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Backlash: New Research Hurts Biotech Industry
On January 11,
2004, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that four
university scientists, three from the U.S. and one from
Scotland, experienced a backlash, either personally or
professionally, after their research showed results that
could harm the well-invested biotechnology industry. Two of
the scientists, professors Tyrone Hayes and Ignacio Chapela,
will be speaking at the 22nd
National Pesticide Forum, Unite for Change: New
Approaches to Pesticides and Environmental Health, at
the University of California, Berkeley, April 2-4, 2004.
The
following is an excerpt from the story written by Mark Dowie,
published in the San
Francisco Chroncle:
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.
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.
(Beyond
Pesticides, January 23, 2004)
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