Corporations Waging War on Biotech Critics, Independent Science

Four biologists from Europe and North America met face to face for the first
time on the University of California’s Berkeley campus last month.

Although none of them is particularly famous as a scientist — not one Nobel
among them — they know each other’s names and work as well as if they had been
working together for 10 years in the same laboratory. They share a painful
experience.

Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each made a simple but
dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same powerful industry
— biotechnology — that by then had become the handmaiden of industrial
agriculture and the darling of venture capitalists, who are still hoping they
have invested their most recent billions in "the next big thing."

If any one of the experiments of these four scientists is proved through
replication to be valid, the already troubled agricultural arm of biotech will
be in truly dire straits. No one knows that better than Monsanto, Sygenta and
other biotech firms that have so aggressively attacked the four discoveries in
question.

When he was the principal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute in
Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed transgenically modified
potatoes to rodents in one of the few experiments that have ever tested the
safety of genetically modified food in animals or humans. Almost immediately,
the rats displayed tissue and immunological damage.

After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review and were
published in the United Kingdom’s leading medical journal, Lancet, Pusztai’s
home was burglarized and his research files taken.

Soon thereafter, he was fired from his job at Rowett, and he has since suffered
an orchestrated international campaign of discreditation, in which Prime
Minister Tony Blair played an active role.

While Pusztai was fighting for his professional life, Cornell Professor John
Losey was patiently dusting milkweed leaves with genetically modified corn
pollen. When monarch butterfly larvae that ate the leaves died in significant
numbers (while a control group fed nongenetically modified pollen all survived),
Losey was not particularly surprised.

The new gene patched into the butterfly’s genome was inserted to produce an
internal pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), intended to attack and kill the
corn borer and some particularly troublesome moth caterpillars.

What did surprise Losey was the vehement attack on his study that followed from
Novartis and Monsanto, their open attempts to discredit his work and the extent
to which mass media leapt to their support. Losey is still at Cornell, where his
future seems secure.

Not true of Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist in the plant sciences
department at UC Berkeley. In 2000, Chapela discovered that pollen had drifted
several miles from a field of genetically modified corn in Chiapas into the
remote mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico, landing in the last reserve of biodiverse
maize in the world.

If genes from the rogue pollen actually penetrated the DNA of traditional crops,
they could potentially eliminate maize biodiversity forever. In his report,
Chapela cautiously stated that this indeed might have happened. He expressed
that sentiment in a peer-reviewed study published by Nature in November 2001.

After an aggressive public relations campaign mounted for Monsanto by the
Bivings Group, a global PR firm that began with a vicious e-mail attack mounted
by two "scientists" who turned out to be fictitious, Nature editors did
something they had never done in their 133 years of existence. They published a
cautious partial retraction of the Chapela report. Largely on the strength of
that retraction, Chapela was recently denied tenure at UC Berkeley and informed
that he would not be reoffered his teaching assignment in the fall.

When Tyrone Hayes, a UC Berkeley endocrinologist specializing in amphibian
development, exposed young frogs in his lab to very small doses of the herbicide
Atrazine, they first failed to develop normal larynxes and later displayed
serious reproductive problems (males became hermaphrodites), suggesting that
Atrazine might be an endocrine disrupter.

Hayes’ subsequent experience differed slightly from the other panelists’, but
was no less troubling to academic scientists. As soon as word of Hayes’ findings
reached Sygenta Corp. (formerly Novartis) and its contractor, Ecorisk Inc.,
attempts were made to stall his research. Funding was withheld. It was a
critical time, as the EPA was close to making a final ruling on Atrazine.
Hermaphroditic frogs would not help Sygenta’s cause.

Hayes continued the research with his own funds and found more of the same
results, whereupon Sygenta offered him $2 million to continue his research "in a
private setting." A committed teacher with a lab full of loyal students, Hayes
declined the offer and proceeded with research that he knew had to remain in
public domain.

This time he found damaging developmental effects of Atrazine at even lower
levels (0.1 parts per billion). When his work appeared in the prestigious
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sygenta attacked the study and
claimed that three other labs it contracted had been unable to duplicate Hayes’
results.

Hayes, who keeps his head down on the Berkeley campus, has obtained tenure and
continues to teach. But his studies that could affect approval of the most
widely used chemical in U.S. agriculture are being stifled at every turn.

In a public conversation attended by 500 people and Webcast to 4,000 more
worldwide recently on the Berkeley campus, Pusztai, Losey, Hayes and Chapela
shared their experiences and together explored ways to prevent similar fates
from ever happening to their peers. Their similar stories provide a unique
window into a disturbing trend in modern science.

None of the four complained that his science had been challenged, although in
each case it had. All science is and should be challenged. No one knows that
better than a practicing scientist, who also knows that if tenure depended on a
perfect experimental record, there would be very few tenured scientists anywhere
in the world.

These four men were not attacked because of flawed or imperfect experiments but
because the findings of their work have a potential economic effect. The sad
part is that the academies and other allegedly independent institutions that
once defended scientific freedom and protected employees like Hayes, Chapela,
Losey and Pusztai are abandoning them to the wolves of commerce, the brands of
which are being engraved over the entrances to a disturbing number of university
labs.

Mark Dowie lives in Point Reyes, California and teaches a science writing class
at UC Graduate School of Journalism. He also published this article in the San
Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/food_and_health/dowie_corporations_attack_scientists.html