Sunday, February 6, 2005 at 2:00 pm at Chisago Lake Lutheran Church in Center City, Minnesota   Map

University of California Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes to Speak
“From Silent Spring to Silent Night: Pesticides, Amphibian Declines, and what it Means for Us.”

University of California-Berkeley professor, Tyrone Hayes, will present his findings that the common herbicide, atrazine, causes deformities in male frogs at a 2:00 p.m. meeting on Sunday, February 6, 2005 at Chisago Lake Lutheran Church, Center City, co-sponsored by the Wild River Audubon Society, the Women’s Environmental Institute and ACE. Hayes includes a vivid power point presentation in his talk.

An animal endocrinologist specializing in the effect of steroids on amphibian development, Dr. Hayes conducted laboratory and field studies on several different species of frogs and toads. His work demonstrated that atrazine, widely used on corn and bean fields as a pre-emergent herbicide, produces ovaries and eggs in male frogs at levels as low as .1 part per billion. His work was published in the premier British scientific journal, Nature, in the leading American general science journal, Science, and in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Early in his career, Hayes was approached by the Swiss-based company, Syngenta, to serve on a panel assessing their herbicide, atrazine, for its role as an endocrine disruptor, a group of compounds that derail hormonal action in organisms. Hayes and his lab found evidence that atrazine was a significant disruptor. Syngenta then delayed funding of his research and subsequently challenged it.

The conflict surrounding his research was brought to Minnesota recently when Hayes was initially invited, then dis-invited to present the keynote address at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s upcoming Air, Water and Waste conference in the Twin Cities on February 15-17.

A South Carolina native, Hayes earned a BA degree from Harvard in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and a PhD from UC-Berkeley in Integrative Biology. He admits to a life-long passion for frogs, toads and snakes that dates from his childhood and now extends to study areas in Ethiopia and Uganda, as well as the North American continent.

He is also a highly regarded teacher and recently won Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award. His statement of teaching philosophy claims: “I love my job and love to see my students get excited about science. My goal is to make my students as excited as my professors made me.”

For more information on Tyrone Haynes, we recommend these websites:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/emerging/profiles ;

http://www.teaching.berkely.edu/dta02/hayes

If you want to delve into the tussle between Hayes and Syngenta, we recommend: “The Story of Syngenta and Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley: the Price of Research” .

Or, try Googling him. We also recommend you Google “atrazine” and click on the Syngenta website, to see what they have to say about Dr. Hayes.

Thanks to the co-sponsors for this event.

The Women's Environmental Institute ( http://www.w-e-i.org/ ) at Amador Hill is an environmental research, renewal and retreat center designed to create and share knowledge about environmental issues and policies relevant to women, children and identified communities especially affected by environmental injustices; to promote organic and sustainable agriculture skill building and ecological awareness; and to promote activism that influences public policy and promotes social change.

ACE, Action for Community and Environment, is a community environmental coalition in the Chisago Lakes Area.