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in the reports. They backdated documents in order to hide the scheme.
    Throughout this time, IBT’s services were being contracted by some of the country’s largest and wealthiest chemical companies, who showed no obvious concern for rigorous, objective scientific testing. Monsanto, for example, had one of its own men in the halls of IBT faking the testing of TCC (trichlorocarbanilide), a toxic antibacterial substance that in the 1950s and 1960s began to appear widely in soaps, laundry detergents, rinse additives, and softeners. This compound was hardly benign; in 1962, a number of premature infants in California were struck with methemoglobinemia, an extremely dangerous disease originating in diapers laundered with a softener made from a mixture of quaternary ammonium and TCC.
    Yet by the mid-1970s, Monsanto was still having IBT labs conduct “tests” of TCC so that it could keep using it in deodorant soaps like Dial. Scientists carried out these “studies” in the most infamous chamber of IBT—a cement cauldron of filthy water, disease, and slaughter known, appropriately enough, as “the swamp.” Workers were reluctant even to step into that room because many lab animals were out of their cages. The animals in the swamp were hungry, thirsty, and mean, drowning in pools of water and excrement, rotting with disease in overcrowded quarters.
    So many rats died during the study that the study should have been canceled. Instead, late-started animals were substituted into the study, and the data from the new rats was mixed in with the data for the original rats. The study lied about that data.
    Monsanto’s man at IBT, who was in charge of the rat toxicity studies, knew about the mixing of the data. He knew that new animals were being ordered and that they were being substituted in, and he did nothing to disclose it. After the scientist went back to Monsanto, he tried to make sure that the report was clean enough so that it could pass approval with the FDA.
    And the fraud continued. Dr. Donovan Gordon, IBT’s pathologist, concluded that even the lowest doses of TCC were harmful to rats’ testicles. But Gordon would learn the hard way what happens when you contradict corporate “science.”
     
    Before Calandra hired him at IBT, Gordon had been a young scientist earning very little at Abbott Laboratories, a Chicago-based pharmaceutical firm. Calandra made Gordon his right-hand man in IBT’s pathology lab. But he did much more than that. He helped Gordon buy a nice house in Chicago’s suburb of Northbrook. He gave Gordon a car. Gordon was African American, and he was paid a good enough salary that he could, at a time of civil rights strife between blacks and whites in Chicago, put his children in private schools. That way, Calandra put Gordon in a golden cage of subservience and indebtedness. The tragedy was that Gordon was one of the first African-American pathologists to make it in the United States.
    When Calandra first read Gordon’s report that Monsanto’s TCC caused testicular degeneration in rats even at the lowest dosage, he invited him to his office and told him that the company (and therefore Gordon) could go on doing the things they liked in life only because of the goodwill of companies like Monsanto. Why don’t you look at some more TCC slides? Calandra asked. Gordon did and, the second time around, he found TCC clean and safe.
    Monsanto itself then hired an independent pathologist named Dr. William Ribelin to examine rat testicle slides. But when Ribelin reached the same conclusion as in Dr. Gordon’s first report, Monsanto knew this would cause problems with the FDA, so Ribelin’s report was never submitted to them.
    In early 1975, Calandra himself took personal control over all report writing at IBT, and he directed changes in the TCC report. Calandra conducted most of the important meetings regarding the changes, and he made the ultimate decisions on what lies were going to be included in the