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My best – and wronged – new heroes

Three Health Canada scientists blew the whistle, then got canned
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Since my Grade 5 science teacher described how Copernicus fought his entire life to convince people that the sun was the centre of the solar system but, for the most part, failed — something so inconceivable and wrong to a classroom of wide-eyed nine-year-olds who couldn't imagine the sun in any other location — clear-minded scientists have been my heroes.

Whether they're at the lectern defending evolution against rabid creationists or providing irrefutable evidence of climate change, the work of scientists informs the neural system of our collective modern thinking.

Now I have three new brilliant heroes who just happen to be scientists, scientists who were hired to protect the health of Canadians and then fired for doing so.

Dr. Shiv Chopra, Dr. Margaret Haydon and Dr. Gérard Lambert were honoured last week with the first annual Integrity Award from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, an organization created in the early 1980s out of concern for the safety of Latin American journalists during that authoritarian era.

In the late 1990s, the CJFE broadened its mandate to champion free expression worldwide. And doctors Chopra, Haydon and Lambert fit perfectly into that template.

The story goes back to the late 1980s, when the three were working for Health Canada, and has become lodged in the more infamous side of our Canadian mythology as the first case of whistleblowing in the Canadian public service and, more importantly, how we, as a society, treat such injustices.

It all started with the scientists' concerns over bovine growth hormone, an innocent enough hormone produced by a cow's pituitary gland to regulate metabolic processes, including the stimulation of milk production so cows can feed their calves. It's also produced by calves to stimulate their growth as they develop into mature animals. In fact, growth hormone is produced by the pituitary glands of all animals, including us, with the levels of production increasing and decreasing as animals need it.

But in the 1930s, scientists discovered that a synthetic bovine growth hormone could be made using recombinant DNA technology to create a synthetic or artificial bovine growth hormone known as recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH for short (also called bovine somatotropin or artificial growth hormone).

In the 1980s, rBGH was manufactured by Monsanto under the brand name of Posilac, the rights to which have since been sold to a branch of Eli Lily, ironically called Elanco Animal Health.

To dig deeper into the gritty details, and possibly gross you out, according to Wikipedia, rBGH is produced through genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. A gene that codes for the sequence of amino acids that make up BST is inserted into the DNA of the E. coli bacterium. The bacteria are separated from the rBGH, which is purified to produce an injectable hormone.

A farmer could give rBGH (Posilac) to cows and it would boost their milk production. Hooray, said the dairy industry in the U.S. where rBST was already in use, more milk for us to sell easier and faster — up to 10 per cent more milk in about 10 months.

And so it was that rBGH came to the attention of our three heroes who were working in various branches of Health Canada in the late '80s, ensuring that anything administered to animals in our food chain, whether they be egg-laying chickens or milk-producing cows, was healthy both for the animals and the ultimate end users — we consumers buying and drinking all that milk which could be produced with the help of a synthetic growth hormone, if approved by Health Canada.

But despite urgings from their bosses all the way to the top, according to Dr. Chopra — along the lines of, it's already in use in the U.S. so just go ahead and pass it in Canada — the three scientists had their doubts.

"There were quite a number of deficiencies," Dr. Margaret Haydon said in an interview last week on CBC Radio One with The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti, who sits on the board of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. "I would ask questions and not always get answers back."

She and her colleagues actually had quite a few questions for Monsanto. For instance, what happened to the cows that disappeared from the Monsanto studies of rBGH? The scientists wanted to see what happened to young heifers after their first three lactation periods following the birth of their first three calves when given rBGH, and sometimes the cows in the study at the second lactation were different cows than those studied at the first lactation.

The scientists were caught between a rock and a hard place. Under the Food and Drug Act, passed on behalf of Canadians after the world witnessed what thalidomide did, they were requested to testify before a Senate House Committee in 1998 on rBGH, but "advisors" all the way up to the Privy Council were pressuring them not to be negative.

In the end, integrity and courage ruled. The scientists attested to all sorts of problems in cows given rBGH, from mastitis, birth defects and multiple births to problems with the cows' pancreases, hips and joints.

Bottom line: Canada did not pass rBGH for use in our milk supply. That decision influenced Australia, New Zealand, Japan and 37 countries in the EU to outright ban rBGH — a stronger condemnation that Canada's "fail to pass". But rBGH remains in use in the U.S. to this day.

My three new heroes also went on to warn against carbadox, a drug promoting growth in pigs, and in 2003, before mad cow disease hit the headlines, doctors Chopra and Haydon called for a total ban on using animal parts in the feed of other animals.

But the story does not end happily. In 2004, all three scientists were fired from their jobs for insubordination. Dr. Lambert has since been reinstated in a 2011 ruling by the Public Service Labour Relations Board, but the other two scientists remain fighting for justice.

Despite a Canadian federal court ruling for an investigation, and the new Public Service Accountability Act that Harper's Conservatives campaigned on — a hollow piece of legislation that does not come close to protecting whistleblowers, say the good doctors — Chopra and Haydon remain in limbo.

What can you do? Write your MP right now and demand that the government support the federal court ruling to investigate the case, which has been before the Public Service Integrity Office for 10 years — with no action taken.

And think twice about cross-border grocery shopping.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance journalist whose top pick is Avalon milk.