Dr. Tyrone Hayes is only one of those diminished in stature at a time when the USA can't afford it.

Is there something wrong with that picture?

JESSE WASHINGTON    
10/23/11 09:41 AM ET

... STEM barriers are not unique to black people. The United States does not produce as high a proportion of white engineers, scientists and mathematicians as it used to. Women and Latinos also lag behind white men.

Yet the situation is most acute for African-Americans.

Black people are 12 percent of the U.S. population and 11 percent of all students beyond high school. In 2009, they received just 7 percent of all STEM bachelor's degrees, 4 percent of master's degrees, and 2 percent of PhDs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

From community college through PhD level, the percentage of STEM degrees received by blacks in 2009 was 7.5 percent, down from 8.1 percent in 2001.
The numbers are striking in certain fields. In 2009, African-Americans received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics. Out of 5,048 PhDs awarded in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, 89 went to African-Americans – less than 2 percent.

Several factors are cited by scientists, educators and students. One is a self-defeating perception that STEM is too hard. Also mentioned are a lack of role models and mentors, pressure to earn money quickly, and discouraging academic environments....

There is a sincere problem with 'attitude' about securing our brain trust in the USA. And any excuse to demean hard working Americans and seek to victimize them and their children further is still being touted by the rightwing.

The electorate of the USA needs to decide either they are going to be a world power that makes strides in science and math across the spectrum of those able to learn and carry out discovery, or they can forget about the national security their children will inherit. 

First, a graph of how Black students in DC (click here) compare with Black students from other large cities and in the entire nation, from 1992 (the earliest date I found data for):

From "Real Time with Bill Maher" (click here)

...ALICIA MENENDEZ: Yeah, I mean, it creates opportunity -- it basically is a game of musical chairs where we have the same number of chairs but less people competing to sit in those chairs. So it creates opportunity, and as you said, free people up. So that means: you want to go hang out with your grandkids? You can do that. You want to start a business? You can do that because you're no longer dependent on your job for your healthcare. 

MAHER: Yeah disincentives to work are not always a bad thing. Americans work too much. Americans are over-worked, overstressed. They take less vacation time. They don't retire when they want to. Not everything is GDP. 

S.E. CUPP: No. Um, no. Disincentivizing work, up until two days, was agreed by Democrats and Republicans to be not a great thing. The project of economics on the left and the right has always been to come up with welfare programs that disincentivize work the least. Why? Work is dignity. Work is social and economic empowerment. Work is women's lib. Work is opportunity. So this false argument that somehow disincentivizing 2 million people to work and leave the economy is now a good thing is bull. It's absolute spin....

...MAHER: But Social Security is a disincentive to work. 

MENENDEZ: Pell grants are a disincentive to work. I mean, you take basically any program and you say that because you're giving another opportunity now I don't need to fish fry. (HBO's Real Time, February 7, 2014)

"The Crackpot Underground."

Dr. Tyrone Hayes made a fatal mistake in his early years of practice. He absolutely did. He was ethical and believed Syngenta once a member of the Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals merger wanted research that was honest in it's findings. In fact it wanted lies. It wanted Dr. Hayes to manipulate science to prove how wonderful it's products were. They never thought a hungry African American would actually practice ethics and the truth. What the hell was wrong with the man? Didn't he know he could have had anything he wanted if he just lied enough?

I mean, look the climate idiots that were on the corporate take. Hello?

My dear people, this is the ethics of Syngenta.

By TOM WRIGHT,

International Herald Tribune

Published: November 27, 2005 
Profits at any cost!

GENEVA, Nov. 27 -Swiss voters today supported (click here) a five year-ban on the farming of genetically modified crops, offering a further sign of widespread distrust in Europe of scientifically enhanced foods.

"The vote reflects the view across the E.U., not just Switzerland," said Adrian Bebb, an expert on the issue at Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group. "The public doesn't want to eat genetically modified food."

The vote also underscored the problems facing the European Commission and biotech companies like Syngenta, Bayer and Monsanto as they try to overcome consumer doubts about safety.

While the United States has led the production and consumption of genetically modified crops, Europeans consumers have been largely hostile. The European Commission banned the import of genetically modified organisms from the United States between 1998 and 2004.

But under pressure from the United States and other nations, the commission ended the ban after Washington took Europe to the World Trade Organization, claiming its ban amounted to unfair protection, and was not based on scientific evidence that the organisms harm human health or the environment....

Can you imagine that? The corporate greed of this lousy company actually forcing politicians to NEGATE the vote of a free people of an entire continent. This wasn't about research, it was about THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE in a VOTE they favored for their SOVEREIGN country, it's people and children. This had nothing to do with research and the pressure by a scientist to have his way. This was about the free will of the nations of people. What chance would an African American scientist have?

The USA turned the WTO on it's head. It turned the WTO into a political arm of the corporate paid for politicians. Like. What the hell? 

The American people had to go underground for a decade or longer to develop crops and growing techniques to provide GMO free foods for themselves and their children. Now, that very underground movement is the basis of an entire growing local economy that is flourishing and providing quality of life to people. 

UNDERGROUND. Seriously. Who ever thought people that wanted to grow heritage crops would actually matter? They were nobody. Ah, but, in fact they were the saviors of a drying and hot planet. 

American corporations? They are the gods of the rightwing. There is no greater deity. 

This is corporate harassment.

Every biologist in the world knows amphibians show any change in environment long before other species. Every biologist knows that.

His work has been duplicated. Other research, outside of this lab, has been conducted regarding this chemical and produced adverse effects. I strongly suggest Europe, the continent that separates human rights from corporate rights, provide law that protects investigation by scientists in esteem above corporate harassment.

It is Europe that conducts incredible research on the basis of the simple trust of the work of their scientists. There is no other continent that would believe scientists could prove Einstein's equation was truly an equation based in solid reality of the order of the universe.The Hadron Collider would never exist with the protection of Europe's coveted belief in that scientists are valuable. Europe believes scientific investigation is not simply a luxury, but, a necessity to any world of understanding and compassion.

Tyrone Hayes is African American and a target of hate by a paranoid corporation that is scared of the truth about their own chemicals. He is peer reviewed in professional journals, has brought many wonderful scientists into their own research that is valued in this world. He made headway for minority scientists in the USA. There are not nearly enough of them. He is a valuable professional who has endured through years of looking over his shoulder in order to carry out his work and etch out a life for himself and his graduate students.

This is corporate harassment. I don't care what Syngenta wants or doesn't want. This is LEGALLY harassment. Syngenta is a paranoid entity in this world with intentions of causing harm to the professional status of respected scientists. It needs to stop. The USA isn't going to pass legislation that would outlaw such harassment and protect intellectual knowledge, which is property, in order for growth in research rather than it's inhibition. There are those in the USA that would like to see God in the laboratories and no one else. 

Europe needs to set the standard to protect scientists from corporate greed which is at the basis of this life long harassment. Europe can easily become a protective place for scientists seeking a safe and sane place to live. Someone has to do it. The USA is to tainted in it's politics to value it's own brain trust.

There is no reason why scientists cannot find funding in the fines achieved through legal liability of corporate harassment. I think it is long overdue and a matter of human rights.

...Not long ago, (click here) Hayes saw a description of himself on Wikipedia that he found disrespectful, and he wasn’t sure whether it was an attack by Syngenta or whether there were simply members of the public who thought poorly of him. He felt deflated when he remembered the arguments he’d had with Syngenta-funded pundits. “It’s one thing if you go after me because you have a philosophical disagreement with my science or if you think I’m raising alarm where there shouldn’t be any,” he said. “But they didn’t even have their own opinions. Someone was paying them to take a position.” He wondered if there was something inherently insane about the act of whistle-blowing; maybe only crazy people persisted. He was ready for a fight, but he seemed to be searching for his opponent.

One of his first graduate students, Nigel Noriega, who runs an organization devoted to conserving tropical forests, told me that he was still recovering from the experience of his atrazine research, a decade before. He had come to see science as a rigid culture, “its own club, an élite society,” Noriega said. “And Tyrone didn’t conform to the social aspects of being a scientist.” Noriega worried that the public had little understanding of the context that gives rise to scientific findings. “It is not helpful to anyone to assume that scientists are authoritative,” he said. “A good scientist spends his whole career questioning his own facts. One of the most dangerous things you can do is believe.”

In the meantime, I can see anthropologists and/or biologists from esteemed universities carrying out studies of the people and their health in areas where atrazine is densely used.

Public health records would provide a good beginning.

Atrazine was found in 1958. It was a time of naive understanding of the dangers of chemicals in the environment. It wasn't until the 1970s when Rachel Carson found a way to have the people of the USA understand the dangers of these chemicals that protections were passed. Those protections have been played with ever since by politicians bought and paid for by corporations. However, there are health records before this chemical was ever used and then subsequent decades. I would strongly suggest protections for those historical records be ordered by a court to prevent their disposal and/or destruction.

I wish everyone luck.