There are times when quoting rap verses are apropos, then there are times when they are not. Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, opted for the latter, finding himself under an ethics investigation for sending taunting, hip-hop lyric quoting e-mails to the chemical company Syngenta.
Dr. Hayes is a critic of atrazine (he maintains a website dedicated solely to the topic) and believes Syngenta (the world's largest manufacturer of the herbicide -- read: weed killer -- has been trying to debunk his research on its ill effects.
In a real life case of when keeping it real goes wrong, after an alleged run-in with one of its scientists, Dr. Hayes sent numerous e-mails to Syngenta, deriding the company with choice raps quotes from the likes of Ludacris and Beanie Sigel. It is safe to say that Luda was not thinking about scientist beef when he rapped "I'm restless, tryna tell 'em that I'm hotter than a burn of the 3rd degree, Then I try to tell 'em that nobody in the world as hot as me," on his "How Low Remix."
In the same e-mail that uses the Luda quote, which he butchers, as well as others, Dr. Hayes is using ebonic jargon that is painful to read considering the context (this feud is over 10 years long and his research has been used in lawsuits against Syngenta) and the fact that he has a Ph.D.
Syngenta dropped dime on the poetically inclined Dr. Hayes and filed an ethics complaint against him with UC Berkeley officials. Instead of sending e-mails, as a faculty member Dr. Hayes should have been, to quote Common, "trying to innovate and stimulate minds."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Tuesday, August 24th 2010 at 1:31PM
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