A federal judge dismissed a key plaintiffs’ expert in litigation over Syngenta’s paraquat herbicide after finding his conclusions were based on a “methodological flip-flop.”
Judge Nancy Rosenstengel, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois who is overseeing the paraquat multidistrict litigation, found that Dr. Martin Wells, a biostatistician and epidemiologist and a professor at Cornell University, used unreliable methodologies in concluding that exposure to paraquat, first sold in the 1960s to professionals to kill weeds and grasses prior to planting crops, causes Parkinson’s disease.
