For readers local to Minnesota, the company name Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, better known as 3M, is a storied name and the local corporate research powerhouse. But it appears that it, too, has supped at the forbidden soup-bowl of profits-above-all in regards to the recent legal settlement regarding water pollution. Carrie Fellner reports in The Age:
As a leading international authority on toxic chemicals, Professor John P. Giesy is in the top percentile of active authors in the world.
His resume is littered with accolades, from being named in the Who’s Who of the World to receiving the Einstein Professor Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Professor Giesy was credited with being the first scientist to discover toxic per- and poly-fluoroalkyl [PFAS] chemicals in the environment, and with helping to persuade chemical giant 3M Company to abandon their manufacture.
But Fairfax Media can now reveal that Professor Giesy was accused of covertly doing 3M’s bidding in a widespread international campaign to suppress academic research on the dangers of PFAS.
A trove of internal company documents has been made public for the first time following a $US850 million ($1.15 billion) legal settlement between the company and Minnesota Attorney-General Lori Swanson. They suggest that Professor Giesy was one weapon in an arsenal of tactics used by the company to – in a phrase coined by 3M – “command the science” on the chemicals.
It’s a disappointment and a shame on 3M to engage in a form of doublespeak that obscures the company’s responsibility in the manner. And what of Professor Giesy?
To the outside world, Professor Giesy was a renowned and independent university academic.
“But privately, he characterised himself as part of the 3M team,” alleged the State of Minnesota.
“Despite spending most of his career as a professor at public universities, Professor Giesy has a net worth of approximately $20 million. This massive wealth results at least in part from his long-term involvement with 3M for the purpose of suppressing independent scientific research on PFAS.”
Professor Giesy’s consulting company appears to have received payments from 3M between at least 1998 and 2009. One document indicated his going rate was about $US275 an hour.
In an email to a 3M laboratory manager, Professor Giesy described his role as trying to keep “bad papers out of the literature”, because in “litigation situations they can be a large obstacle to refute”.
Professor Giesy was an editor of several academic journals and, in any given year, about half of the papers submitted on PFAS came to him for review.
“Some journals … for conflict-of-interest issues will not allow an industry to review a paper about one of their products. That is where I came in,” he wrote in another email.
“In time sheets, I always listed these reviews as literature searches so that there was no paper trail to 3M.”
If true, I would be very careful about trusting Professor Giesy.
