University of Missouri biology professor Frederick vom Saal has been sounding the alarm about bisphenol A for a decade. Has he got your attention?

Other scientists at the meeting don't remember it this way. Oehlmann, the scientist who did the snail study, writes in an e-mail, "I attended that meeting in Berlin in 2003 but do not remember a person leaving the room after being asked a particular question." Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University who attended the Berlin symposium, says via e-mail: "There were several heated discussions at the meeting, but I do not recall anything like this."

Waechter wasn't available for comment. But Walton, Dow Chemical's spokesman, explains Waechter's behavior in an e-mail: Walton says that, according to Waechter, the confrontation happened on a stairway outside the meeting hall. "Dr. Waechter said that he told Dr. Welshons that he had a telephone call he needed to make at that moment and that he would not be able to have that discussion then, and that he then proceeded to his hotel room to make his telephone call. Dr. Waechter said the entire discussion took only a few seconds," Walton writes.

In 2004, vom Saal and another endocrinologist, Claude Hughes, conducted a review of the 115 published studies on bisphenol A and concluded that 90 percent of government studies found adverse low-dose effects, but not a single industry-funded study found any effect.

"Honesty in industry is not a requirement," vom Saal says. "As a matter of fact, the willingness to be dishonest seems to be the criterion for these people being hired and representing the chemical industry. We're playing on a very uneven playing field when we talk to them."

Welshons nods. "They can lie, and we can't."

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Concern over chemicals such as bisphenol A eventually came to the attention of the government agencies charged with protecting public health. However, vom Saal and his fellow researchers have watched in disgust as federal agencies repeatedly fumble their responses.

The Environmental Protection Agency was supposed to be doing something about bisphenol A more than ten years ago.

In 1996, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, mandating that by 2000 the EPA was to begin protecting consumers from endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as those used in pesticides and plastics.

Scientists don't know how many of the 80,000 federally registered chemicals act as hormone disruptors. This year, the EPA was to have begun screening the first round of 50 to 100 chemicals. The tests haven't started yet.

The delay is partly because the EPA rounded up panels of experts to evaluate the process. Scientists were invited, but so were representatives of the chemical industry. Not surprisingly, consensus was hard to come by.

Five EPA panels have met to advise the EPA on chemical screening. Nagel was invited to be part of the second EPA panel for the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program from 2001-03. She listened in frustration as fellow panelists dismissed the importance of measuring low-dose effects of hormones such as bisphenol A and failed to recognize the distinction between testing the chemicals on fetal animals versus adult animals.

Nagel says that on such panels, industry representatives are able to dilute the process because of their tenacity in insisting that there is controversy in science where none really exists. The panels also try not to include particularly outspoken scientists. "They deselect people like Fred and me," she says. "They want people who are trying to bend over backwards not to have an opinion. But industry is never not trying to further their cause."

Nagel was not invited to join later panels. The screening program's participants have since decided to conduct hormone testing on a breed of rat that many endocrinologists consider a bad candidate for such study. The panelists also chose to feed the rats a type of chow that is high in soy, which contains enough natural estrogens to disrupt the study findings. Perhaps worst of all, the panel concluded that it was open to allowing chemical companies to tailor the tests to their liking.

"That's not uncommon at all," Nagel says. "Traditionally, these panels will say, 'Here's the guidelines for the tests, but you can choose one of these four ways [to carry them out].'"

The flaws in this effort were widely reported. For instance, The Dallas Morning News revealed that the EPA had solicited advice on what breed of rat to use from a toxicologist who works for a company contracted by the chemical industry.

Last month, a House committee opened an investigation on rumored conflicts of interest in the scientific panels that advise the EPA.

But the EPA isn't the only federal agency battling conflict-of-interest accusations. Another federal agency, the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, which is part of the U.S. National Toxicology Program, convened an expert panel on bisphenol A in 1997. Naturally, vom Saal wanted to be part of the process, but he was barred. No scientists were allowed to be part of the CERHR panel if they'd published a study on bisphenol A.

The American Chemistry Council, on its Web site, explains why it agrees with this decision: "Scientists who have conducted significant amounts of research or have otherwise taken a position on the chemical of interest, either favorable or unfavorable, are generally excluded from participation on the panel to avoid conflicts of interest or bias."

Vom Saal calls this position "absolutely based on complete ignorance of the way science works. What we love about what we do is it's absolutely self-correcting. Unlike practically any other field, if you publish something important and it's wrong.... It's critical that other scientists point that out."

Because more than 200 studies have confirmed vom Saal's initial hypothesis on bisphenol A, "it's not a debated hypothesis anymore," he says. "And the idea that we proposed that and published that makes us biased — when 200 independent groups have confirmed it — there's something very, very seriously wrong with that message."

So vom Saal flew to Virginia on his own dime to attend March 2007 meetings of the CERHR panel on bisphenol A, joining other scientists and members of the press in the audience. Like Nagel, he was disgusted by the basic scientific misunderstandings he was hearing from members of the appointed panel.

"It was like listening to a high school debate or something," vom Saal says of the panel's arguments. "All of the critical issues that Wade, Susan and I and other scientists working in the field have been raising ... they weren't discussing that. They were saying, 'Humans are exposed to bisphenol A orally, and it's completely metabolized.' What they were sitting there saying is completely contradicted by a large scientific literature."

The panel threw out studies by vom Saal and many others because of vom Saal's methodology. Panelists disagreed with any study that used injection as a method to introduce bisphenol A to mice, claiming that because humans absorb bisphenol A through drinking water and food, the only acceptable test method was to feed it to mice. But bisphenol A is most dangerous to fetuses, which absorb the chemical through their mothers' bodies rather than by eating it, vom Saal and other scientists argued in letters they submitted as public comments on the process. And because bisphenol A is present in air and water, digestion isn't the only means by which people come into contact with it. Bisphenol A can enter through the lungs and even through the skin (the same way that birth control does in patch form).

The CERHR panel was ultimately discredited, though not by vom Saal. In a March 7, 2007, Los Angeles Times story, reporter Marla Cone revealed that Sciences International, the company contracted to write the CERHR's reports, had been funded by more than 50 chemical companies, including Dow Chemical. The firm had drafted reports analyzing seventeen chemicals, including bisphenol A. The conflict of interest had gone under the radar since 1998, when Virginia-based Sciences International first landed the $4.3 million contract to help manage the CERHR.

The Los Angeles Times story was published the same day that one of the CERHR's panel meetings was taking place. Vom Saal says he was in the room when the director of the CERHR, Mike Shelby, walked in and dismissed the meeting.

"He said, 'Basically, the panel meeting's over,'" vom Saal remembers with a laugh. "Yeah, the Los Angeles Times article came out basically saying that this is a completely corrupt process."

Congress is starting to notice industry science-for-sale schemes. John Dingell, a Democratic representative from Michigan and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, just launched an investigation into the Weinberg Group Inc., a Washington, D.C. firm hired by the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups to come up with scientific findings in their favor. Among the documents uncovered in the congressional probe was a 2003 memo from the Weinberg Group to the chemical manufacturer DuPont that read, in part, "We will harness ... the scientific and intellectual capital of our company with one goal in mind — creating the outcome our client desires."