The Paraquat Poisoning Problem

A former Syngenta scientist calls the failures to heed his warnings about the deadly pesticide “a conspiracy within the company to keep this quiet.”

Jon Heylings was 34 when he found the notebook that would upend his life. A junior scientist at Imperial Chemical Industries, Heylings happened upon it in 1990 as he was trying to solve a mystery. Trained in toxicology, he had been brought to the company three years earlier to lead a team that would work to reduce the health risks of ICI products that contained the pesticide paraquat. He had spent much of that time testing formulations that did appear to be safer. Yet to Heylings’s puzzlement, the company hadn’t put them on the market. Curious about how ICI had arrived at the chemical concentrations in the version of the pesticide it was selling, he did some research in the corporate archives. There he came across the old book of notes that Michael Rose, a senior scientist at the company, had handwritten years earlier.