Biology Lectures to Focus on Negative Effects of Herbicides

Tyrone Hayes, assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at University of California, Berkeley will give two lectures during his visit to Illinois State University as the School of Biological Sciences 2010 Rilett Lecturer. He will present "An herbicide that does more than kill weeds: atrazine-induced chemical castration, feminization, homosexuality, and breast/prostate cancer" on Thursday, March 18 at noon in Schroeder Hall Annex 238. His public seminar "From Silent Spring to Silent Night: A Tale of Toads and Men" is set for 7 p.m. in the Bone Student Center Brown Ballroom.

Hayes earned his Ph.D. in integrative biology in 1993 at University of California, Berkley. His primary research focuses on the role of environmental factors on growth and development in amphibians, specifically the effects of endocrine-disrupting pesticides on amphibian growth, development, reproduction and immune function and how these studies predict effects in other wildlife and humans. He has pioneered the field by showing that atrazine can alter normal development in animals resulting in a multitude of developmental defects, deformities, and cancer.

Until recently, atrazine was the number one herbicide sold in the world. Atrazine is used with crops such as corn in more than 80 countries, but it is banned in all of Europe. A typical farmer applies atrazine at 290 million times the levels Hayes' group used in their lab studies. Hayes' research has shown that "there's enough atrazine in rainwater to make frogs hermaphroditic" and Illinois' public waterways have been shown to contain atrazine at levels high enough to cause developmental defects. At such high levels, atrazine has been implicated in inducing various types of cancer including breast and prostate cancer.