chapela

[michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here is a short section from my ms.

Fouling the Nest: How Right-Wing Extremism and Business Incompetence
Destroy American Prosperity



Ignacio Chapela was an up-and-coming young scientist in the department.
Earlier, he had worked for the Swiss biotech pioneer Sandoz which, in
turn, had merged with Ciba Cigy to form Novartis, the company in
question. He also had been a member of a National Academy of Science's
committee reviewing the impacts of genetic manipulation of crops.
Nonetheless, Chapela was skeptical about genetic engineering of food
crops and was opposed to the Novartis deal. Neither position was likely
to advance his academic career.

To make matters worse for him, Chapela, along with a graduate student,
published an article in the prestigious journal, ”Nature•, showing that
transgenic corn was intermixing with native Mexican corn (Quist and
Chapela 2001). This finding was alarming because Mexico has the most
diverse reservoir of indigenous corn in the world.

I once served on a United States Department of Agriculture task force
dealing with the importance of maintaining such diversity. For
millennia, breeders have drawn upon naturally occurring traits, such as
those found in Mexican corn, to develop strains that can increase yields
or protect against insects or plant diseases. Destroying this diversity
would be an irreparable loss for the world.

The director of a Mexican corporation approached Chapela, first offering
a "glittering research post if he withheld his paper, then told him that
he knew where to find his children." When this approach did not work,
corporate interests applied a different type of pressure. In the words
of British journalist, George Mombiot:

##In the US, Chapela's opponents have chosen a different form of
assassination..... On the day the paper was published, messages started
to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000
scientists, called ”AgBioWorld•. The first came from a correspondent
named "Mary Murphy." Chapela is on the board of directors of the
Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, "not exactly what
you'd call an unbiased writer." Her posting was followed by a message
from an "Andura Smetacek", claiming, falsely, that Chapela's paper had
not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and foremost an activist" and
that the research had been published in collusion with
environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked
"how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel
reimbursements and other donations ... for his help in misleading
fear-based marketing campaigns?" The messages from Murphy and Smetacek
stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the
accusations they had made. Senior biotechnologists called for Chapela to
be sacked from Berkeley. ”AgBioWorld• launched a petition pointing to
the paper's "fundamental flaws." [Monbiot 2002]

The two leaders of this attack on the article were actually fictitious
creations of a British public relations organization, the Bivings Group.
Real or not, they stirred up enough of a firestorm to pressure the
journal to take unprecedented actions. The editor called upon three
outside reviewers, then overruled the majority of the reviewers and
finally made the first retraction in the history of the journal (Monbiot
2002).

Chapela's problems did not stop there. He was up for tenure at the
university. At first, his chances looked good. Those with the most
knowledge of Chapela's skills as a researcher and teacher -- his peers
in the department -- supported him. A departmental committee voted in
favor of tenure (32 to 1, with three abstentions). At the college level
the vote was unanimous. The next stage should have ensured tenure. An ad
hoc committee, composed of five faculty members chosen for their ability
to evaluate Chapela's research then voted unanimously in his favor. His
dean had also signed off on the tenure decision.

At this point, the powers that be gathered strength. The Vice-Provost
intervened, asking the ad hoc committee to reconvene in order to review
Mr. Chapela's research once again. The chairman resigned and disavowed
the committee's report, saying he did not have the expertise to judge
Mr. Chapela's research. The chairman did not tell any of the members of
the committee about his decision at the time.

This special committee then compiled a dossier and forwarded it to the
Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, a
faculty committee that routinely reviews tenure decisions. This
committee then advised the chancellor to reject Mr. Chapela's tenure bid
-- which the chancellor did. Apparently, the senate committee that had
appointed the ad hoc committee asked it to reconvene to review Mr.
Chapela's research again.

This bureaucratic maneuver was highly unusual. One member of the ad hoc
committee, Wayne M. Getz, a professor of environmental science, stated,
"I've been here 24 years, and my understanding is that if the department
and the ad hoc committee recommend for tenure, you get tenure" (Walsh
2004). Later, after a storm of adverse publicity and an impending
lawsuit, the university relented and granted Chapela tenure.

What about Novartis? One outside committee later asked by the University
to review the entire Novartis contract concluded, "Regardless of whether
Chapela's denial of tenure was justified, there is little doubt that the
UCB-N agreement played a role in it" (Busch et al. 2004, p. 42).

Corporations influence the tenor of science even when they have no
direct contact with researchers. Promotion and tenure in universities
often depends, at least in part, on a person's ability to win research
grants. This pressure plays a role in many fields that might seem far
afield of corporate interests, but nowhere is it felt more strongly than
in science and technology.

Corporations censor science in even more direct ways. For example,
pharmaceutical companies routinely require academic researchers to sign
contracts that give the company control of the scientists' data and
prevent them from publishing without the company's consent (see Perelman
2002).


--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901