[10] Described by his colleagues as a "man of high scientific standards who also knew how to make a dollar", Calandra was an effective entrepreneur; his laboratory was contracted by the Department of Defense to evaluate irradiationally preserved food within its first year of operation.

At that time, it listed its research areas as "industrial toxicology, food, drugs, cosmetics, pharmacology, radioisotopes, medical, dental, and veterinary products".

[15] Irregularities in IBT's data were discovered in April 1976 by Adrian Gross, an investigator at the Food and Drug Administration, whose aide retrieved one of the laboratory's naproxen studies that had been conducted for Syntex, a pharmaceutical company recently outed by a whistleblower.

[13][20][21] During Gross' physical inspection of the laboratory, he gained access to the study's raw safety data and found frequent references to an unknown acronym, "TBD/TDA," which he said perplexed him until learning that it denoted a testing animal whose body had "too badly decomposed.

Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), in which the integrity of safety data produced by IBT, as well as G. D. Searle & Company and Biometric Testing, Inc., was publicly called into question by FDA officials.

[25] Plank parted ways with IBT in April, and Philip Smith, who would later testify against the laboratory, was "fired and given 20 minutes to clean out his office" in approximately June 1977.

"[19][27] IBT was criminally implicated in 1977 for producing fraudulent studies on widely used household and industrial products, including Nemacur, Sencor, Naprosyn, and trichlorocarbanilide.

"[6][28] Consequently, IBT would later be described as being "at the center of one of the most far-reaching scandals in modern science, as thousands of its studies were revealed through EPA and FDA investigations to be fraudulent or grossly inadequate.

[30][page needed] In October 1983, three former officials of the company were convicted by a US federal jury of fabricating key product safety tests used to gain government approval for marketing two popular pesticides and two commonly used drugs.

[46][47] The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on July 11, 1983, that 34 pesticides would be pulled from the market unless manufacturers provided additional safety data within 90 days, although an indefinite exception was made for those who committed to do so at a later time.

[48] In September 1983, the agency revealed that it was still a "long way from solving problems associated with the integrity of hundreds of studies produced by IBT and other large independent laboratories.

"[7] Keith Schneider reported in the Winter 1983 edition of Amicus Journal that "IBT performed over 2,000 key product safety tests approved by federal scientists to market 212 agricultural pesticides.

[49][50][51] The Law Reform Commission of Canada noted in a 1987 report that Canadian agriculture's increasing dependence on pesticides had led to inaction against many of those approved on the basis of IBT's research data.

[54] According to various reports, IBT's clientele included a wide variety of companies such as 3M, American Cyanamid, American Seed, Avitrol Corp, BFC, Black Leaf Chemical, Buckman, Casoron, Chemagro, Chevron, Ciba‑Geigy, Conrel, Diamond Shamrock, Dow Corning, DuPont, FMC, Glyco, Gulf, MGK, Mobay, Mobil, Monsanto, Montedison, Nissan, Noram, Olin, Penwalt, Procter & Gamble, PPG, Sandoz, Shell, Thompson-Hayward, Uniroyal, Upjohn, US Borax, Velsicol Chemical Company, Vertac Chemical Corporation, and Zoecon, as well as the United States Army, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the World Health Organization.

[15] The Ecologist claimed in a 2007 article that IBT had provided expert testimony against Douglas Gowan during a court case in which Monsanto allegedly sought to discredit and silence him over the wanton disposal of PCBs and other toxic waste at Brofiscin Quarry.