The Sad Saga of Ignacio Chapela

http://www.theava.com/04/0218-chapela.html

by John Ross

How to destroy Mexican corn, reap maximum profits, and buy a university in one
easy lesson...

Seated on the balcony of his appropriately professorial office upon a
sun-stroked hillock in the midst of the Life Science complex on the hallowed
Berkeley campus of the University of California, the controversial Mexican-born
microbiologist Ignacio Chapela, an academic who has dared to lock horns with the
potentates of Big Biotech, reflected upon the tenuous status of his employment.
"They will never forgive me here," the curly-haired, Cupid-mouthed Chapela
sighed disconsolately, his gaze fixed upon the Campanile, the Berkeley campus’s
most recognizable landmark, as if it were a stand-in for Chancellor Robert
Berdahl himself.

"It really began with the mushrooms," Chapela explains, going back to the
beginning. In the late 1980s, his brother Paco had become involved with a group
of Oaxacan Indians, Zapotecos and Chinantecos in the Sierra del Norte of that
highly indigenous southern Mexican state, who were battling a major highway that
threatened to carry their forests off to a proposed International Paper pulp
mill up in Tuxtepec. Coming together in a pioneer Indian organization acronymed
UZACHI, the Zapotecs and Chinantecos of Calpulapan, a tiny municipality high in
the sierra, successfully fended off the loggers and saved their forests.

But after Big Timber, came the Japanese hunting prized Matsutaki mushrooms that
are associated with the high pine forests and which sell for $600 a pound
amongst Tokyo’s gourmands. "I was a microbiologist and Paco invited me to
explain what it was all about to UZACHI - the Indians suspected that the
mushrooms had to do with drugs. That was when I first came to Calpulapan."

Chapela was soon up to his eyeballs in negotiating between the Indians and the
Japanese mushroom rustlers who were often armed. The villagers, buoyed by the
victory over the pulp mill, soon decided to take control of the mushrooms for
themselves and began growing them for commercial markets. Chapela, now a trusted
advisor, borrowed money from Mexico City friends to set up a rudimentary rustic
laboratory up in Calpulapan that would keep tabs on the quality of the product

After the mushrooms came the orchids. While UZACHI was finding niche markets for
its exotic exports, its real sustenance came from the abundant cornfields that
surround Calpulapan. Maize or "Maiz" was first domesticated in the altiplano of
Puebla and Oaxaca five millenniums ago. The region extending from the Valley of
Tehuacan in Puebla state to Mitla and beyond in Oaxaca is truly the cradle of
world corn.

By the turn of the millennium, Ignacio Chapela, who had once worked for the
Swiss biotech pioneer Sandoz which, in turn, had merged with Ciba Cigy to form
the all-powerful Novartis conglomerate, was fretting the fate of Mexican corn.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico was being inundated by
millions of tons of cheap NAFTA-driven corn courtesy of the U.S. and Canada, as
much as 6,000,000 a year. Because the corn was designated not for human
consumption, no one seemed worried about the consequences although much of this
deluge was genetically modified. Given prohibitions on genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) by both Japan and the European Union, Greenpeace-Mexico
considers that US farmers are dumping their GMO corn south of the border - as
much as 60% of all NAFTA corn imports may be contaminated. "I was worried about
the implications but still thought they were five to ten years down the road,"
recalls Chapela.

In October of 2000, the microbiologist dispatched a graduate student, David
Quist, to Oaxaca to conduct workshops about the coming of genetically modified
corn. "I was shocked when David called me to report that our lab in Calpulapan
was already finding positives on contamination." Keeping the findings under
wraps, Quist returned to Berkeley with the samples and after rigorous testing
both on and off campus, the results were confirmed in March 2001. Quist and
Chapela began compiling a paper to be submitted to the prestigious British
scientific journal Nature describing their alarming discovery. But rather than
garnering laurels for the microbiologist and his assistant, the revelations
would put the kibosh on Chapela’s academic career.

In all fairness to his superiors, Ignacio Chapela had always stuck like an
ornery thistle in the throats of the Berkeley poobahs. He had been brought on
board as an assistant professor in 1995 almost certainly because of his
association with Novartis and two years later, a rising star in academia,
Ignacio had become the president of the faculty committee of his department. But
despite his previous affiliation with the Biotech moguls, Chapela was not a
gung-ho advocate of the industry. As a member of the National Academy of
Science’s committee reviewing the impacts of genetic manipulation of crops, he
had raised questions about the unintentional spread of GMOs, particularly from
US export agriculture. "I was already thinking about Mexican corn but my peers
told me to concern myself only with impacts in the continental US."

"This smelled like a cover-up to me. Who was going to look into the spread of
GMOs?" Certainly not the International Commission for the Betterment of Maize, a
Rockefeller Foundation-funded biotech stalking horse which has been growing gm
corn at its Texcoco station in the state of Mexico since the early 1980s.
Indeed, Chapela charges, most of the varieties of gm corn now flooding Mexico
were first developed at Texcoco. Mexico, with its two growing seasons, is an
excellent laboratory for the biotech industry, he explains.

One morning in early 1997, Dr. Chapela was summoned to his dean’s office and
informed that the university was about to announce a five year $50,000,000 grant
from Novartis. In return, Chapela’s old company would get a first look at all
research papers produced by the department. Since the grant accounted for a
third of the department’s budget, Novartis would get first dibs on a third of
the department’s research. "My gut reaction was that the company was trying to
buy the university. I knew all about that. In fact, I had tried to do the same
thing with the Scripps Institute in San Diego when Novartis first decided it
needed a West Coast beachhead."

Ignacio was flabbergasted by the university’s shameless hucksterism. "The
faculty had not even been told of the Novartis grant and the Chancellor’s office
was already putting out press releases claiming that we supported it."

A year-long tug of war over the windfall - the crown jewel of Chancellor
Berdahl’s reign at Berkeley - left many scars. "I admit that we made a big
scandal. The Atlantic Monthly ran a front cover story and then state senator Tom
Hayden held hearings in Sacramento. I think they can never forgive me for this."

Consciences were purchased to win support for the Novartis buy-out. The biotech
giant had offered $50,000,000 over five years, half for research and half for
what was called "capital improvements". "You can see for yourself how our
conditions have deteriorated here" - Dr. Chapela’s offices are in Hillgard Hall,
a dingy and decrepit Life Science building with a basement that feels like Dr.
Frankenstein works down there and a ton of mercury in its drains.
Notwithstanding, when the Novartis grant kicked in in 1998, the boodle was cut
in half and the capital improvement component disappeared. Those researchers who
did not complain about the con job became the beneficiaries of the Novartis money.

Ignacio Chapela had stepped on other toes even more life threatening than those
of the Brahmans of Berkeley. The Mexican government had learned of the impending
Nature publication and went ballistico. Under-secretary of Agriculture Victor
Villalobos fired off a furious letter accusing the microbiologist of "doing
incalculable damage" to the nation’s agriculture and economy. "We hold you
personally responsible," Villalobos wrote in an epistle that still retains a
place of honor on Chapela’s crowded desk.

The director of Mexico’s bio-security commission, Dr. Fernando Ortiz Monasterio,
summoned Ignacio to a meeting in an abandoned building in a wooded zone just
outside Mexico City. "’You have gotten yourself into some serious shit this
time,’ he told me, ’but you will not stop us - no one will stop us!’ I had the
impression he was threatening my life. Was he going to rub me out? This was like
a bad Mafia movie."

When Ortiz Monasterio saw that Dr. Chapela was not going to retract the Nature
piece, he moved on the media. Knowing that Nature would cancel an article if its
contents were leaked to the press prior to publication, he released the study to
select members of the media. "Actually, this backfired on them. I was in Paris
and Le Monde ran the story on the front page right below the bombings in
Afghanistan. Nature was already getting cold feet because of industry pressures
and told us our paper was not interesting to a general audience, but now the Le
Monde story made it interesting again."

The publication in November 2001 triggered the anticipated bombshell. The
article seemed to suggest that wind-blown GMOs had been the vector of
contamination in Calpulapan - the industry has always insisted that such a
spread could not occur. Moreover, the laboratory studies indicated that the
altered genes were jumping around within the genome of the plant and could even
spread to other species. The implications were frightening. Thousands of years
of maize cultivation and millions of years of biological history would be lost.
Hundreds of native species were at risk of homogenization. Biodiversity was
threatened by the gm corn. In its stead would come seed dependency with biotech
titans like Novartis, Monsanto, Dow, and Dupont controlling the Mexican market.

Big Biotech, alerted to the Mexican corn study in advance, sought to pre-empt
publication by hiring a high-powered Washington PR firm, the Bivings Group,
which specializes in internet subterfuge. The Chapela-Quist study had barely
touched down on the newsstands when an orchestrated barrage of letters decrying
"fundamental flaws" in the research began clogging up the list serve operated by
AgBioWorld, a creature of the industry. Investigative reportage by the British
Guardian failed to verify the existence of the authors but traced the computer
used to generate the e-mail campaign to one operated by a Bivings front.

Six months later, Nature would publish two letters objecting to Dr. Chapela’s
research, one attributed to a Berkeley colleague and both from parties to the
Novartis agreement, along with what amounted to a retraction of the Mexican corn
story, the first in this high-minded, purportedly neutral journal’s 133-year
history. "Nature sent us recantation forms but David and I refused to sign them."

Nature’s disavowal weighs heavily upon Ignacio Chapela’s academic standing. "I
am now a liability to the department and they are not going to give me tenure,"
he rues. But what stings most is that Nature’s turn-around has had a chilling
effect on further research into the spread of gm corn in Mexico. Chapela holds
five separate studies by Mexican researchers, one by the National Ecology
Institute and another even by Villalobos’s agriculture secretariat, that confirm
his research but no academic journal has seen fit to publish the findings. "The
Mexican government does not want those papers published and, of course, neither
does the biotech industry, so they will not appear anywhere."

"They have made an example of me. Other scientists see this and decide that
maybe they should go back to studying the bristles on the back of a bug."

That Ignacio Chapela would be denied tenure was a foregone conclusion. Yet when
his tenure application was submitted three years ago, his college voted
unanimously to support it and the department favored the application 32 to 1.
With such strong backing, the dean with whom Chapela had scuffled over the
Novartis grant had little choice but to sign off on it.

The flimflam hit the fan when the recommendation went to the Berkeley academic
senate. A secret committee was assigned to evaluate Chapela’s tenure bid but the
pressure from the Chancellor’s office for a negative was so over-arching the
chairperson resigned. The process was "disgraceful" committee member Wayne Getz
told the Journal of Higher Education. In the end, the rejection was expected -
the last four non-white applicants from his department for tenure had all been
rejected and Chapela does not discount racism as a factor in the university’s
decision.

Not about to accept the turndown without a fight, Ignacio set up his desk, two
chairs, his teapot, biscuits and some books outside California Hall last June
for five days while the solons decided his fate. The 24-hour-a-day vigil drew
further press attention and international support. "It was amazing - people came
and stayed with me. There were e-mails from all over the world." Instead of
tenure, the university offered a one-year extension on Chapela’s contract that
is now in its last months. Meanwhile, Chapela has appealed the rejection of
tenure to the Chancellor’s office and is talking with attorneys about a civil
suit if no redress is forthcoming. "They have so damaged my academic reputation
that I will never have another job in a first tier university," he concludes
morosely.

"I am living proof of what happens when biotech buys a university. The first
thing that goes is independent research. The university is a delicate organism.
When its mission and orientation are compromised, it dies. Corporate
biotechnology is killing this university."

(John Ross graduated from the College of Hard Knocks and took his doctorate at
the Ed Sanders Institute of Investigative Poetry.)