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at the ceiling. Need I say these are also dangerous people who threaten public health as much as pesticide companies do?”
    Congress could easily demolish the toxic alliance between EPA’s senior managers and the chemical industry, Gross says, but the truth is that congressmen and senators “don’t care especially when the agribusiness contributes money for their reelection.”
    “You need to fire EPA’s senior managers and start all over again with a small and dedicated scientific staff to do the critical job of safeguarding our people from the deleterious effects of farm sprays,” Gross told me. “In this business you cannot cover up for too long, especially when you have so many people involved with simple operations like cleaning the shit out of the animal cages while scientists carry out complex experiments, each of which may involve hundreds of animals.”
    I knew Adrian Gross for several years. I listened to his stories for many hours over a long period of time, and I admired his courage to expose fraud in the chemical industry and the government. And when it came to fraud, there were not many bigger cases than the scientific cesspool called IBT Laboratories.
     
    Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories was a biological research and testing organization created in 1952 to test all kinds of chemicals for human safety and environmental effects. Joseph Calandra, the man who founded IBT, was a professor and scientist with advanced degrees in biochemistry and medicine. Calandra taught at the medical and dental schools of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago. He built his lab in Northbrook, a suburb close to Northwestern, and when his business picked up, he expanded his testing facilities to Wedge Creek, Wisconsin, and Decatur, Illinois.
    At its peak, in 1976, IBT had 230,000 square feet of space, a research farm of more than two hundred acres, and laboratories in three cities. Calandra was also in charge of some three hundred fifty people doing as many as two thousand new studies a year. In 1966, Calandra sold IBT to Nalco, a large chemical company. But he remained president of IBT until IBT went bankrupt in the late 1970s.
    IBT went bankrupt because of Adrian Gross.
     
    One of the most significant documents in any laboratory testing on live subjects is the log a technician keeps in order to record observations of what is happening to each animal throughout the course of the experiment. The animals eat food that has been poisoned, so if the poison causes serious toxic effects, a careful observer is likely to see how the toxins affect the behavior and body of the animals he has been watching. When an animal is “sacrificed” for autopsy, the visual inspection of an abnormal growth, for example, is taken a step further with a microscopic examination to determine the nature of that growth. From all that “raw data,” the lab issues a report about the chemical tested and gives it to the company or organization that paid for the testing. Typically, that organization then uses the lab’s findings to convince the government that its chemical product is safe for people and the environment and to “register” it for sale and general use.
    Though it is far from a perfect system, and it is in many ways morally objectionable, animal testing does provide a reliable picture of what happens when toxins contaminate living organisms. Government regulators are crippled and blind without that picture. But they are far worse off if the picture they are shown is fake.
    Inside IBT, scientists with advanced degrees in chemistry, toxicology, biology, pharmacology, and medicine engaged in a criminal conspiracy for close to twenty-five years. IBT executives falsified test data in order to hide the fact that their laboratory was in a shambles. Animals were escaping. Huge numbers of them were dying. Lab techs forgot to run tests on some of the animals. Researchers simply made up page after page of data and put it