EXCERPT: "I believe there are illegal channels of influence driven by corporate, academic and political forces that are not disclosed to faculty," Chapela said. "The university is governed by a shadow process, which I really look forward to shedding some light on through this action."
The net result of the process, Chapela said, is to harness the university, its faculty, and its students to benefit profit-making corporations rather than the common good.
1.Chapela Files Tenure Suit Against UC Berkeley
2.SEEDS OF DISSENT
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1.Chapela Files Tenure Suit Against UC Berkeley
By RICHARD BRENNEMAN
Berkeley Daily Planet, April 19, 2005
http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=04-19-05&storyID=21185
Ignacio Chapela, the UC Berkeley professor denied tenure after his outspoken criticisms of genetically modified crops and corporate/academic ties, filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court Monday against the UC Board of Regents.
The action, filed by Oakland attorney Dan Siegel, alleges wrongful conduct by the university on three separate grounds: discrimination on the basis of national origins (Chapela was born in Mexico), violation of the California Whistleblower Protection Act, and false representations by the university of the real grounds of ”š"secret, de facto requirements for promotion."
The lawsuit doesn't include specific monetary damages, which Siegel said would be determined later in the course of the action. The suit does call for remuneration for:
* Lost wages, earnings and benefits.
* Compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish and emotional distress.
* Injunctions to mandate redress of the alleged wrongs.
* Attorneys' fees and costs of the action.
"I've been at UC Berkeley for eight years, and I have very mixed feelings about the case moving away from the internal processes of the university," Chapela said Monday.
Monday's filing was forced by the impending statutory filing deadline for filing a discrimination lawsuit, Siegel said. Chapela filed a discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing last April 21, and received immediate notice of his right to file suit.
According to the discrimination statue, any lawsuit must be filed within a year of state notification, forcing Chapela to act this week. On June 24, the professor also filed a complaint with the university alleging that he had suffered retaliation for his whistleblowing activities. He said Monday that the university failed to respond within the time required by statute.
Chapela serves on the faculty of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management of the College of Natural Resources.
By most accounts, the controversial professor's career foundered on two issues: his outspoken critique of UC Berkeley's financial partnership with Novartis, a Swiss biotech giant since renamed Syngenta, and his publication of a report describing man-made genes in native strains of Mexican corn.
Chapela and graduate student Richard Quist published their findings in Nature, long considered the world's preeminent scientific journal, in November 2001. Agribusiness giants, alarmed by the implications of the findings, immediately launched a countercampaign designed to discredit the researchers.
Much of the heat came from a British website that offered criticisms from supposed scientists who were later revealed as fabrications of the site's creator [this is seriously inaccurate - see below for the true story of the industry's dirty tricks campaign against Chapela]. Critics also sent scathing letters to Nature, which responded with a quasi correction, the journal's first, that advised readers to decide for themselves on the accuracy of the report.
Despite the Nature flap, Chapela's colleagues voted 32 to 1 in favor of tenure, followed by a unanimous vote for tenure by the Campus Ad Hoc Committee on tenure on Oct. 3, 2002. But on
June 5, 2003, the university's budget committee voted against tenure. After a second negative vote by the budget panel, then-Chancellor Robert Berdahl denied Chapela tenure on Nov. 20.
The university agreed to keep Chapela on staff through the remainder of this academic year, and Chancellor Robert Birgenau is currently considering his case, Chapela said.
"I believe there are illegal channels of influence driven by corporate, academic and political forces that are not disclosed to faculty," Chapela said. "The university is governed by a shadow process, which I really look forward to shedding some light on through this action."
The net result of the process, Chapela said, is to harness the university, its faculty, and its students to benefit profit-making corporations rather than the common good.
"This has gone on way too long," he said. "My hope is that this action will open up the case to the public of Berkeley, this country, and the world."
Following massive academic and public outcry against the Novartis pact, UC Berkeley submitted the agreement for review by Michigan State University. Though their report found that many of the worst fears of critics hadn't materialized, both UC Berkeley and Novartis agreed to end the compact when the five-year term ended in 2003.
Siegel said he assumes the case will take 14 to 18 months to come to trial. UC Berkeley did not respond to a request for a comment on the lawsuit.
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2.SEEDS OF DISSENT
The Big Issue, No 484, 15-21 April 2002
http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=19&page=1&op=2
Anti-GM scientists are facing widespread assualts on their credibility. Andy Rowell investigates who is behind the attacks
Anti-GM scientists and activists are increasingly having their credibility attacked through a campaign orchestrated by the biotech industry. Now that campaign has seen a prestigious scientific journal become the latest casualty.
The attacks against the journal Nature culminated in the publication last week of an admission that it was wrong to print a scientific paper last year that was critical of GM. The admission was the first in the journal's history. It is apparently the latest example of biotech giants using front organisations and websites to discredit scientific research that criticises GM technology.
The saga started last November when Nature published an article by scientists from the University of California Berkeley that alleged contamination of native Mexican maize by GM. As Mexico has a moratorium on commercial GM planting, it raised crucial issues about genetic pollution in a centre of maize biodiversity.
The paper led to the researchers and Nature being attacked by pro-GM scientists and the biotech industry. Nature finally buckled under the pressure, issuing a statement saying "the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper".
"It is clearly a topic of hot interest", says Jo Webber from Nature, admitting that this story is not just "technical" but also "political".
The political context is that the biotech industry is trying to lift European, Brazilian and Mexican moratoria on genetically modified seeds or foods. It is desperate to open up Europe, having lost more than $200 million due to the moratorium on growing of GM corn alone. Nature has refused to comment further about the row.
This week sees crucial negotiations at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in The Hague. The Nature statement could not have come at a better time and the biotech industry is naturally gleeful. "Many people are going to need that (Nature's editorial) reference", says Willy De Greef from Syngenta, the world's leading agribusiness company, "not least those who, like me, will be in the frontline fights for biotech during the Hague negotiations".
Despite Nature's climb-down, the authors of the original study, David Quist and Ignacio Chapela, have published new evidence they say vindicates their original findings. They add that two other studies by the Mexican government confirm their research and believe Nature has been "under incredible pressure from the powers that be".
"This is a very, very well concerted, co-ordinated and paid for campaign to discredit the very simple statement that we made," says Dr Chapela.
The central co-ordinator of the attacks has been CS Prakash who is a professor of Plant Molecular Genetics at Tuskegee University Alabama, and who runs the AgBioWorld Foundation. AgBioWorld was co-founded by an employee of the Washington-based right-wing think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Prakash calls the Quist and Chapela study "flawed" and says the "results did not justify the conclusions." He adds that they were "too eager to publish their results because it fitted their agenda".
Prakash's pro-GM website has been the central discussion forum of the Nature article. He said: "I think it a played a fairly important role in putting public pressure on Nature because we have close to 3,700 people on AgBioView, our daily newsletter, and immediately after thi paper was published many scientists started posting some preliminary analysis that they were doing.
"AgBioView has brought together those scientists and AgBioWorld provided a collective voice for the scientific community". These discussions led to a highly critical and influential statement attacking Nature that received more than 80 signatories.
Two letters signed by pro-GM scientists that criticised Nature's original publication were also printed in the same issue as the journal's retraction. The lead authors of the letters, Matthew Metz and Nick Kaplinsky, signed the pro-biotech statement on the website.
Both have or have had links with the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at Berkeley that entered into a $25 million deal with Novartis (now Syngenta), a deal that was opposed by Chapela. "It became a very big scandal and they cannot forgive that", says Chapela.
But most importantly it wasn't scientists but a PR company that works for GM firm Monsanto that started and fuelled the anti-Nature debate on Prakash's listerv. On the listserv the first attack was posted by someone called 'Mary Murphy' within hours of publication. She wrote: "It should be noted that the author of the Nature article, Ignacio H Chapela, is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network North America, an
activist group." Murphy accused Chapela of being "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer".
The next bulletin was from someone called 'Andura Smetacek' who claimed Chapela was in league with environmental groups and added, wrongly, that his paper was "not a peer-reviewed research article subject to independent scientific analysis". Smetacek and Murphy have between them posted around 60 articles on the Prakash Iist. So who are they?
Mary Murphy's email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., which hides her employer. On one occasion on an internet message board she used this address but also left a trail of other identifying details that showed she worked for the Bivings group, a PR company with offices in Washington, Brussels, Chicago and Tokyo.
Bivings, which has more than a dozen Monsanto companies as clients, has been assisting the GM firm's use of the internet since realising that it played a significant part in the company's poor PR image. Bivings says it uses the internet's "powerful message delivery tools" for "viral dissemination".
When asked about what they do for Monsanto, a spokesperson for Bivings said "We run their web sites for various European countries and their main corporate site and we help them with campaigns as a consultant. We are not allowed to discuss strategy issues and personal opinions". They declined to give any further information on their work for the company.
However further insight can be gleamed from a recent report by Bivings which said: "Message boards, chat rooms and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party."
As a "third party" Bivings has covertly smeared biotech industry critics on a website called CFFAR.org as well as via articles and attacks on listservs under aliases. The attack on the Nature article was a continuation of this covert campaign.
Andura Smetacek is no stranger to such tactics. The Big Issuet can also reveal that she was the original source of a letter that was published under the name of TonyTrevawas, a pro-GM scientist from the University of Edinburgh, in the Herald newspaper in Scotland. The letter became a source of legal action between Greenpeace, its former director Peter Melchett, and the newspaper. The case went to the high court and ended with Melchett receiving undisclosed damages and an apology from the Herald. Trevawas has always denied he wrote the letter.
In a letter written earlier this year, Smetacek said: "I am the author of the message which was sent to AgBioWorld. I'm surprised at the stir it has caused since the basis for the content of the letter comes from publicly available news articles and research easily found on-line".
Smetacek is also a "front email". In an early posting to the AgBioView list she gave her address as London, while in recent correspondence with The Ecologist magazine Smetacek left a New York phone number. However, after extensive searching of public records in the US, the Big Issue found no one in America with that name. Despite numerous requests by The Ecologist for Smetacek to give an employer or land address she has refused to do so.
A clue to her identity is that Smetacek's earliest messages to AgBioView consistently promoted the CFFAR.org website. CFFAR stands for the Centre For Food and Agricultural Research and describes itself as "a public policy and research coalition dedicated to exploring and understanding health, safety, and sustainability issues associated with food and fiber production".
In fact the website attacks organic agriculture as well as environmental groups, like Greenpeace, calling them "terrorists". The website is registered to an employee of Bivings who works as one of Monsanto's web gurus.
Even the AgBioWorld Foundation website is linked to Bivings.
Jonathan Matthews, a leading anti-GM activist, has researched the activities of Bivings. While searching the AgBioWorld archives he received a message that told him that an attempt to connect him to a Bivings database had failed. Internet experts believe that this message implies Bivings is hosting an AgBioView database. These experts also notice technical similarities between the CFFAR, Bivings and AgBioWorld websites.
Prakash, though, denies receiving funding or assistance for the AgBioWorld foundation and denies working with any PR company saying he is "pro-the technology not necessarily the companies".
However Matthews said: "Via Bivings, Monsanto has a series of shop windows with which to influence the GM debate. One of these is AgBioWorld. The chief mannequin seems to be Prakash who has been very influential in the whole Nature/GM corn contamination fiasco. But I wonder if Nature really knows who is behind the attacks."
Dr Sue Mayer from GeneWatch UK says: "It is quite extraordinary the lengths the biotech industry and the scientific establishment will go to discredit any critical science."