This is a very good read. Reminds me some of my own experiences working in a toxic environment. Though in my case it wasn't about chemicals but the product I worked on was intentionally being run into the ground for political reasons that are still somewhat obscure to me.
It's a horrible experience; the constant gaslighting grinds you down.
I can especially relate to the idea of being paid to do something that nobody in the company actually wants you to do. The better you are at your job, the more they hate you.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted her to fail. I bet if she had lied and started reporting that there were no PFOS and made up some BS that the old methods of testing were arcane and her new (intentionally flawed) method is better, they would have given her a huge raise and she would have been made employee of the year.
That's the kind of stuff that happened at my previous employer. All the liars and saboteurs at that company ended up being promoted within the company or hired by other companies with big salaries to help them run projects into the ground; which they did diligently.
She wasn’t lying and they knew that. From their point of view she was the saboteur and they are objectively right.
If you want to create conflict, you better have integrity and leave instead of continuing to use the resources of the group for your crusade.
Yet she stayed there and waited literally decades to create outrage about something that has yet to be proven problematic in the long run.
They even alerted the EPA pretty quickly so it is clear to anyone reading between the lines the one acting the most in bad faith is actually her.
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS Found”… ok, the PFOS found the scientist?
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS found in Human Blood”… PFOS found a scientist in human blood?
The problem is that there are gramatically valid ways to parse partial versions of the sentence, which you have to reparse as you go through the sentence.
That's what I immediately understood the title to mean... Is this not what the title is saying? I'm confused as to why people are having trouble understanding it.
Apparently the theory is that the word "How" in titles is always meaningless clickbait so HN automatically removes it. I don't believe this actually improves things.
Not to mention the overuse of the term "gaslighting". What used to mean a serious systematic method of making someone question reality is now simply "lied", apparently.
I thought the rule was to keep the title the same as the article? The title is: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe"
Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionally and knowingly poisoning nearly every living thing for decades, and when caught are allowed to not just still exist as a company, but continue to poison us.
By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it.
You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring.
The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M.
You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
That penalty exists, and e.g. Purdue Pharma was subject to it. But of course, Purdue also shows why it's complicated:
* When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get.
* A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale.
* But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
We need this, plus criminal liability for the C-suite, and possibly for the BoD.
The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
This is needed when ever a company too big to fail needs to be bailed out. It would remove the bad CEO and top management by chopping up a company and selling it off. By keeping them around, bad CEOs, governments are rewarding bad behavior. Until politicians can no longer be bought, donations and super packs, this will continue to happen since rewarding bad behavior is a two-way street.
A company is nothing more than a group of people, working towards a single goal, no? If that's a case, breaking up the group itself also seems futile.
We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts.
Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
I’m fairly sure that the president can dissolve a company at will.
Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today.
Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
Why? So all the workers who had nothing to do with this decision can be unemployed the next day? All you'll achieve is a cascade of negative effects and a hit to GDP
It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
The C-levels need to be criminally liable, that will fix it. It will fix many things. In this case the people who were in charge should get the chair if the state has it or 100000x life in max with the other rapists and serial killers. It won’t happen again. Boeing comes to mind too.
At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort.
US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
Leadership in the know should be banned for life, but the corporation would likely have to continue (split or not), otherwise you're giving the entire machine a reason to oppose accountability and correction.
What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all?
I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.
All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes.
It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet.
Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person.
More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.
Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
Will we dismantle silicon valley in the decades ahead after we start realizing the damage from collecting personal information, biometrics, behavioral data and more from everyone in the world?
Worse things have happened. Union Carbide still exists. And they literally killed 16000 people in India and injured hundreds of thousands more out of negligence.
We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.
Related anecdote: I know someone who used to work in Oakdale, Minnesota, a town that 3M literally used as a PFAS dumping ground. I'm not saying it's normal for a kid to die of cancer at the local high school, I'm just saying it happens more often there than anywhere else I've ever heard of.
Oakdale is more than just a town in Minnesota. It's a first ring suburb of St Paul, the capital of the state. Also, it wasn't limited to Oakdale. It covered a huge swatch of the east metro.
Source: I live about 12 miles west of there.
The people involved in that practice should be jailed for murder.
> In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. [...] Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next.
Though it's implied that Johnson's leaving is connected to the PFOS revelation, I don't see the article indicating whether Johnson had told Hansen anything more about it.
(Such as discussions behind closed doors, ultimatums, his own disillusionment/despair, etc.)
> At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contractors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.
> Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.
> Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.
This leaves me wondering how many biomedical implants might have things like this in them which might be leaching into our bloodstream and thus bodies over time.
Generally for biomedical stuff, you don't need to prove it is 100% safe, but merely that it is safer than not using the implant/device/alternative treatments
At least for a biomedical implant, you're probably benefiting more from the implant than from the long-term accumulation of these chemicals. Sucks to be a healthy person who gets the accumulation for free, though.
Bioaccumulatrion of PFOAs mainly occurs in the liver, kidneys, and blood [0]
Maybe filtering blood would help other tissue by proxy, allowing the blood to hold more? but from what I understand PFOA doesn't just hang around in those organs inert, it binds to proteins which is why it can cause problems.
Also consider that we probably accumulate most of this through ingestion, since it's in pretty much all food and water, but to differing concentrations. So we are constantly consuming this stuff in tiny quantities, but it's always there. People worry about things like teflon in non-stick pans and other products, but that's a product of PFOAs, i.e they were manufactured using them, they are not themselves PFOAs and do not readily break down into them just by handling them (you have to heat your pan to >250c roughly to get it to start vaporising the teflon into an aerosolised PFOA. So while the firefighting foam story is awful, most products are not themselves toxic, the real danger is in what the manufacturing processes has already released into the environment and is now part of the global food chain (particularly in sea food).
In other words, it doesn't matter what you buy or use (personally at least), and we are all eating and drinking it. Any kind of blood filtering would be a continuous process, and it's not clear how effective it would be considering one of the primary routes to exposure is through ingestion, and how it readily binds to and disrupts various tissues in the body.
I suspect anything that would help substantially reverse the process in the human body would need to be more active, e.g a drug that interacted with the PFOA either to render it harmless or reduce it's "elimination half life" (currently thought to be 3 years) to allow it to be released faster than we accumulate it.
Kidneys are one of the highest in demand artificial organs. Unfortunately the complexities of "artificial" kidneys are manied.
The smallest dialysis machine is about the size of a laser printer. Many folks become confined to their dialysis schedule, and kidney disease, dialysis or no, has many side effects and can be very painful.
I could see that, actually. When the one percent can just escape the consequences of forever chemicals, there's no longer a need to actually do anything against them in their eyes. Just as with climate change, where a lot of them hope they are insulated from the worst fallout by having homes all over the world, so that they can avoid political instability caused by mass migration after draughts and the like.
Not everything needs to be implanted. A process similar to haemodialysis intended to filter microplastics would be what we need.
You also can't just have a catch all "filtering of toxins" like that. There are many molecules and proteins in your serum that need to be there and any sort of aggressive filtration will be a problem.
I like the idea. „Hey I have a life treating condition and it might help if x is filtered out in my kidney, is that possible? Of course that will make an additional 5€/month , but since we would loose one of our valued customers we will give you 30% of for the first six months“
Readit News
It's a horrible experience; the constant gaslighting grinds you down.
I can especially relate to the idea of being paid to do something that nobody in the company actually wants you to do. The better you are at your job, the more they hate you.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted her to fail. I bet if she had lied and started reporting that there were no PFOS and made up some BS that the old methods of testing were arcane and her new (intentionally flawed) method is better, they would have given her a huge raise and she would have been made employee of the year.
That's the kind of stuff that happened at my previous employer. All the liars and saboteurs at that company ended up being promoted within the company or hired by other companies with big salaries to help them run projects into the ground; which they did diligently.
If you want to create conflict, you better have integrity and leave instead of continuing to use the resources of the group for your crusade. Yet she stayed there and waited literally decades to create outrage about something that has yet to be proven problematic in the long run.
They even alerted the EPA pretty quickly so it is clear to anyone reading between the lines the one acting the most in bad faith is actually her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist…” ok
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS Found”… ok, the PFOS found the scientist?
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS found in Human Blood”… PFOS found a scientist in human blood?
The problem is that there are gramatically valid ways to parse partial versions of the sentence, which you have to reparse as you go through the sentence.
executives from the company 3M
convinced a scientist (presumanly to sign off)
that PFOS (chemicals used for certain non-stick properties in domestic and industrial products)
that seem to leak into human blood when using said products
are safe
you can force a scientists to sign off...
Apparently the theory is that the word "How" in titles is always meaningless clickbait so HN automatically removes it. I don't believe this actually improves things.
Sort of like people misusing the phrase "Ponzi scheme" to refer to basically any kind of unsustainable and ethically-dubious thing whatsoever.
Deleted Comment
Better?
You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring.
The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M.
You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
* When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get.
* A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale.
* But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts.
Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today.
Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort.
US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
In theory their insurance costs would go up and fiduciary duty would compel executives to act properly.
Most countries have the equivalent of corporate manslaughter which in theory should send executives to prison for the behaviour of their subordinates.
The problem with both is that the powers at be don't prosecute very often.
Executives often weasel out in court by simply saying "I didn't know"... when it is 100% their job to know.
I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.
All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes.
It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet.
Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.
Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.
Deleted Comment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_Contamination_of_Minnesot...
Source: I live about 12 miles west of there.
The people involved in that practice should be jailed for murder.
Though it's implied that Johnson's leaving is connected to the PFOS revelation, I don't see the article indicating whether Johnson had told Hansen anything more about it.
(Such as discussions behind closed doors, ultimatums, his own disillusionment/despair, etc.)
> At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contractors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.
> Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.
> Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.
* Johnson thought Hansen knew everything she needed to know;
* Johnson had been incentived/threatened not to say anything;
* Johnson told Hansen something more (possibly NDA-violating), but either Hansen didn't tell the journalist, or the journalist didn't write it; or
* Johnson was too troubled (emotionally, or physical health problems triggered by the stress) to think of where this left Hansen.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Maybe filtering blood would help other tissue by proxy, allowing the blood to hold more? but from what I understand PFOA doesn't just hang around in those organs inert, it binds to proteins which is why it can cause problems.
Also consider that we probably accumulate most of this through ingestion, since it's in pretty much all food and water, but to differing concentrations. So we are constantly consuming this stuff in tiny quantities, but it's always there. People worry about things like teflon in non-stick pans and other products, but that's a product of PFOAs, i.e they were manufactured using them, they are not themselves PFOAs and do not readily break down into them just by handling them (you have to heat your pan to >250c roughly to get it to start vaporising the teflon into an aerosolised PFOA. So while the firefighting foam story is awful, most products are not themselves toxic, the real danger is in what the manufacturing processes has already released into the environment and is now part of the global food chain (particularly in sea food).
In other words, it doesn't matter what you buy or use (personally at least), and we are all eating and drinking it. Any kind of blood filtering would be a continuous process, and it's not clear how effective it would be considering one of the primary routes to exposure is through ingestion, and how it readily binds to and disrupts various tissues in the body.
I suspect anything that would help substantially reverse the process in the human body would need to be more active, e.g a drug that interacted with the PFOA either to render it harmless or reduce it's "elimination half life" (currently thought to be 3 years) to allow it to be released faster than we accumulate it.
</armchair biochemist analysis>
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Human_d...
The smallest dialysis machine is about the size of a laser printer. Many folks become confined to their dialysis schedule, and kidney disease, dialysis or no, has many side effects and can be very painful.
You also can't just have a catch all "filtering of toxins" like that. There are many molecules and proteins in your serum that need to be there and any sort of aggressive filtration will be a problem.
And it will have to be periodically replaced!
Somebody know some bio engineers, I’m hiring.