Following a recent article on the relentless activism directed by Collegium Ramazzini fellows, I received an outpouring of emails from scientists sharing more details and expressing their annoyance with the transgressions of scientific integrity by a large number of these fellows. Their evidence further demonstrates how this secretive scientific sect is abusing its positions on government bodies, journal editorial boards and agency networks to favour Ramazzini interests and campaigns. I took some of the information provided to me to caricature the life of a typical American Ramazzinian.

It’s a great time to be a retired American regulatory scientist. You get your friends and former colleagues to sponsor you to become a fellow at the Collegium Ramazzini, get someone to give you an “in” at IARC to serve as a member on a monograph working group panel (which one? Doesn’t matter! No special expertise is required.) Use that eight-day networking stint in Lyon as your key to then sign open contracts with US tort lawyers to be a litigation consultant for hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs in need of a white coat (one who could speak authoritatively about cancer). You get trained on how to speak to people on juries with no scientific background and they pay you 500-600 USD per hour for preparation work and for serving as a witness for the plaintiff justifying ridiculous claims (like how consuming that single can of diet soda in 1997 could have caused that cancer).

With serious money in the bank and credibility among your peers, you can begin to travel the world, speaking to government officials and journalists on behalf of some interest group, non-profit managed out of a tort law office or colleague with an agenda. With your Ramazzini fellowship, you will be lighting the aisles and giving keynotes at the best conferences, your Collegium friends will peer review your articles (ghost-written by someone whose name may escape you since you are just too busy to actually go back into a lab) and auto-publish them in journals like “Environmental Health” where the editors all share your secret handshake. And these friends will never allow a critical response to your work to be published.

As you are standing up against industry, you will be lauded for your heroism (and maybe get a bit part in some lobbumentary someone in your honey-pot circle paid to make). You’ll learn that there is such a thing as a free lunch, always flying first class (if not on some private Air Predatort jet) and that you never have to pay for anything again (except maybe your Ramazzini annual dues, but as you will have formed a private consultancy, you can just expense that).

You are now a Ramazzinian and as a member of this exclusive sect, the world is at your feet. Life couldn’t get any better.

Enough is just never enough!

Soon though that won’t be enough and you will crave more power, attention and money. So you will get together with your Ramazzini network to work on certain projects alongside some low-level Predatort handlers and NGOs loaded with foundation funding earmarked to trash the capitalist system. Projects to save lives? To make the world better? To alleviate poverty? Hell no, there’s no money or power in that. You will find projects, rather, to provide you more vengeance and control.

• Maybe run a government body like the Californian Cancer Identification Committee (CIC), where you can invite the Ramazzini network to testify on how to make Proposition 65 even more restrictive to business.
• Maybe take over some academic journals and prioritise articles from those you meet every October in a castle outside of Bologna. Activism can be relabelled as “science” if you manufacture a quick peer review process among Ramazzini fellows.
• Maybe use your network, publish papers and travel the world to speak on changing the methodology for detecting carcinogens so any consumer product can then be labelled a cancer hazard in upcoming IARC meetings you influence, giving you more opportunities to cash in on the latest industry assault.

And that’s what it’s all about – giving it good to industry. Bernardino Ramazzini did not live too far away from Machiavelli so you have been imbibed with a culture where the ends justify any lying, cherry-picking or breaking of the principles of scientific integrity if it can help destroy industry (either in the arena of public trust or in some American judicial hell-hole). Anyone who hates or hurts industrial corporations (Predatorts, NGOs, journalists…) is your ally and if you have created tools that can now weaponise scientific research, agencies or campaigns, then you are dutifully serving the cause. And if you need to make some information up in the process, you have a large network to protect you and reinforce your lies.

Staring into the face of awful

Some might wonder how these once esteemed researchers can sleep at night after behaving in such an unethical manner. Ramazzini sect transgressions have included:

• cherry-picking data or grossly over-estimating potential hazards (ie, lying);
• getting involved in petty personal assaults on their peers;
• breaking most rules of good scientific practice;
• manipulating IARC to create evidence to help the tort law firms who pay them;
• testifying in courtrooms on information they know is irrationally stretching the truth;
• lining their pockets with millions from court testimonies while the plaintiffs they were supposed to represent are even further victimised by the process, going home with very little compensation.

Whatever happened to scientific integrity?

Ramazzinians justify their bad behaviour rather nobly, as taking action in the face of a purely awful opponent: the industrial corporation. During their careers, most of the American Ramazzini fellows held some position of influence in scientific regulatory bodies. They examined evidence, produced reports and gave advice in what they truly believed was in the service of public health. Then, when all is said and done and the evidence looked overwhelming, some corporate lobbyist with a suitcase stuffed with campaign donations would fly in and undo all of the years of hard work and honest research. That would be enough to set off even the gentlest of souls.

So Ramazzinians operate with the passion of moral crusaders, hell-bent on imposing their anti-industry ideology on Western societies. Some Ramazzinians have written books attacking this corporate lobbying method. The Collegium Ramazzini even set up the Journal of Scientific Practice and Integrity to attack unethical industry-supported scientific research (but the only thing they seem to be publishing are revenge pieces by that noble journalist-for-hire, Paul Thacker). Some are paid by NGOs to lend credibility to their anti-industry campaigns. Ramazzinians truly don’t believe that their own shit stinks as they joyfully spread it all over the world.

Now that they have a perch in Italy from which their interpretation of justice can be exacted, if Ramazzinians can right these industry wrongs, then who would argue about stretching the truth or receiving suitcases stuffed with Predatort donations? Merely alms for their righteous crusades.

The Collegium Ramazzini creates the perfect environment to exact revenge, put entire industries out of business and create short-cuts around the democratic process. Ramazzinians like Bernie Goldstein can thus design processes with US tort law firms to create IARC-crafted evidence to sue companies out of existence (giving it a pseudo-regulatory characteristic by calling it “adversarial regulation”). In an email exchange published by the Risk-Monger, Bernie once even went so far as to demand that IARC go back and produce a third benzene monograph because his tort law firm employers needed a better scientific link between benzene and a common type of cancer (and Ramazzini fellow, Kurt Straif, dutifully complied).

Then there was the Godfather of Bologna, Don Martyn T Smith, who, when seeing how the scientific community was generally ignoring IARC hazard statements, assembled a number of key characteristics of carcinogenicity that was so well-promoted that it would overwhelm dissent. With the coordinated campaigns of the Ramazzini rat pack, who would ever doubt their diktats again?

Taking science down with them

But what have these malicious manipulators, with their networks of hate and greed, actually done to the long-term reputation of science? True, the American regulatory system is broken and its political elite largely corrupt, but is that a reason to destroy centuries of scientific practices, of research methodologies, of public trust in science and innovation?

Creating fear and outrage of companies that provide services, well-being and innovative solutions to the problems and challenges society faces, should not be the principle objective of scientists (no matter how broken their personal experiences may have been). It only makes matters worse when these conflicted Ramazzinians wear their white coats to legitimise opportunistic low-life’s in the US tort law and NGO activist worlds and thus reinforcing their narrative of mistrust in research and technology.

I once asked an open question: Can you be bought? and found that the answer was usually “Yes” and it was mostly a matter of price. Ramazzinians are able to extract a significant amount of money for their integrity and surround themselves nicely with the trappings of their corruption. And if you do this long enough, with enough other bent individuals around you on the take, it all appears normal and an easily justifiable compensation for a long career of frustration.

I recently attended a Ramazzini-driven anti-glyphosate campaign event in Brussels where I could not stop staring at Ramazzinian, Chris Portier, blithely sitting right next to Dwayne Lee Johnson – one man has scammed millions from his activism without any concern for the fact that the only thing the other man, seated beside him, has so far received, in five years of campaigns, is further victimisation from a world-class breed of scoundrels. I suspect Chris is no longer even mildly ashamed or even aware of how despicable he has become … after all, he took the money.

So how should we react to the political control now being exerted on the regulatory health risk arena by these vindictive, ruthless Ramazzinians? Perhaps it is time to shine more light on the Ramazzini rat pack. The next SlimeGate subsection will highlight the antics of some of their “heroes”.