Douglas Gowan

Douglas Gowan (1943–2018)^[1][2] was a former Assistant Parliamentary Secretary at the National Farmers Union and a researcher on PCBs. He found pollution near Brofiscin Quarry in Wales and filed the first official report in 1972 after nine cows on a local farm died of poisoning.^[3]

In 2007 The Ecologist reported that Gowan had been offered witness protection after receiving death threats.^[1] He also stated that he had been discredited by Monsanto through a two-year smear campaign.^[4][5]

His work formed the basis of the BBC Radio 4 series Buried: The Last Witness, first broadcast in June 2024.^[6][7]

Welsh actor Michael Sheen first read Gowan's name in an article in Wikipedia in 2017,^{[2][note 1]} visited him and recorded a seven-hour interview, and spoke about him in his 2017 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture.^[8][9]

Notes

1. The reference Sheen read may have been the sentence "The Ecologist claimed in a 2007 article that IBT had provided expert testimony against Douglas Gowan during a court case ..." in the article Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, which was in the encyclopedia during 2017.