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After I spoke at a pesticide industry confab a few months ago, an executive with the agrichemical/GMO seed giant Syngenta approached to politely challenge my assessment of the US regulatory agencies. I had charged that these federal watchdog groups kowtow to Big Food and Big Ag, regularly approving dodgy products or practices with little regard for how they may affect public health or the environment.

Au contraire, the Syngenta guy assured me. He insisted that the US regulatory system was full of rigorous scientists who vetted the industry’s products carefully and would never let something through that might harm the public. We began a tense conversation about Syngenta’s highly toxic and widely used atrazine herbicide, green-lighted by the Environmental Protection Agency despite growing evidence of harm to people and wildlife. We decided after a few minutes to agree to disagree.

The fellow’s gentle assurances of regulatory rigor have been echoing through my mind as I follow the spectacle of the Food and Drug Administration’s unfolding surveillance scandal, triggered by excellent reporting from the New York Times and Washington Post. The subject is off my beat-it involves the FDA’s medical-oversight arm, not its food wing. But it reveals just how completely large, powerful industries have gained ownership over their federal watchdogs and taught them to sit, heel, and perform other submissive tricks. And it also reveals that FDA-employed scientists are not always the bland, quiet characters I imagine them to be. A front-page article in Tuesday’s Times presents the saga’s chief whistleblower as a prickly, aggressive figure with a history of challenging employers with lawsuits.