![]()
Until fairly recently, Jonathan Lundgren enjoyed a stellar career as a government scientist. An entomologist who studies how agrichemicals affect the ecology of farm fields, he has published nearly 100 articles in peer-reviewed journal since starting at the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Brookings, South Dakota in 2005. By 2012, he had won the ARS's "Outstanding Early Career Research Scientist" award, and directorship of his own lab. But recently, things have changed. His work has "triggered an official campaign of harassment, hindrance, and retaliation" from his superiors, Lundgren alleged in an official complaint filed with USDA scientific integrity authorities last year. Lundgren took his battle with his USDA superiors public in October, two months after the agency imposed a 14-day without-pay suspension on him. The charges—laid out in a Aug. 3 letter to Lundgren by John McMurtry, associate director of the ARS's Plains Area—centered on infractions regarding a trip to the East Coast to present research, and a failure to get proper clearance from his superiors before submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Lundgren, who is currently not authorized to speak to the media, has released a detailed rebuttal of those charges in a document put together by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which is representing him in the dispute. But there's no doubting his knack for conducting research that raises troubling questions about some of the agrichemical industry's most lucrative existing products and promising future ones. "He's gone from golden boy to public enemy number one," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER. Before digging into the details of Lundgren's alleged infractions and punishment, it's worth having a look at Lundgren's recent research, which, Ruch says, led him "off the reservation" and into a world of "disciplinary disco." In his Aug. 3 letter announcing Lundgren's two-week suspension, the ARS's McMurtry declared two topics of Lundgren's research to be "sensitive"—meaning, he writes, subjects that agency scientists can't publish or speak to media about without "prior approval at the Area and National Program levels." Now, it's unclear exactly what makes a topic "sensitive." Weeks ago, a spokesman for the Agricultural Research Service's press office told me he would look up the agency's formal criteria for sensitivity and divulge it to me. Since then, he repeatedly declined to answer the question. But it's abundantly clear that many of Lundgren's findings don't jibe with industry interests. Take neonicotinoids, the globe's most widely used class of insecticides with annual sales of around $2.6 billion. In a peer-reviewed 2015 paper co-authored with a South Dakota State University professor—the one the ARS accuses him of submitting for publication without proper internal approval—Lundgren found that one common neonic, clothianidin, marketed by Bayer, harms monarch butterflies at levels commonly found in Midwestern milkweed plants, the endangered insect's habitat and food source. In a 2011 study, Lundgren and his team found that another one, Syngenta's thiamethoxam, didn't do much at all to protect soybeans from its target, crop-eating aphids—but did significantly reduce populations of insects that eat aphids. Then there's Lundgren's work on RNA interference, an emerging insecticidal technology that promises to kill targeted insects and weeds by silencing genes crucial to their survival, leaving everything else unaffected. GM seed/agrichemical giant Monsanto has placed great hope in RNAi, as this novel genetic technology is known. In a 2013 paper, Lundgren and USDA colleague Jian Duan noted that the great bulk of the research done on RNAi involves using the technology for human medicine, not to kill specific insects. They also challenged the claim that the technology can target particular pests and leave everything else in the ecosystem alone, and concluded that how long the RNAi pesticide material would persist in the environment is "largely unknown." IN 2014, Lundgren served on a panel of independent scientists convened by the Environmental Protection Agency to assess the technology's risks. The scientists' report (PDF) echoed the assessment of Lundgren's paper. As Monsanto's new technology makes its way through the regulatory system, the questions raised by Lundgren are slowing it down. In late October, the US Department of Agriculture quietly greenlighted Monsanto's RNAi-engineered corn strain designed to kill an insect called the corn rootworm —the first RNAi pesticide product the agency has okayed. Because of the odd system the United States uses to regulate new GM crops (explained here and here), the USDA review process doesn't directly assess the possible impacts that novel pesticides might have on ecosystems, the topic of Lundgren's research. That task falls to the Environmental Protection Agency—and the EPA appears to be taking the questions raised by Lundgren quite seriously. Days after the USDA gave Monsanto's new corn the thumbs up, the EPA granted it only "limited registration, " which does not allow commercial sale and distribution of the novel corn or its seed. The EPA would not comment on why it declined to fully register the product. Meanwhile, the USDA declined my request to interview Lundgren on RNAi pesticides in the context of the recent regulatory decisions regarding Monsanto's corn. "I'm sorry, but Dr. Lundgren is not available for media opportunities at this time," an ARS spokeswoman told me, after stringing me along for three days. All of which brings us back to the substance of Lundgren's dispute with his USDA superiors over violations of travel and publication protocol. According to PEER's Ruch, both incidents involve the USDA enforcing rules in an extraordinarily exacting standard. The travel controversy involved a two-stop East Coast trip Lundgren took in March, to appear on a panel at a National Academy of Sciences conference in Washington, D.C, on on the role of genetic engineering in pest management, and to Philadelphia to address the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance. According to Ruch, ARS scientists routinely assume that they have de facto permission to present at such prestigious fora. The typical procedure is to file paperwork requesting travel, assume it will be granted, and embark on the trip. In his whistleblower's narrative, Lundgren acknowledges that he filed his paper work at the last minute, but adds that such situations are not uncommon—he notes three other colleagues who traveled under similar conditions within six weeks of this trip.
