A particularly curious tale begins with a September 21 letter to Margaret Hamburg, the new Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Director Linda Birnbaum who, among others, was copied on the correspondence.  The letter was penned by Thomas Zoeller, a member of the 2007 Chapel Hill Consensus that advanced theories of danger associated with BPA, and 32 additional signatories.  The letter opens by stating that its signatories are “a group of independent (mostly university) researchers with extensive experience working with endocrine disrupting compounds and in particular bisphenol A (BPA)” but then gives a curious warning to Commissioner Hamburg regarding plans for $10 million in BPA studies by FDA.

“We find it troubling that the FDA is proposing to spend such a large amount of money on such a well-researched chemical,” the letter notes.  It goes on to claim that plans to further research BPA are “disturbing” and that “there is sufficient research and independent review available for the agency to make a decision as to whether, as the law dictates, there is ‘reasonable certainty’ that this chemical is ‘not harmful.’”

At first blush, one might be inclined to give credit to these researchers for their noble stance in defense of government frugality with taxpayer money.  But a cursory understanding of many of the signatories’ past efforts raises an intriguing issue.  Close to half of the signatories had been part of the Chapel Hill Consensus, and some of those have had questions raised about their research methods and the incestuous nature of their scientific work.

The curiosities of the September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Hamburg are compounded by an October 28 news release from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences announcing 10 grants funded by federal economic stimulus money to pay for two years of additional research on BPA.

The NIEHS news release explains, “While recent assessments by authorities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan agree that current food contact uses of BPA are safe, these assessments have identified the need to address data gaps.  For these reasons, NIEHS prioritized BPA research as a Signature initiative in the grants program undertaken with stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

The language of the NIEHS announcement is standard government boilerplate, but its meaning becomes almost surreal when a review of grant money recipients reveals that seven of the ten grants are to be awarded to signatories of the September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Hamburg.  Although the press release referred to an October 6 meeting of researchers receiving stimulus funds, no mention is made in their letter to Hamburg about having applied for any NIEHS grant money or whether any of the signatories had been informed that they were to receive such grants.  They only mention that “the NIEHS has initiated a $7 million program (GO grants) to address several key data gaps.”

According to an analysis by Trevor Butterworth of the George Mason University Statistical Assessment Service, some of the recipients of the stimulus funds and participants in the Chapel Hill Consensus seem to have an “incestuous” relationship.  The scientists who signed the September 21 FDA letter had claimed “there are already over 900 peer-reviewed studies in the published literature,” but the NIEHS press release states, “The innovative two-year grants [of $14 million] provided through the Recovery Act will support human and animal studies that address many of the research gaps identified by expert scientific panels, and provide a better understanding of how this chemical may impact human health.”  Which is correct?

The letter signers wrote, “We are deeply troubled that the agency would announce these research plans in light of its decision to release a reassessment of BPA by November 30^th.  This disconnect between research and reassessment raises concerns about whether the FDA is striving to resolve the critical public health issues raised by widespread exposure to BPA, or is avoiding making a decision because of the pending research, the results of which will not be available for review for many years.”  But will the expected announcement of a “reassessment” declare the dangers of BPA just as an expensive two-year study gets underway?

In justifying the money allocated to the study of BPA, Birnbaum, in the press release was quoted as saying, “’We know that many people are concerned about bisphenol A and we want to support the best science we can to provide answers.’”  This brings up the legitimate and larger question of whether these “concerns” can be adequately addressed by taxpayer research grants to those who raised the concerns in the first place.  And is this going to be “the best science,” when we know that serious questions have been raised about the incestuous nature of some of these scientists?  Is this research going to be done to fit the headlines generated by some of these same scientists?

It took a computer hacker to reveal the less-than-scientific consensus on global warming.  We need a full disclosure on how the “consensus” was arrived at Chapel Hill and how the decision was made to use funds intended to stimulate the economy to continue to fund what seems to be less than objective scientific research.  We need to be sure that we are not paying for the fox to guard the henhouse.

Most recently, BPA came under attack November 2 when Consumers Union, the parent organization of the respected Consumer Reports, sent out a press release announcing the results of its lab tests that purportedly showed high levels of the suspect compound in 19 food products.  The authors of the Consumers Report article did not claim that they had found any harmful effects in anyone, just that BPA had been detected.

The Consumers Union press release inspired panic-inducing headlines.  ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and the New York Times dutifully announced the “results” with alarm.  In a separate commentary, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff compared the danger of BPA to those he has faced as a reporter of “threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas.”

By comparison, the journal Toxicological Sciences (October 2009) published the results of a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which noted that the National Toxicology Program “rated the potential effects of low doses of BPA as an area of ‘some concern,’ whereas most effects were rated as of ‘negligible’ or ‘minimal’ concern.”  But this study, as well as numerous others that demonstrate BPA’s safety, does not make headlines.

At George Mason University’s STATS center, Trevor Butterworth has an entire archive of articles disputing claims and test results raising the alarm about BPA.  He cites an international array of scientists who have repeatedly refuted the claims of such tests.  Of the latest test funded by Consumers Union, Butterworth quotes Wolfgang Dekant, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Wurzburg, who has done testing on BPA for the European Union.  Dekant said he was  “’incredulous’” at the claims made by Consumers Union; the test, he says, was “’highly biased.’”

The Consumers Union’s release is the latest salvo in media campaigns against BPA, despite the fact, as Butterworth writes, that Consumers Union has not released the name of the lab conducting the experiments.  Yet absent this critically important piece of information, the authors of the Consumers Union report claim that current federal guidelines of 50 micrograms is based on outdated research from the 1980s and assert that “a 165-pound adult eating one serving from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts’ recommended daily upper limit” [at 0.0024 micrograms].

Who are these experts?  An examination of the two scientists cited in the article reveals that they are part of a network of left-leaning researchers with political agendas.  A key participant is Pete Myers, described in the article as “chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit group based in Charlottesville, Va.”  According to Environmental Health News, Myers is not only chief scientist but founder and CEO of the group, which he created after serving as director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and co-authoring Our Stolen Future, about endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.  The introduction to this work, considered an environmental polemic by detractors, was written by then Vice President Al Gore.  A search, however, did not reveal a website for Environmental Health Sciences, nor a 990 tax return.

The other scientist cited in the Consumer Reports article is Frederick vom Saal, “a professor of developmental biology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and a leading researcher on BPA.”  A disclosure accompanying an article for the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), noted that vom Sall has served as “expert witness for the defendant in a trial in 2004 regarding the health effects of bisphenol,” served as a “consultant for in-preparation litigation regarding BPA,” and serves as “chief executive officer of XenoAnalytical LLC, which uses a variety of analytical techniques to measure estrogenic activity and BPA in tissues and leachates from products.”

The media and vom Saal are also well acquainted.  The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which in 2008 won several “environmental reporting” prizes, utilized vom Saal’s own laboratory to conduct experiments for the newspaper.  Butterworth notes the bias of the panel awarding the Columbia University’s John B. Oakes award; it featured members of National Public Radio and environmental groups.  Further, it turns out that an “outside expert” called on to evaluate the results, Patricia Hunt, has coauthored articles on BPA with vom Saal.  He, in turn, has championed her research.  Vom Saal and Hunt were also signatories of the “Chapel Hill Consensus,” a meeting in 2007 where 50 seemingly like-minded scientists who had been studying BPA gathered at the University of North Carolina to decide on the dangers of BPA.  This “Consensus” statement shows a network of many scientists who hold similar opinions on BPA and whose names sometimes appear together in work on “green” issues.

The circular relationships between researchers, activist organizations, and media outlets serve to create a continuous flow of questionable information about BPA.  Yet, many of those involved in such eye-brow raising research are set to accelerate anti-BPA research, thanks to stimulus funds from American taxpayers.

NEXT: How Stimulus Spending Fuels the BPA Scare