to fool regulators at EPA & FDA. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency began auditing IBT studies in the late 1970s, what they found was staggering. The FDA invalidated 618 of 867 IBT studies it audited — about 71 percent — for what regulators described as “numerous discrepancies between the study conduct and data.” EPA later estimated that approximately 80 percent of the data IBT had submitted to support chemical registrations was nonexistent, fraudulent, or invalid. Of the roughly 483 pesticides registered based at least in part on IBT data, 99 percent of the long-term studies — the studies designed to detect cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm — were determined to be invalid. FDA officials described the IBT case as “the most massive scientific fraud ever committed in the United States, and perhaps the world.”

Investigators documented practices that ranged from sloppy to criminal. Rats listed as dead in study records were also listed as having been mated at the same time. Animals were recorded as dying twice. Autopsy records existed for test animals that were still alive. Tumors and other adverse findings were systematically under-reported. Internal memos showed that IBT toxicologists themselves were embarrassed by the work; one wrote that he was “ashamed” to put his name to it. In 1981, IBT's president and three top officials were indicted by a federal grand jury, and in 1983 they were convicted of conducting and distributing fraudulent scientific research.

Atrazine and Roundup Were Both Registered Based on IBT Data

Atrazine and Roundup share more than just the IARC “probably carcinogenic” classification — they share an origin story. Both products were among the chemicals that IBT “tested” and declared safe before the fraud was exposed.

Ciba-Geigy — the predecessor company to Syngenta — was one of IBT's clients. IBT conducted toxicology studies on atrazine, including the chronic-toxicity and oncogenicity (cancer) studies that were used to support EPA registration of the herbicide. EPA toxicology branch memoranda from the early 1980s specifically reference the agency's attempts to validate “Atrazine Mouse Oncogenicity and Rat Chronic Oral Toxicity” studies that IBT had performed. Monsanto, similarly, used IBT to conduct toxicology studies on the original Roundup herbicide, and Monsanto's use of IBT became one of the most heavily litigated and documented aspects of the IBT scandal. Both companies' flagship herbicides reached the American market on the strength of testing performed by a laboratory that was later proven to be a criminal enterprise.

What EPA Did About It

Faced with the prospect of pulling registrations for hundreds of pesticides that had been registered on fraudulent data — including atrazine and Roundup — EPA did not order them off the market. Instead, senior EPA officials and chemical industry executives met to figure out how to manage the problem.

Congress later amended pesticide law to allow registrations based on IBT data to continue indefinitely as “conditional registrations” while manufacturers “replaced” the deficient tests.

And more than eight years after EPA discovered the IBT fraud, the agency continued to allow atrazine sales while the manufacturer repeatedly failed to replace IBT's fraudulent tests. Roundup remained on the market on the same basis. Both toxic products are still sold in the United States today.

Why This Matters Now

The IBT scandal is not ancient history — it is the foundation that the U.S. regulatory record for atrazine was built on. When Syngenta and its defenders point to the fact that atrazine has been “approved by EPA for decades,” what they do not tell you is that the studies underlying that approval came from a laboratory whose president went to federal prison for scientific fraud.

The parallels between Syngenta's conduct with atrazine and Monsanto's conduct with Roundup do not end there. In both cases, the company:

•        Used IBT to generate the toxicology data that supported initial EPA registration.

•        Continued to sell the product after the IBT fraud was exposed.

•        Funded its own follow-on safety studies and worked to influence regulators rather than allow independent scrutiny.

•        Launched aggressive campaigns to discredit independent scientists who raised concerns — in Syngenta's case, hiring detective agencies to investigate researchers, commissioning psychological profiles of critics, and paying academics to produce favorable studies without disclosure of their financial ties.

•        Continues to sell the product to American consumers while it is banned or restricted in dozens of other countries.

Our experienced pesticide attorneys will fight for not just transparency, but accountability.

Get Started: Free Atrazine Lawsuit Case Review

If you or a loved one was exposed to atrazine and diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Parkinson's disease, or parkinsonian symptoms, contact Wagstaff Law Firm today. Our pesticide exposure attorneys are reviewing cases nationwide on a contingency-fee basis. There is no cost to you unless we win.

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