The Big Issue, No 484, 15-21 April 2002
SEEDS OF DISSENT
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 this 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”.
TBC
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