Source: https://www.whistleblowersblog.org/2010/09/articles/environmental-whistleblowers/uga-wins-scientific-integrity-loses/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 20:43:10+00:00

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In 1863, under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, Congress passed the False Claims Act to recover taxpayer funds looted from the U.S. Treasury through fraudulent claims. Included in the False Claims Act were "Qui tam" provisions, which allow private citizens with both direct and independent knowledge of such acts of fraud to file lawsuits on behalf of the U.S. Government and receive a portion of the money recovered. Qui tam is short for a Latin phrase that loosely translates: "He who sues on behalf of the king and himself."
After I published articles in Nature questioning the 503 Rule,iv,v EPA terminated me in 2003 and UGA decided against giving me a faculty position. Using my own personal funds, my coworkers at UGA and I conducted the first studies linking widespread illnesses and several deaths to biosolids in 2002.vi,vii In 2008, Nature editors cited a multi-university study in Ohio confirming this link.viii They praised our work at UGA and called EPA’s biosolids program an "institutional failure" of three presidential administrations.
Research on climate change, alternative energy sources, pollution control and other important areas has become a high-stakes game in which various groups within government, industry and academia attempt to steer and, in some cases, manipulate science. The use of unreliable data by EPA, USDA and other federal agencies to defend their scientifically questionable policies in these areas is a common practice that is eroding scientific integrity.
EPA employees who developed the 503 Rule funded UGA to dispel public concerns over hundreds of head of cattle that died after eating forage grown with Augusta’s biosolids on dairy farms owned by the McElmurray and Boyce families. Soil, forage and tissue samples collected by the farmers’ experts revealed that the forage had taken up potentially toxic levels of cadmium, molybdenum and other hazardous wastes from the biosolids.
Before filing my qui tam lawsuit, we offered UGA several opportunities to simply correct the scientific record and avoid any costs associated with litigation. Authors of the Gaskin study declined; and UGA engaged in an all-out effort to defeat our qui tam lawsuit and avoid having to retract Augusta’s fabricated data.
My former UGA department head testified about a meeting he had with faculty in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences who objected to UGA hiring me.xix Because of their dependence on "future EPA grants" and "connections [with] the waste-disposal community," the faculty advised him to “stay away from things that could end up biting [them] in the rear-end."
Somehow, when scientific integrity was weighed against future grants to be gained by helping EPA employees publish fabricated data, scientific integrity lost.
†David Lewis (LewisDaveL@aol.com) serves on the Board of Directors of the National Whistleblowers Center (www.whistleblowers.org).
 Lewis et al. v. Walker et al. United States District Court, Middle District of Georgia, Athens Division. Case No. 3:06-CV-16.
iiLewis et al. v. Walker et al. Order issued Sept. 8, 2010.
iv Lewis, D.L. 1996. EPA Science: Casualty of election politics. Nature381:731-2.
v Lewis, David L., Wayne Garrison, K. Eric Wommack, Alton Whittemore, Paul Steudler & Jerry Melillo. 1999. Influence of environmental changes on degradation of chiral pollutants in soils. Nature401:898-901.
viii Editorial, "Stuck in the Mud;" Tollefson, J. "Raking through sludge exposes a stink," Nature453:258; 262-263.
ixMcElmurray v. USDA, United States District Court, Southern District of Georgia, Case No. CV105-159, p. 17. Order issued Feb. 25, 2008. Available online at hallmanwingate.com.
xii National Research Council. Biosolids Applied to Land: Advancing Standards and Practice, pp. 4, 52. National Academy Press. Washington, DC, 2002.
xiv Gattie, D.K. and D. L. Lewis. 2004. A high-level disinfection standard for land-applied sewage sludge (biosolids). Environ. Health Perspect. 112:126-31.
xvLewis et al. v. Walker et al. Depo. R. Brobst, Apr. 14, 2009, p. 269.
xviLewis et al. v. Walker et al. Depo. J. Gaskin, Jun. 22, 2009, p. 269.
xviiLewis et al. v. Walker et al. Depo. J. Gaskin, Jun. 22, 2009, p. 293.
xviiiLewis et al. v. Walker et al. Depo. J. Gaskin, Jun. 22, 2009, p. 374-380.
xixLewis v. EPA, U.S. Dept. Labor CA 2003-CAA-00005,-6. Depo. R. E. Hodson, Jan. 31, 2003.

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