By LILA GUTERMAN

In March 1989, the turquoise sea here turned black. When a captain who had been drinking allowed his crew to pilot the Exxon Valdez onto Bligh Reef, the ship hemorrhaged 11 million gallons of oil into a vibrant ecosystem. The accident remains the largest oil spill in American waters.

Money poured into Prince William Sound just after the oil did. The cash paid for the cleanup and for the scientific quest to understand the damage wrought by the oil on the sound's animals and habitats. But today, money threatens to taint the very research that is attempting to identify the spill's lingering effects.

The financial issues drag on thanks to a 1991 civil settlement between Exxon and the federal and Alaskan governments. The oil company agreed to pay $900-million for the spill and promised an additional $100-million if unanticipated damages became evident by 2006. Government-financed researchers say they've uncovered such damages. But scientists financed by Exxon, many of them academics, say unexpected long-term damages don't exist.

The debate has turned as ugly as the oil-soaked beaches that have become the spill's enduring symbol. Even as scientists attempt objectivity, their rancor has escalated. Each side accuses the other of conducting biased studies. Each charges the other with violating the usual rules of scientific discourse.

"An ecosystem never recovers when there's money to be made off of it," says Robert J. Huggett, a toxicologist who is a consultant for the company now known as Exxon Mobil and who this summer retired as vice president for research at Michigan State University.

"It's a little bit of a discouraging comment on science, really," says Daniel Esler, a research associate at Simon Fraser University who has worked on the spill's effects with government financing. "It's unfortunate that one can predict the results of studies based on who's doing it."

Scientists Choose Sides

To the untrained eye, no evidence remains of the dark-brown crude oil -- sometimes a foot thick -- that swamped many of the beaches of Prince William Sound. On a clear August morning, an island's once-tainted beach teems with life. Purple starfish glisten on the rocks waiting for the tide to return. Yellow rockweed clings to small boulders. Mussel shells crunch underfoot. Tiny fish jump out of Prince William Sound's clear waters.

But in 1989, this spot was a slimy morgue. Within weeks of the spill, wind and waves carried the oil to shorelines hundreds of miles from the ship. Death came to hundreds of thousands of seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 22 killer whales, and billions of fish eggs. The animals that survived that foul spring had to endure huge swaths of oil both on the water and ashore. But over the next several months, the oil gradually dissipated thanks to natural processes and to the cleanup efforts, which cost Exxon $2.1-billion.

In 1991 Exxon and the government settled the civil and criminal lawsuits. (A $4.5-billion punitive award that would go to fishermen and other people harmed by the spill is still locked in appeals.) With $900-million in settlement money, the government established the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which oversees restoration and conservation of the ecosystem. The trustees represent three federal agencies and three Alaskan agencies. So far, the trustee council has spent about $170-million on research and monitoring, making the research here one of the most expensive environmental studies in history.

In a section titled "Reopener for Unknown Injury," the settlement allowed the federal and Alaskan governments potentially to claim another $100-million from Exxon by September 2006. The money would pay for restoring "one or more populations, habitats, or species which, as a result of the Oil Spill, have suffered a substantial loss or substantial decline. ..." Such a loss or decline "could not reasonably have been known nor could it reasonably have been anticipated" in 1991, when the settlement was reached.

The trustee council now spends about $5-million a year on research, which focuses on possible long-term effects of the spill and on monitoring species affected by the oil. Every year the trustees issue a request for proposals. Once grant ideas flow in, they go through several layers of assessment, including peer review by outside scientists and evaluation by a scientific committee employed by the trustees.

"We have an open, competitive process," says Phillip R. Mundy, the council's science director, who oversees the government-sponsored work on the spill.

Exxon, meanwhile, has done a smaller but significant amount of research on potential lingering effects of the spill.

"It's largely a defensive mode," says Alan W. Maki, an environmental adviser in Exxon's Anchorage office, who oversees the research. "I see a study coming from the trustees with allegations, and then we'll design a study to examine their conclusions."

Mr. Maki estimates that Exxon has invested "some millions" on post-spill research, and that it now spends a few hundred thousand dollars each year. (Still, if a reporter's experience is typical, Exxon scientists live much more lavishly while in the field than do government-financed researchers. With private state rooms and showers on a chartered cruise ship, the Exxon consultants travel in comfort on the sound. Government scientists, by contrast, pack tightly in shared bunks below deck on a smaller boat.)

Mr. Maki says the threat of the "reopener clause" is a major motivator for Exxon's research. Claims of continuing harm to Prince William Sound could, he says, underlie a government argument that Exxon should pay the additional $100-million, and possibly influence the pending punitive-award case, which could cost the company far more.

So Exxon has hired independent researchers to do their own studies on the current state of the sound, including many well-respected scientists.

Mr. Huggett, for instance, had a long career in toxicology research at the College of William and Mary before becoming an administrator, first at the Environmental Protection Agency and then at Michigan State. John A. Wiens, who studies the ecology of birds, became one of three lead scientists at the Nature Conservancy in 2002, after leaving academe with 200 papers and six books on his CV.

Mr. Wiens says he was originally hesitant to work for the oil company. "I was outraged by the spill," he says. Although he worried that Exxon would exert pressure to produce results favorable to the company, his worries did not come true, he says: "What they told us when we first started working was, 'We know this is bad. We know there are going to be consequences. We just want to know the truth.'"

Nonetheless, Exxon-financed studies have faced skepticism from the start. "Everyone loves to hate Big Oil," says Mr. Maki. "We are always fighting an uphill battle in the public eye."

"You can be politically correct or scientifically correct, but it's hard to be both at the same time," says David S. Page, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Bowdoin College, and a consultant to Exxon.

Outside contractors conducting research for the company design studies in collaboration with Mr. Maki and other Exxon scientists. The contract investigators are paid hourly or daily wages. Most academics receive payment in the range of $1,000 per day, and some scientists' work for Exxon exceeds a month out of the year. The expenses for the research work itself are covered by Exxon, whose scientists often accompany the consultants in the field and share authorship of resulting research papers.

Contradictory Conclusions

Despite the controversy, the two sides have reached some broadly accepted conclusions. Scientists agree that many animals have recovered from the spill. Among them are bald eagles, river otters, and a seabird called the common murre, which made up most of the oiled carcasses found just after the spill. No entire species is threatened by the spill.

Scientists also agree that almost no oil remains in the waters of Prince William Sound and that the vast majority of its beaches are clean.

But the amount of oil polluting the shorelines generated intense debate only a few years ago. In 2001 government scientists conducted a $500,000 project to evaluate how much oil lingered on the sound's beaches. Led by Jeffrey W. Short, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Auke Bay, Alaska, the scientists randomly surveyed 91 beaches in the western, oiled part of Prince William Sound. They searched for lingering oil on the beaches' surfaces and dug about 9,000 pits to find subsurface oil. The work began in May and continued until September.

In August Mr. Short was surprised to see he had company. "Exxon shows up and starts following us around," he recalls. "After we left a beach, they'd go and look at what we did. It's a free ocean, so that's fine."

In the winter he presented preliminary results at a public conference. His team had found far more oil than anyone had expected based on smaller surveys done in the years immediately following the spill.

Mr. Short estimated that more than 16,000 gallons of oil still polluted 28 acres of beaches. Although that was a small fraction of the original 11 million gallons spilled, the amount was concentrated on a few beaches, and the estimate generated headlines. The Anchorage Daily News solicited essays from Mr. Short and from Mr. Page, of Bowdoin College, who was the scientist tracking Mr. Short's progress that summer.

In a January 2002 column in that newspaper, Mr. Short reported that the persistence and toxicity of the oil were "substantially greater than previously recognized." Mr. Page, in a counterargument, undercut the research, charging that Mr. Short's study was biased. He also said that the government researchers had not performed all the work they reported.

Based on his review of the beaches that Mr. Short's team visited, Mr. Page wrote: "We found clear evidence of activity at 33 sites and were able to map the locations of 875 pits. Had thousands been dug, we would have located many more."

Mr. Short was shocked. Exxon's boat, he knew, didn't start following the researchers until they were three-quarters done with the study -- and in some cases, visited beaches either before the government scientists got there or three months after the scientists had refilled their pits. Besides, he says, a team of approximately 10 people worked with him on every beach and kept detailed notes. "It's not like we were lacking for witnesses," he says.

The essay amounted to an accusation of scientific fraud, which triggered a government inquiry that ultimately cleared Mr. Short. The government called the research a "rigorous, well-designed and executed study." Mr. Short hired a lawyer, who sent Mr. Page a letter warning him that his article constituted defamation. Mr. Page neither responded nor issued a retraction.

He says now that Mr. Short and others overreacted to his essay. "I don't think that what I said in that op-ed piece was inappropriate," he says. "In science, you're constantly questioning what other people do and what their conclusions are. That's part of the process."

But others say Mr. Page's charges went far beyond the norm. "That was outrageous," says Mr. Mundy, the trustee council's scientific director. Says Charles H. Peterson, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "It was simply astounding. I've never seen anything like it."

To this day, Mr. Page describes much of his research as "looking over the shoulder of NOAA scientists." Before the Exxon Valdez he had studied many other oil spills, often in conjunction with oil companies, and he says that little remains to be learned in Alaska.

"To be honest, I cannot give you any rational scientific reason why studies should be going on for 15 years," he says. "The fat lady sang a long time ago."

A Question of Context

But since the tempest in the winter of 2002, Exxon scientists have largely come to accept the results of Mr. Short's study. And a prediction Mr. Page made in the Anchorage Daily News has proved false: Mr. Page wrote that the study "will not stand the test of rigorous and unbiased scientific scrutiny." Mr. Short and his colleagues published their results in January 2004 in a peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Science and Technology.

"Yeah, there is oil," concedes Exxon's Mr. Maki. "I don't care if it's 12 acres, or 28, or 36, or 42. The key question is, Is it having an effect in the food chain?"

That question motivates much of the research a group of Exxon-sponsored scientists is performing this year. Led by Mr. Huggett, the scientists collect clams and mussels to search for signs of oil. If the scientists find no oil in the bivalves, he says, "you can't convince me they're being harmed by it."

To do the work, the scientists travel at low tide to the sound's rocky beaches to dig for clams and to pluck mussels off rocks. A. Edward Bence, a research adviser from Exxon Mobil in Houston, collects the samples in jars and bags, stores them in a cooler, and prepares them for mailing to the lab that will analyze them.

Though the scientists are focusing on bivalves here, the public cares most deeply about the sea otters that eat the clams and mussels. People want to know whether the cute mammals, whose oil-soaked fur captured national sympathy in 1989, are still suffering from the aftereffects of the spill. (See box on facing page.)

Sea otters dig for clams much as the Exxon scientists do, encountering subsurface oil where it is present. Even this summer, 15 years after the spill, when scientists (and presumably otters) scoop away the surface, an oily sheen occasionally appears on the sediments and sometimes a viscous dark-brown fluid flows into the hole.

Researchers tied to the government and to Exxon can't agree on whether sea otters are still being harmed by the oil spill. They also can't agree on an issue that is even more controversial: whether traces of oil in streams can damage fish eggs.

Even if oil does affect animals, the Exxon researchers say, it is hard to pin the blame on the oil spill. Exxon scientists have spent years documenting other sources of hydrocarbons in Prince William Sound, from natural oil seeps to pollution from roads, boats, and other sources. Much more oil from those other sources, they argue, pollutes the sound than does oil from the spill.

Mr. Page has studied the hydrocarbon "fingerprints" of oil in the sediments and in the mussels and clams of Prince William Sound. By looking at the chemicals, he can trace where the oil came from. "The input from spill remnants is really, in the great scheme of things, negligible," he says.

But Mr. Short says Mr. Page's studies on the oil's source are biased. Instead of randomly sampling sites in the sound, he says, Mr. Page chose only locations most polluted by non-Valdez oil.

A Red-Hot Debate

Researchers who study the environment say they are used to controversy about their science. But the whiff of money here has increased the stakes and the temperature of the debate.

In particular, researchers have grappled over sharing data. Government-backed scientists complain bitterly that they have repeatedly asked for data from the Exxon side but have been denied. But Mr. Maki says he is unaware of Exxon's denying any such requests. "We have nothing to hide," he says.

Meanwhile, Exxon has used unusually aggressive techniques to get access to government scientists' work.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the oil company has filed numerous requests for copies of files, data, and notes from the NOAA researchers and from other government researchers. The act requires government employees to disclose records after a written request.

Some of the requests, says Mr. Short, "not only wanted data for studies that were in print, they wanted data for studies that were still being written up. And in fact they wanted data from studies as we collected it." He and others voice concern that outsiders would misinterpret raw data that the scientists had not had a chance to analyze or even check for errors.

For months after a request, several NOAA employees would spend a third of their time copying files for Exxon, Mr. Short says. The latest request has worn out his patience. He is afraid that government scientists would "get so tied up in this that we'd never get the study done." The U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA's parent agency, has not decided whether it will require the researchers to comply.

Mr. Maki says Exxon resorted to the formal requests out of frustration. After hearing presentations about trustee-financed studies at conferences, he says, "we'd never see the data." Furthermore, says Michael F. Smith, Exxon's lead environmental lawyer, if Exxon submits a request and government scientists don't provide materials, he suspects he could successfully argue that those materials should not be allowed as evidence in court.

Biased Science?

Without the up-for-grabs $100-million, much of the research on the spill's effects would dry up. Many of the scientists would lose a source of research funds, an addition to their income, or a reason to regularly visit an exquisite location.

But scientists insist they have maintained their objectivity. The Exxon scientists interviewed by The Chronicle deny to a person that the company has ever told them what to publish or killed a study plan because of fears that it would find the "wrong" answer.

At the same time, though, Exxon scientists also cannot recall having published research papers that documented any long-term damages, which raises the question of whether none exist or whether researchers with contracts from the company simply have focused on studies that won't harm Exxon's standing in the debate.

"They're given latitude to design studies," says James L. Bodkin, a sea-otter specialist with the United States Geological Survey. "Clearly it's to their advantage not to find damages."

In fact, with money from the trustee council, Mr. Peterson, of North Carolina; Roger H. Green, a retired statistician from the University of Western Ontario; and two other scientists published a paper in 2001 that found Exxon's studies to be statistically weak. Exxon scientists searching for lingering oil had not collected enough samples to separate subtle signals of the spill from the background noise, they said.

Mr. Green says that in Exxon's attempts to find oil from the spill, "an awful lot of sampling effort was in places where you're guaranteed not to find any oil." He compares their surveys of those sites to trying to count blue whales by sampling all the habitats on earth, including deserts.

The Exxon scientists retort that government-financed researchers bias their research designs in order to continue to receive money for their work. If an animal recovers, scientists lose their source of funds.

Stephen M. Murphy has seen that happen. Mr. Murphy, research director and president of ABR, an environmental-research company in Fairbanks, has worked for both Exxon and the government. In 1998 he studied black oystercatchers for the government and found that the birds had recovered. The trustee council then lost interest in his research, he says.

"That, in my view, is a dangerous way to fund things," Mr. Murphy says.

One August afternoon, Mr. Murphy relaxes in a beach chair on a small motorboat, binoculars in hand. He and a colleague are circling several of western Prince William Sound's small islands, making note of which bird species they see, and where. Having just spotted five black oystercatchers, a mew gull, and two harlequin ducks, Mr. Murphy says, "You can see right here that this is enjoyable work."

Government scientists defend their studies and the philosophy behind the financing decisions. Because the trustee council's purpose is to restore the ecosystem, it needs to find out which species are still suffering. Besides, say several of the scientists, a fundamental difference exists between how bias might affect their research and Exxon's.

Exxon scientists, they say, can design studies so statistically weak that they won't find effects. But for the government-financed researchers to claim that an effect has occurred, one must have actually taken place -- unless the scientists have made an error or falsified their data, which they deny having done.

Scientists may soon confront the issues head-on. If the government files a claim to the additional $100-million under the reopener clause, it must do so by 2006. Officials at the offices of Alaska's attorney general and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to say whether they planned to do so.

Some of the trustee-financed scientists say their data suggest the government has a strong case. "My 2001 study is nothing if not an unforeseen effect, because of the unanticipated persistence of the oil," says Mr. Short.

'The Money Stays in the Bank'

But the government might have trouble satisfying another part of the reopener clause: proposing steps to restore the injured species or habitats. Very little research has focused on trying to heal species that may still be feeling the oil spill's effects.

Mr. Mundy, the trustee council's science director, says he does not know of remedies that would offset the unanticipated damages. "If you cannot specify a remedy," he says, "then the money stays in the bank."

Exxon will probably challenge any request, says Mr. Smith, the company's lawyer. "We've seen nothing that wasn't described or anticipated," he says.

On Prince William Sound, the arguments fade as afternoon sunlight glints off the ocean. Researchers put down their shovels and play tourist for a moment, watching as a river otter swims silently to an island, clambers up its bank, and disappears into a spruce forest. But beneath their feet, the scientists know, oil from the Exxon Valdez still permeates the deeper layers of the beach.

With so much at stake, researchers will continue to debate for years whether that lingering oil is harming the sound. Scientific clarity will emerge only after the lawsuits have ceased, the money has dried up, and the combatants have retired or died. By that time, the waves lapping at the shore will probably have washed away the last marks of the oil spill.

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 5, Page A12