The Poison Papers

Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States

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Jonathan Latham, PhD

Jonathan R Latham, PhD Co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and Editor of the Independent Science News website. Dr. Latham holds a Masters degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in Virology.

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Failing for Forty Years: What the Poison Papers Tell Us About the EPA and How to Reform It

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In this lecture Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project, talks about the importance of the 20,000-document Poison Papers collection and how it exposes problems with both the internal culture of the EPA and its legal framework that prevent precautionary decision-making, even when the science clearly points to danger. The documents known as the Poison Papers were collected over a period of 40 years by Carol Van Strum, Diane Hebert, Eric Coppolino, and Peter von Stackelberg, who served as custodians of the documents, gathering, storing, scanning, and distributing them. The Park Foundation, The Bioscience Resource Project, Center for Media and Democracy, and the late Rosalind Peterson helped fund this endeavor.

https://lecture.ucsf.edu/ets/Play/0b4ef9a0f5af41fdb982aa4a1f0753f21d

Unsealing the Science: What the Public can Learn from Internal Chemical Industry Documents

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A panel discussion with the people who brought the three new chemical industry documents collections to the UCSF library explored what the documents mean for public health and the perils they faced in making these documents public. Professor Stanton Glantz, who began the library with the first collection of internal tobacco industry documents and explained how the documents have been used to inform litigation, documentaries and public policy decisions. University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Information Management Chris Shaffer gave an overview of the Industry Documents Library and introduced the panel. Panelists included Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and Gary Ruskin, Co-founder and Co-Director of U.S. Right to Know. The panel was moderated by Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Professor and Director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and Co-Director of the UCSF Environmental Health Initiative, which has supported the development of the Chemical Industry Documents library.

https://lecture.ucsf.edu/ets/Play/342d5d84275441b2b97aa9f641d0dca51d

One Planet: The Poison Papers reveal chemical industry secrets in the US

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On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet series, we’ll have a conversation with Dr. Jonathan Latham, the director of the Poison Papers, a vast trove of chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s.

The papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press.

http://www.kalw.org/post/one-planet-poison-papers-reveal-chemical-industry-secrets-us#stream/0

Toxic Secrets: Professor ‘bragged about burying bad science’ on 3M chemicals

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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.” Read more.