Suemedha Sood of the Washington Independent:

In a surprising move last year, the Environmental Protection Agency fired the chairwoman of a chemical review panel six months after the panel took place. When Dr. Deborah Rice, a toxicologist for the Maine state health department, was thrown off a peer review panel at the request of the chemical industry, the EPA’s ethics were called into question.

The unusual circumstances have sparked a Congressional investigation by the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. After Congress began its investigation, the EPA decided to run its own — an internal study by the agency’s inspector general.

House Democrats, including the Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), have blasted the chemical industry lobby for wielding undue influence over EPA science. Yet, the chemical industry and the EPA stand by their joint decision to remove Rice from the panel.

The fired chairwoman sat down with The Washington Independent for her first extensive interview since her dismissal almost a year ago. In a series of telephone conversations, Rice told TWI that the circumstances surrounding her removal were unprecedented. She talked about how stunned she was to be dismissed, why the EPA’s actions were unexpected and what consequences this could have for children’s health.

Rice, 61, had worked for the EPA for four years before joining the Maine Dept. of Health and Human Services. In 2004, she had been awarded one of the EPA’s most prestigious scientific awards — the Scientific and Technological Achievement Award — for her “exceptionally high-quality research” on the toxicity of lead. Regarded as an expert in environmental toxicology, Rice was asked by the EPA to chair a February 2007 review panel on the fire retardant deca (or decabromodiphenyl ether). The five-member panel carried out a standard review of the chemical’s safety.

Rice has served as an expert on more than 30 review panels and assessment committees for the EPA and other government agencies. In fact, since she was fired from the deca panel in August, she has served on another EPA review panel — for the metal thallium.

As Rice remembers it, she did nothing different on the deca panel than all her other panels. But she was later dismissed, after the American Chemistry Council, the lobby group for the chemical industry, wrote a letter to the EPA asking for her removal. The EPA charged her with conflict of interest because she had previously recommended the banning of deca to the Maine state legislature. (Maine has since passed the ban.)

Ahmed E. Ahmed, a pathology professor at the Univ. of Texas Medical Branch, was one of the panelists on the deca panel. Until TWI contacted him for this story, Ahmed was unaware that Rice had been fired.

He said that he did not notice Rice displaying bias. “If there was any [bias] I don’t know about it and I did not see it,” Ahmed said. “There was a scientific rationale for every decision we made.”

During the panel, Ahmed said, he did not feel any undue influence or pressure coming from Rice as chairwoman. “Her comments were highly scientific in the context of the science available,” he said. Ahmed also said that he didn’t notice anything unusual about this board. “Everyone was presenting his side of expertise into the concepts we were discussing,” he said, “not something unexpected or politically motivated or anything.”

Herbert Needleman, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, has been a colleague of Rice’s since the 1970s. Both studied lead toxicity and have appeared at many meetings and public discussions together. When the news of Rice’s dismissal became public, Needleman wrote a paper in the journal PLoS Biology titled “The Case of Deborah Rice: Who Is the Environmental Protection Agency Protecting?” In an interview with TWI, Needleman called the EPA’s decision to fire Rice from the panel “an outrage.”

“That’s an extraordinary step to take,” he said. “Someone who won a major award from the EPA for her science, asked to chair this committee — which is a big job that she took willingly — someone held in the highest regard by her colleagues. For [the EPA] to remove her is ridiculous. It’s outrageous.”

Though Rice is not an EPA employee, …

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