Had Skinner pressed on with the investigation, aspartame's manufacturer would have been forced to explain a long history of fabricated laboratory tests and slippery dealings with federal regulators, not to mention the public. Dr. Alexander Schmidt, a former FDA commissioner, said of the original Aspartame Task Force investigation: "What was discovered was reprehensible. . .incredibly sloppy science." A 1980 public board of inquiry opined that the company's testing procedures were "bizarre."68 

Searle's decision to market aspartame culminated with the falsification of test results to obtain FDA approval . In November 1969, officials of the firm hired Dr. Harry Waisman, a researcher for the University of Wisconsin, to test for brain damage in rhesus monkeys. Seven monkeys were fed aspartame for periods up to one year. In the end, though, the evaluation flopped because the technicians failed to perform the intelligence tests and autopsies required to determine brain damage. When questioned about the false data by the FDA, Searle officials claimed to have had no direct control over the study. But the protocol for the study was written by a Searle pathologist *after* it had begun. And, according to Dr. Gross, "Frequent high-level communications took place between Searle executives and Dr. Waisman prior to and during the study." 69 

To make matters worse, Dr. Waisman died in March, 1971, in mid-study. 

Searle submitted the toxicity test to the FDA on October 12, 1972. It bore Dr. Waisman's name as coauthor. Richard Merrill noted: "Dr. Waisman was the expert in the field and his name would carry great weight," but complained to Skinner that Searle took "great literary license" in drafting the report, "which *covers up* the admitted inadequacy of the design, control and documentation of this study." 70 

Searle submitted some 150 test reports, yet Dr. Martha Freeman of the FDA Bureau of Drugs noted in a 1973 memo, "the information provided is inadequate to permit an evaluation of the potential toxicity of aspartame." 71 The FDA task force set up by Dr. Schmidt in 1975 reviewed 25 studies on seven products manufactured by G.D. Searle, a total of 500 pages and 15,000 exhibits.72 Searle was held to be the author of "reports that the FDA believes contain false information" and "concealed facts resulting from having drafted Dr. Waisman's 'pilot' monkey study so that it would *appear* to be a valid, thorough scientific study," and not a forgery. 

In 1975 Searle submitted a battery of cancer test results entitled "The Willigan Report, which contained a statistical table that excluded four malignant mammary tumors detected by Dr. Willigan and incorporated in his data. The malignancies were made to appear benign. Searle dismissed the misrepresentation as a computer "programming error" undetected by supervising statisticians. Dr. Gross interviewed all concerned with the tests. He concluded in a statement to Metzenbaum's committee in August, 1985, that "to accept the Searle explanation is to believe that the unfavorable mammary malignancy data were innocently omitted from the summary table four separate times by three different individuals."74 

The Waisman and Willigan Reports were prepared by Searle Labs, as were 88% of the safety evaluations conducted by 1981.75 They are typical of the shoddy documentation upon which FDA Commissioner Hayes based his decision that aspartame does not constitute a public health risk. Although two members of the 1975 task force considered the tests to be criminal frauds, Hayes and Searle declared the results valid. In an appeal to Hayes' decision, James Turner said: "The entire argument that since the studies are no longer considered fraudulent *by FDA* they are therefore scientifically valid is an example of a rhetorical shell game that, if successful, can only bring discredit and ridicule on the FDA."76 

Dr. Gross, the chief scientist on the FDA task force, told the CBS *Nightly News* staff in January, 1984, that Searle made "*deliberate* decisions" to cloak the toxic effects of aspartame. "They took great pains to camouflage these shortcomings of the study,'' Gross said, "as I say, filter and just present to the FDA what they wished the FDA to know. And they did other *terrible* things. For instance, animals would develop tumors while they were under study-well, G.D. Searle would *remove these tumors from the animals*," surgically masking the cancerous effects of aspartame.77 Yet one 1986 _New England Journal of Medicine_ article claimed that noncompulsive aspartame intake has "no sinister effects." 

Dr. Woodrow Monte told CBS, "Every time a truly impartial team of scientists have looked at NutraSweet, it has been turned down." Dr. Monte, director of the nutrition laboratory at Arizona State University, held that these studies "show *extreme* dangers over the long term."78 

Dr. Monte was rewarded for his comments by a fusillade from the press. On February 23, Dan Dorfman, a business news reporter for WCBS in New York, broke a story that several CBS employees had invested in options on NutraSweet that pay off if the stock price drops.79 Dr. Monte and his attorney had purchased the options as well. It emerged that the CBS staffers had purchased the options on the advice of stock market newsletters printed prior to the nightly news report. The investments were not illegal, nor did they reap a profit. Searle's stock was not affected by the publicity, and the investors took a loss. 

Nevertheless, the _Wall Street Journal_ ran a front-page story condemning the "inside trading." Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media picked up the cudgel against Dr. Monte and the CBS employees as if they'd committed a shocking Wall Street swindle.80 Accuracy in Media, formed in 1969, is an intelligence operation abetted by the CIA. The rabidly right-wing organization was co-founded by Bernard Yoh, a counter-insurgency adviser under the notorious Edward Landsdale in Vietnam, and a fount of CIA funds to military intelligence units in the Delta region. Board member Elbridge Durbrow was once a foreign service "diplomat," and advised commanders of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Another AIM board member, Frank Trager, has conducted research for the Pentagon and CIA, and churns out pamphlets on international business and intelligence operations. Major financial contributors to AIM include Richard Nixon, "Bebe" Rebozo, Edward Scripps, the wretched Dr. Edward Teller and former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon.81 

Accuracy in Media is a strident advocate of the chemical industry, which provides it with generous funding. The media "watchdog" has long waged a campaign on behalf of dioxin, denouncing the "Agent Orange scare" as the creation of delirious, anti-business liberals. Among the leading manufacturers of Agent Orange for the Vietnam war effort was Monsanto, preparing-at the very moment AIM took aim at detractors of NutraSweet[TM]- to buy G.D. Searle.