Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

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Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 1:38 am

Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief
by sourcewatch.org

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Dr Ignacio Chapela, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and graduate student David Quist were the target of attack by Monsanto after publishing a paper in the science journal Nature telling of contamination of indigenous Mexican maize (corn) with GMOs. The lead-up to the incident, however, is downright spooky (1). Still Chapela was determined to publish what they found. So Monsanto employed the services of a firm called Bivings Group which used a phony e-mail campaign to persuade the prestigious science journal Nature to retract the paper, the first time in the publication´s 133 year history that it had ever retracted a paper [1] [2] see also Monsanto's World Wide Web of Deceit. The architect of the deception is thought by some to have been Monsanto´s Jay Byrne who was also active in attempts to shut down web sites critical of Monsanto [3] see also Biotech's Hall of Mirrors. "It shows an organization that is determined to push its products into countries around the world and it's determined to destroy the reputation of anybody who stands in their way" said GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews in The World According to Monsanto.

Chapela and Quist have since been vindicated as it turns out that GM maize has indeed invaded Mexico. Says Science 3/1/2002 "Surprisingly, even Quist and Chapela's most strident critics agree with one of their central points: Illicit transgenic maize may well be growing in Mexico.... At a 23 January meeting in Mexico City, CINVESTAV official Elleli Huerta presented preliminary PCR findings indicating that transgenic promoters, mostly CaMV 35S, were present in about 12% of the plants. In some areas, up to 35.8% of the grain contained foreign sequences, INE scientific adviser Sol Ortiz Garcia told Science last week." "This is the world's worst case of contamination by genetically modified material because it happened in the place of origin of a major crop. It is confirmed. There is no doubt about it." Jorge Soberón Secretary of Mexico's National Biodiversity Commission told the London Daily Telegraph, April 19, 2002 [4]. Also [5].

Unfortunately for Chapela, despite overwhelming support from Berkeley staff and students alike, Chancellor Robert Berdahl decided to deny him tenure. Supporters then petitioned the new Chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, to reverse the decision. However "the Budget Committee knows the chancellor wants to get his hands on that corporate loot [Berkeley receives tens of millions of dollars from biotech] Chapela is exactly the kind of person we need around here. He has wisdom, and above all he has courage and integrity" said Joe Nielands, emeritus professor of biochemistry [6]. UPDATE: Reversing itself, Berkeley finally decided in 2005 to grant Chapela tenure after all. "I know of no other case where the public's role in the conferring of tenure has been more evident. There is no doubt in my mind that I owe this tenure to you, as well as to others beyond yourselves who, without knowing, have been prodigal in support of a place to think and speak freely" he said [7].


In another, more recent confirmation of Chapela and Quist's findings, Elena Alvarez-Buylla of the Institute for Ecology of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), also found that significant contamination has occurred. Interestingly, in a bit of political deja vu, she tells of difficulties she encountered in trying to publish her data.

We battled for two years to get the results of our study published," declares Mrs. Alvarez-Buylla. "In the course of my entire career, I have never encountered so many difficulties! There were efforts to stop the publication of this scientific data!" Biologist José Sarukhan, a UNAM researcher and member of the United States National Academy of Science, had recommended the article for publication by that organization's review. The latter rejected the article in March, with the justification that it risked provoking "excessive media attention for political or environmentally-related reasons. [8]. More details [9][10]


The study, Transgenes in Mexican maize: molecular evidence and methodological considerations for GMO detection in landrace populations has now been published in "Molecular Ecology" (Volume 18, Issue 4, Pages 750-761).

See also this list of quotes about the Commercial influence on science:

(1) "'I had been talking to government officials, because I thought it was the responsible thing to do, even though it was preliminary research', recalls Dr Chapela. [10] At one meeting the aide to the Biosafety Commissioner, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, told Chapela that his boss wanted to see him. 'The guy just sat outside the door and when I came out, he almost took me by the hand and put me in a taxi with him to see his boss,' he says. A Hollywood script-writer could have conceived what happened next. Chapela was hauled up to Monasterio's 'office' on the 12th floor of an empty building. 'The office space was absolutely empty', recalls Chapela. 'There were no computers, no phones, the door was off its hinges, there were cardboard boxes as a table. The official is there with his cell-phone beside him. We are alone in the building. His aide was sitting next to me, blocking the door.' With obvious emotion, Dr Chapela recalls what happened next. 'He spent an hour railing against me and saying that I was creating a really serious problem, that I was going to pay for. The development of transgenic crops was something that was going to happen in Mexico and elsewhere. He said something like I'm very happy it's going to happen, and there is only one hurdle and that hurdle is you.' Sitting stunned, Chapela replied: 'So you are going to take a revolver out now and kill me or something, what is going on?' Then Monasterio offered Chapela a deal: 'After he told me how I had created the problem, he said I could be part of the solution, just like in a typical gangster movie. He proceeded to invite me to be part of a secret scientific team that was going to show the world what the reality of GM was all about. He said it was going to be made up of the best scientists in the world and you are going to be one of them, and we are going to meet in a secret place in Baja, California. And I said, "who are the other scientists"', and he said "Oh I have them already lined up, there are two from Monsanto and two from DuPont". And I kept saying "Well that is not the way I work, and I wasn't the problem, and the problem is out there".' Then events took a very sinister turn. 'He brings up my family', recalls Chapela. 'He makes reference to him knowing my family and ways in which he can access my family. It was very cheap. I was scared. I felt intimidated and I felt threatened for sure. Whether he meant it I don't know, but it was very nasty to the point that I felt "why should I be here, listening to all this and I should leave".'" [11]


(Mexico City) The story starts on the frenetic streets of Mexico City after a scientist alerted his government to a discovery he'd made of national importance...

He soon found himself unceremoniously deposited into one of the City's familiar green and white beetle taxis ... and escorted on an unfamiliar journey up a long road out of the city...

(Chapela driving)

Here I am being led to a very important Mexican government official and under very strange conditions... we were driving into this very seedy part of town ...where people often go and hide from the police or dump people who have disappeared ...I really didn't know what was going to happen but there was this sense of intimidation going on and of course that was confirmed when ...he proceeded to tell me how terrible it was that I was doing the research and how dangerous it would be for me to publish.

-- SCIENTIST TELLS NEWSNIGHT HE WAS THREATENED: ROW OVER GM CROPS - MEXICAN SCIENTIST TELLS NEWSNIGHT HE WAS THREATENED BECAUSE HE WANTED TO TELL THE TRUTH, by BBC Newsnight
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 6:11 am

Monsanto's World Wide Web of Deceit: Index
by ngin.tripod.com
Norfolk Genetic Information Network

"Think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed"


The following articles detail a Monsanto dirty tricks campaign waged against the company's scientific and environmental critics.

In one instance, Monsanto and its PR proxies ran a covert campaign of character assassination against two University of California, Berkeley scientists after they published research in the science journal Nature demonstrating GM contamination of Mexican maize. The campaign culminated in the journal retracting the research even though a majority of the journal's own peer reviewers did not support such a retraction.

In another instance, Monsanto's poison pen campaign triggered a libel case that reached the High Court in London. The campaign of smears, involving cyberattacks posted on messageboards, listservs and front websites, it emerges, involved the direct participation not only of Monsanto's Washington based PR firm - The Bivings Group - but of Monsanto itself.

THE COVERT BIOTECH WAR
The battle to put a corporate GM padlock on our foodchain is being fought on the net - The Guardian, 19 November 2002

MONSANTO PR FIRM'S ADMISSION
The Bivings Group says e-mail was sent by someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services"

NEWSNIGHT
Newsnight on the Bivings campaign - BBC TV's Newsnight, 7 June 2002

CORPORATE PHANTOMS
There's a web of deceit over GM food, says George Monbiot - The Guardian, 29 May 2002

NEW SCIENTIST'S SPECIAL INVESTIGATION
New Scientist on the Bivings campaign - 15 June 2002

THE FAKE PERSUADERS
Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the internet, says George Monbiot - The Guardian, 14 May 2002

SCIENTISTS IN A SPIN
How scientists have become embroiled in a PR dirty tricks campaign - letter to The Guardian, 16 May 2002

KERNELS OF TRUTH
Virulent criticisms were anything but academic - The East Bay Express, 29 May 2002

AMAIZING DISGRACE
A dirty tricks campaign leads straight to the door of Monsanto's PR company - The Ecologist, May 2002

SEEDS OF DISSENT
Anti-GM scientists are facing widespread assualts on their credibility. Andy Rowell investigates who is behind the attacks - Big Issue, 15-21 April 2002

ALTERING NATURE
Exchange of letters with the editor of the science journal Nature - The Guardian, 15, 20 & 24 May 2002
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 6:14 am

The Covert Biotech War: The corporations seeking to force GM food into reluctant markets are opening new fronts in their internet campaign against their critics.
By George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian 19th November 2002

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The president of Zambia is wrong. Genetically modified food is not, as far as we know, “poison”. While adequate safety tests have still to be conducted, there is, as yet, no compelling evidence that it is any worse for human health than conventional food. Given the choice with which the people of Zambia are now faced – between starvation and eating GM – I would eat GM.

Glyphosate & glyphosate tolerant crops

Glyphosate use has gone up sharply worldwide since the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant GM crops. Herbicide use per acre has doubled in the US within the past five years compared with the first five years of commercial GM crops cultivation, the increase almost entirely due to glyphosate herbicides. Glyphosate has contaminated land, water, air, and our food supply. Damning evidence of its serious harm to health and the environment has been piling up, but the maximum permitted levels are set to rise by 100-150 times in the European Union with further hikes of already unacceptably high levels in the US if Monsanto gets its way.

1. Scientific evidence accumulated over three decades documents miscarriages, birth defects, carcinogenesis, endocrine disruption, DNA damage, general toxicity to cells, neurotoxicity, and toxicity to liver and kidney at glyphosate levels well below recommended agricultural use.

2. The major adjuvant POEA in glyphosate Roundup formulations is by far the most cytotoxic for human cells, ahead of glyphosate and its metabolite. It also amplifies the toxic effects of glyphosate.

3. A recent review blames glyphosate for practically all modern diseases as its general chelating action affects numerous biological functions that require metal cofactors. It is the most pervasive environmental chemical pollutant that also inhibits enzymes involved in detoxification of xenobiotics, thereby increasing their toxicity. In addition, it kills beneficial gut bacteria that prevent pathogens from colonizing the gut and promotes the growth of the pathogenic bacteria, leading to autism and other diseases.

4. Rats fed Roundup contaminated and Roundup tolerant maize beyond the required 90 days showed a startling range of health impacts. Females were 2 to 3 times as likely to die as controls and much more likely to develop mammary tumours. In males, liver congestions and necrosis were 2.5 to 5.5 times as frequent as controls, while kidney diseases were 1.3 to 2.3 times controls. Males also develop kidney or skin tumours 4 times as often as the controls and up to 600 days earlier. The harmful effects were found in animals fed the GM maize that was not sprayed with Roundup, as well as those that were, indicating that the GM maize has its own toxicities apart from the herbicide.

5. Livestock illnesses from glyphosate tolerant GM feed including reproductive problems, diarrhoea, bloating, spontaneous abortions, reduced live births, inflamed digestive systems and nutrient deficiencies. Evidence has also emerged of chronic botulism in cattle and farmers as the result of glyphosate use.

6. Glyphosate is lethal to frogs and Roundup is worse; it increases toxic blooms, and accelerates the deterioration of water quality. It use also coincides with the demise of monarch butterflies.

7. Glyphosate poisons crops and soils by killing beneficial microorganisms and encouraging pathogens to flourish. Forty crop diseases are now linked to glyphosate use and the number is increasing.

8. Glyphosate-resistant weeds cover 120 million ha globally (61.8 m acres in the US) and continue to spread; it is a major factor accounting for the enormous increase in pesticide use since herbicide tolerant GM crops were introduced.

9. Contamination of ground water supplies, rain, and air has been documented in Spain and the US. Berlin city residents were found to have glyphosate concentrations above permitted EU drinking water levels.

Bt crops

Bt crops were sold on the premise that they would increase yields and reduce pesticide use; instead they have resulted in too many crop failures, and the introduction of Bt cotton is now acknowledged to be responsible for the escalation in farm suicides in India.

1. Bt crops claim to reduce pesticide use is based on excluding the Bt produced in the crops in total "pesticides applied"; but the Bt toxins leach from the plants and persist in soil and water, with negative impacts on health and the ecosystem comparable to conventional pesticides.

2. Fungicide use and insecticide treatment of corn and soybean have gone up dramatically since the introduction of Bt crops.

3. The breakdown of Bt traits due to target pest resistance and secondary pests has resulted in increasing use of conventional pesticides; and pesticide companies are reporting 5 to 50% increase in sales for 2012 and the first quarter of 2013.

4. Contrary to industry's claim that Bt is harmless to non-target species, independent studies showed that Bt toxins elicit immune response in mammals in some cases comparable to that due to cholera toxin. This is consistent with farm workers' reports of allergic symptoms affecting the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.

5. A new study found Bt proteins toxic to developing red blood cells as well as bone marrow cells in mice.

6. Toxicity to human kidney cells has been observed in vitro, consistent with in vivo experiments in lab animals showing toxicity to heart, kidney and liver.

7. Bt crops fail to control target pests due to insufficient expression of Bt toxins, thereby promoting the evolution of resistance.

8. Bt crops promote the emergence of secondary pests when target pests are killed. Primary and secondary pests are already huge problems in the US, India and China, and are now hitting multiple crops in Brazil since Bt maize was introduced.

9. Stacked varieties containing multiple Bt toxins are predicted to hasten the evolution of multiple toxin resistance, as resistance to one toxin appears to accelerate the acquisition of resistance to further toxins.

10. Bt toxins harm non-target species including water fleas, lacewings, monarch butterflies, peacock butterflies and bees, which are showing worrying signs of population decline across the world.

11. Bt toxins leach into the soil via the root of Bt crops where they can persist for 180 days; this has been linked to the emergence of new plant diseases and reduced crop yields.

12. Bt toxins also persist in aquatic environments, contaminating streams and water columns and harming important aquatic organisms such as the caddisfly.

New genetics & hazards of genetic modification

The rationale and impetus for genetic engineering and genetic modification was the "central dogma" of molecular biology that assumed DNA carries all the instructions for making an organism. This is contrary to the reality of the fluid and responsive genome that already has come to light since the early 1980s. Instead of linear causal chains leading from DNA to RNA to protein and downstream biological functions, complex feed-forward and feed-back cycles interconnect organism and environment at all levels, marking and changing RNA and DNA down the generations. In order to survive, the organism needs to engage in natural genetic modification in real time, an exquisitely precise molecular dance of life with RNA and DNA responding to and participating fully in "downstream" biological functions. That is why organisms and ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the crude, artificial genetically modified RNA and DNA created by human genetic engineers. It is also why genetic modification can probably never be safe.

1. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is anything but precise; it is uncontrollable and unpredictable, introducing many collateral damage to the host genome as well as new transcripts, proteins and metabolites that could be harmful.

2. GM feed with very different transgenes have been shown to be harmful to a wide range of species, by farmers in the field and independent scientists working in the lab, indicating that genetic modification itself is unsafe.

3. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is different from natural genetic modification done by organisms themselves for the following reasons: it relies on making unnatural GM constructs designed to cross species barriers and jump into genomes; it combines and transfers genes between species that would never have exchanged genes in nature; GM constructs tend to be unstable and hence more prone to further horizontal gene transfer after it has integrated into the genome.

4. Horizontal gene transfer and recombination is a major route for creating new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases and spreading drug and antibiotic resistance. Transgenic DNA is especially dangerous because the GM constructs are already combinations of sequences from diverse bacteria and viruses that cause diseases, and contain antibiotic resistance marker genes.

5. There is experimental evidence that transgenes are much more likely to spread and to transfer horizontally.

6. The instability of the GM construct is reflected in the instability of transgenic varieties due to both transgene silencing and the loss of transgenes, for which abundant evidence exists. Transgenic instability makes a mockery of "event-specific" characterization and risk assessment, because any change in transgene expression, or worse, rearrangement or movement of the transgenic DNA insert(s) would create another transgenic plant different from the one that was characterized and risk assessed. And it matters little how thoroughly the original characterization and risk assessment may have been done. Unstable transgenic lines are illegal, they should not be growing commercially, and they are not eligible for patent protection.

7. There is abundant evidence for horizontal transfer of transgenic DNA from plant to bacteria in the lab and it is well known that transgenic DNA can persist in debris and residue in the soil long after the crops have been cultivated. At least 87 species (2 % of all known species) of bacteria can take up foreign DNA and integrate it into their genome; the frequency of that happening being greatly increased when a short homologous anchor sequence is present.

8. The frequency at which transgenic DNA transfers horizontal has been routinely underestimated because the overwhelming majority of natural bacteria cannot be cultured. Using direct detection methods without the need to culture, substantial gene transfers were observed on the surface of intact leaves as well as on rotting damaged leaves.

9. In the only monitoring experiment carried out with appropriate molecular probes so far, China has detected the spread of a GM antibiotic resistance gene to bacteria in all of its major rivers; suggesting that horizontal gene transfer has contributed to the recent rise in antibiotic resistance in animals and humans in the country.

10. GM DNA has been found to survive digestion in the gut of mice, the rumen of sheep and duodenum of cattle and to enter the blood stream.

11. In the only feeding trial carried out on humans, the complete 2,266 bp of the epsps transgene in Roundup Ready soybean flour was recovered from the colostomy bag in 6 out of 7 ileostomy subjects. In 3 out of 7 subjects, bacteria cultured from the contents of the colostomy bag were positive for the GM soya transgene, showing that horizontal transfer of the transgene had occurred; but no bacteria were positive for any natural soybean genes.

12. The gastrointestinal tract of mammals is a hotspot for horizontal gene transfer between bacteria, transfer beginning in the mouth.

13. Evidence is emerging that genomes of higher plants and animals may be even softer targets for horizontal gene transfer than genomes of bacteria.

14. The CaMV 35S promoter, most widely used in commercial GM crops, is known to have a fragmentation hotspot, which makes it prone to horizontal gene transfer; in addition. it is promiscuously active in bacteria, fungi, as well as human cells. Recent evidence also suggests that the promoter may enhance multiplication of disease-associated viruses including HIV and cytomegalovirus through the induction of proteins required for transcription of the viruses. It also overlaps with a viral gene that interferes with gene silencing, an essential function in plants and animals that protects them against viruses.

15. The Agrobacterium vector, most widely used for creating GM plants is now known to transfer genes also to fungi and human cells, and to share genetic signals for gene transfer with common bacteria in the environment. In addition, the Agrobacterium bacteria as well as its gene transfer vector tend to remain in the GM crops created, thereby constituting a ready route for horizontal gene transfer to all organisms interacting with the GM crops, or come into contact with the soil on which GM crops are growing or have been grown.

16. In 2008, Agrobacterium was linked to the outbreak of Morgellons disease. The Centers for Disease Control in the US launched an investigation, which concluded in 2012, with the finding: "no common underlying medical condition or infection source was identified". But they had failed to investigate the involvement of Agrobacterium.

17. New GM crops that produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) for specific gene-silencing are hazardous because many off-target effects in the RNA interference process are now known, and cannot be controlled. Furthermore, small dsRNA in food plants were found to survive digestion in the human gut and to enter the bloodstream where they are transported to different tissues and cells to silence genes.

18. Evidence accumulated over the past 50 years have revealed nucleic acids (both DNA and RNA) circulating in the bloodstream of humans and other animals that are actively secreted by cells for intercommunication. The nucleic acids are taken up by target cells to silence genes in the case of double-stranded microRNA (miRNA), and may be integrated into the cells' genome, in the case of DNA. The profile of the circulating nucleic acids change according to states of health and disease. Cancer cells use the system to spread cancer around the body. This nucleic acid intercom leaves the body very vulnerable to genetically modified nucleic acids that can take over the system to do considerable harm.

-- Ban GMOs Now: Especially in the Light of the New Genetics, by Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji


The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the foodchain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are manoeuvring themselves into a position in which they can exercise complete control over what we eat. This has devastating implications for food security in poorer countries.

This is the reason why these crops have been resisted so keenly by campaigners. The biotech companies have been experimenting with new means of overcoming their resistance. This article reveals just how far they seem prepared to go.

Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, all of which are suffering from the current famine, have been told by the US international development agency, USAID, that there is no option but to make use of GM crops from the United States. This is simply untrue. Between now and March, the region will need up to two million tonnes of emergency food aid in the form of grain. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has revealed that there is 1.16m tonnes of exportable maize in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Europe, Brazil, India and China have surpluses and stockpiles running into many tens of millions of tonnes. Even in the US, over 50% of the harvest has been kept GM-free. All the starving in southern Africa, Ethiopia and the world’s other hungry regions could be fed without the use of a single genetically modified grain.

But the United States is unique among major donors, in that it gives its aid in kind, rather than in cash. The others pay the World Food Programme, which then buys supplies as locally as possible. This is cheaper and better for local economies. USAID, by contrast, insists on sending, where possible, only its own grain. As its website boasts, “the principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the USAID contracts and grants go directly to American firms. Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans.”

America’s food aid programme provides a massive hidden subsidy to its farmers. But as a recent report by Greenpeace shows, they are not the only beneficiaries. One of USAID’s stated objectives is to “integrate GM into local food systems”. Earlier this year, it launched a $100m programme for bringing biotechnology to developing countries.

USAID’s “training” and “awareness raising” programmes will, its website reveals, provide companies such as “Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto” with opportunities for “technology transfer” into the poor world. Monsanto, in turn, provides financial support for USAID. The famine will permit USAID to accelerate this strategy. It knows that some of the grain it exports to southern Africa will be planted by farmers for next year’s harvest. Once contamination is widespread, the governments of those nations will no longer be able to sustain a ban on the technology.

All that stands in the way of these plans is the resistance of local people and the protests of development and environment groups. For the past few years, Monsanto has been working on that.

Six months ago, this column revealed that a fake citizen called “Mary Murphy” had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops. The computer from which some of these messages were sent belongs to a public relations company called Bivings, which works for Monsanto. The boss of Bivings wrote to the Guardian, fiercely denying that his company had been running covert campaigns. His head of online PR, however, admitted to Newsnight that one of the messages came from someone “working for Bivings” or “clients using our services”. But Bivings denies any knowledge of the use of its computer for such a campaign.

This admission prompted the researcher Jonathan Matthews, who uncovered the first story, to take another look at some of the emails which had first attracted his attention. He had become particularly interested in a series of vituperative messages sent to the most prominent biotech listservers on the net, by someone called “Andura Smetacek”. Andura first began writing in 2000. She or he repeatedly accused the critics of GM of terrorism. When one of her letters, asserting that Greenpeace was deliberately spreading unfounded fears about GM foods in order to further its own financial interests, was re-printed in the Glasgow Herald, Greenpeace successfully sued the paper for libel.

Smetacek claimed, in different messages, first to live in London, then in New York. Jonathan Matthews checked every available public record and found that no person of that name appeared to exist in either city. But last month his techie friends discovered something interesting. Three of these messages, including the first one Smetacek sent, arrived with the internet protocol address 199.89.234.124. This is the address assigned to the server gatekeeper2.monsanto.com. It belongs to the Monsanto corporation.

In 1999, after the company nearly collapsed as a result of its disastrous attempt to thrust GM food into the European market, Monsanto’s Communications Director, Philip Angell, explained to the Wall Street Journal “maybe we weren’t aggressive enough… When you fight a forest fire, sometimes you have to light another fire.” The company identified the internet as the medium which had helped protest to “mushroom”.

At the end of last year, Jay Byrne, formerly the company’s director of internet outreach, explained to a number of other firms the tactics he had deployed at Monsanto. He showed how, before he got to work, the top GM sites listed by an internet search engine were all critical of the technology. Following his intervention, the top sites were all supportive ones (four of them, incidentally, had been established by Monsanto’s PR firm Bivings). He told them to “think of the Internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed.”

While he was working for Monsanto, Byrne told the internet newsletter Wow that he “spends his time and effort participating” in web discussions about biotech. He singled out the site AgBioWorld, where he “ensures his company gets proper play”. AgBioWorld is the site on which “Andura Smetacek” launched her campaign.

The biotech companies know that they will never conquer new markets while activists are able to expose the way their operations damage food security and consumer choice. While working with USAID to open new territory, they also appear to have been fighting covert campaigns against their critics. Their products may not be poisonous, but can we say the same of their techniques?
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 6:44 am

Bivings: we condemn online vandalism
by Dr. Matthew Metz
Department of microbiology, University of Washington
metzilla@u.washington.edu
Tuesday 11 June 2002

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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The allegations made against the Bivings Group in two recent columns (The fake persuaders, May 14, and Corporate phantoms, May 29) are completely untrue.

The "fake persuaders" mentioned in the articles -- Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek -- are not employees or contractors or aliases of employees or contractors of the Bivings Group. In fact, the Bivings Group has no knowledge of either Mary Murphy or Andura Smetacek.

The article says that someone in our office appears to have "hacking skills" and accuses "biotech lobbyists" of launching "hacker" attacks. The Bivings Group does not hack into servers on behalf of anyone. As a victim of hacking attacks in the past, we strongly condemn anyone who resorts to this sort of online vandalism. We are aware of no "biotech lobbyists" engaged in such activities.


The articles claims that the Bivings Group is the author of several websites and "bogus citizens' groups" which have been coordinating campaigns against environmentalists, including a fake scientific institute, Centre for Food and Agricultural Research. We deny that. The article also says that we set up the Alliance for Environmental Technology (AET). The Bivings Group has long worked for AET, which is a legitimate trade association representing the pulp and paper industry. The AET website clearly discloses who funds the organisation. The Bivings Group has no involvement with Centre for Food and Agricultural Research and AgBioWorld.

by F Gary Bivings
President, Bivings Group, Washington, DC


What the Mexican maize fiasco has demonstrated to me is that the press is almost entirely unaccountable for what they say. Some serve an agenda. For George Monbiot the agenda is what I have come to call the anti-corporate faith.

The server at Berkeley crashing took out Quist and Chaplea's email, but it also took out email of the authors of one critique (Kaplinsky et al). Though Conko and I have both written in to Agbioview, we have never exchanged so much as a single message with each other. My research is publicly funded, and my political stance is far from rightwing. The difference between Monbiot and Rush Limbaugh is which wing is flapping.

Dr Matthew Metz
Department of microbiology, University of Washington
metzilla@u.washington.edu
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 6:46 am

Corporate phantoms: The web of deceit over GM food has now drawn in the PM's speechwriters
by George Monbiot
Wednesday 29 May 2002
@GeorgeMonbiot

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Tony Blair's speech to the Royal Society last Thursday was a wonderful jumble of misconceptions and logical elisions. He managed to confuse science with its technological products. GM crops are no more "science" than cars, computers or washing machines, and those opposing them are no more "anti-science" than people who don't like the Millennium Dome are "anti-architecture".

He suggested that in the poor world people welcome genetic engineering. It was unfortunate that the example he chose was the biotech industry in Bangalore in south-west India. Bangalore happens to be the centre of the world's most effective protests against GM crops, the capital of a state in which anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in the UK by 1,000 to one. Like most biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the key concern of the activists: the corporate takeover of the food chain, and its devastating consequences for food security.

But it would be wrong to blame Blair alone for these misconstructions. The prime minister was simply repeating a suite of arguments formulated elsewhere. Over the past month, activists have slowly been discovering where that "elsewhere" may be.

Two weeks ago, this column showed how the Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate over the past few years.

While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an email fiercely denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the Nature paper. Last week I checked the email's technical properties. They contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The message came from the same computer terminal that "Mary Murphy" has used. New research coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked the fake persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in Hyattsville, Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the company's chief internet marketer.

Not long ago, the website slashdot.com organised a competition for hackers: if they could successfully break into a particular server, they got to keep it. Several experienced hackers tested their skills. One of them was one using a computer identified as bw6.bivwood.com.

Though someone in the Bivings office appears to possess hacking skills, there is no evidence that Bivings has ever made use of them. But other biotech lobbyists do appear to have launched hacker attacks. Just before the paper in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the accounts used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective attack which crippled their capacity to fight back. The culprit has yet to be identified.

July 3, 2012

I often feel especially fortunate to practice law in the Northern District of California, where so many good lawsuits are filed. The City of Brotherly Love has seen fit to make crazy okay, in many ways, and of that, I am all in support. It has a pride, a privilege, and a pleasure to practice law there. But to practice law, you have to get inside the courthouse, or at least, get your papers inside the courthouse.

And something strange is happening. Something that has never happened in the 12 years I’ve been using the Northern District ECF System. It’s down, without prior notice. That means I can’t file my Motion for Temporary Restraining Order, because all filings must be done electronically.

This is the critical moment, when the money gathered in the Bear Love Campaign, all $220,000 of it, is going to pass from Indiegogo to Matt Inman. That’s pinch-point number one, where I can get an order that compels two of our adversaries to do my will.

There is still pinch-point number two, after Inman gets the money but before he pays out anything. But Indiegogo is definitely engaging in unregistered fundraising here, right along with Inman, and taking a 4% cut of this spite-money, which is disgusting for a business that is usually doing legitimate stuff, the equivalent of online bake sales for all manner of good causes. I want them to read the law they’re breaking, and learn for the future. That’s my gift to the world.

So I need to get this Motion for TRO filed, but the site is down for days. Crazy. I’m emailing tech support at ECF and getting no response. I’m wondering if someone’s hacked my office network and is blocking me, so I go out and try to access it on my laptop from Starbucks. No luck. I serve all the lawyers with the papers, but I can’t get them to the judge.

I finally get the papers filed after days of delay. Of course, Indiegogo ignores the pendency of the TRO and transfers the money out from under the judge’s nose. I get an order, though, at pinch-point number two. Telling Inman to do something. To file photocopies of the checks he pays to NWF and ACS. He has about 24 hours to do it.

-- The Real Diary of Charles Carreon, by Charles Carreon


Bivings is the secret author of several of the websites and bogus citizens' movements which have been coordinating campaigns against environmentalists. One is a fake scientific institute called the "Centre for Food and Agricultural Research". Bivings has also set up the "Alliance for Environmental Technology", a chlorine industry lobby group. Most importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with AgBioWorld, the genuine website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at Tuskegee University, Alabama.

AgBioWorld is perhaps the most influential biotech site on the web. Every day it carries new postings about how GM crops will feed the world, new denunciations of the science which casts doubt on them and new attacks on environmentalists. It was here that the fake persuaders invented by Bivings launched their assault on the Nature paper. AgBioWorld then drew up a petition to have the paper retracted.

Prakash claims to have no links with Bivings but, as the previous article showed, an error message on his site suggests that it is or was using the main server of the Bivings Group. Jonathan Matthews, who found the message, commissioned a full technical audit of AgBioWorld. His web expert has now found 11 distinctive technical fingerprints shared by AgBioWorld and Bivings' Alliance for Environmental Technology site. The sites appear, he concludes, to have been created by the same programmer.

Though he lives and works in the United States, CS Prakash claims to represent the people of the third world. He set up AgBioWorld with Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian lobby group funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow Chemical. Conko has collaborated with Matthew Metz, one of the authors of the scientific letters to Nature seeking to demolish the maize paper, to produce a highly partisan guide to biotechnology on the AgBioWorld site. The Competitive Enterprise Institute boasts that it "played a key role in the creation" of a petition of scientists supporting biotech (ostensibly to feed the third world) launched by Prakash. Unaware that it had been devised by a corporate lobby group, 3,000 scientists, three Nobel laureates among them, signed up.

Bivings is just one of several public relations agencies secretly building a parallel world on the web. Another US company, Berman & Co, runs a fake public interest site called ActivistCash.com, which seeks to persuade the foundations giving money to campaigners to desist. Berman also runs the "Centre for Consumer Freedom", which looks like a citizens' group but lobbies against smoking bans, alcohol restrictions and health warnings on behalf of tobacco, drinks and fast food companies. The marketing firm Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called StopEcoViolence, another "citizens' initiative", demonising activists. In March, Nichols Dezenhall linked up with Prakash's collaborator, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to sponsor a conference for journalists and corporate executives on "eco-extremism".

What is fascinating about these websites, fake groups and phantom citizens is that they have either smelted or honed all the key weapons currently used by the world's biotech enthusiasts: the conflation of activists with terrorists, the attempts to undermine hostile research, the ever more nuanced claims that those who resist GM crops are anti-science and opposed to the interests of the poor. The hatred directed at activists over the past few years is, in other words, nothing of the kind. In truth, we have been confronted by the crafted response of an industry without emotional attachment.

Tony Blair was correct when he observed on Thursday that "there is only a small band of people... who genuinely want to stifle informed debate". But he was wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM crops. Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate are the ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he delivered it, but in the years in which the arguments he used were incubated.

http://www.monbiot.com
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 7:04 am

SCIENTIST TELLS NEWSNIGHT HE WAS THREATENED: ROW OVER GM CROPS - MEXICAN SCIENTIST TELLS NEWSNIGHT HE WAS THREATENED BECAUSE HE WANTED TO TELL THE TRUTH
by BBC Newsnight
7 June 2002

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As Britain sits down to watch the Fields of Gold TV drama about a GM conspiracy, Newsnight's Science Editor Susan Watts reveals a true story of conspiracy and concealment. Last year a Mexican scientist revealed that genetically modified material had got into native species of maize plants grown in Mexico. Nature first published his paper which made worldwide news then retracted amid allegations that they had given into pressure from scientists backed by biotechnology companies.

Newsnight has learnt that Nature ignored the advice of most of its advisers when it decided to retract and that new Mexican Government research will endorse the Mexican scientist's main findings.

The story starts on the frenetic streets of Mexico City after Dr Ignacio Chapela of University of California at Berkeley alerted the Mexican Government to a discovery he'd made of national importance... He found himself unceremoniously deposited into one of the City's familiar green and white beetle taxis ... and escorted on an unfamiliar journey up a long road out of the city...

Dr Ignacio Chapela told Newsnight: "Here I am being led to a very important Mexican government official and under very strange circumstances we were driving into this very seedy part of town ...where people often go and hide from the police or dump people who have disappeared ...I really didn't know what was going to happen but there was this sense of intimidation going on and of course that was confirmed as soon as we got to the office...When he proceeded to tell me how terrible it was that I was doing the research and how dangerous it would be for me to publish."

I had been talking to government officials, because I thought it was the responsible thing to do, even though it was preliminary research', recalls Dr Chapela. [10] At one meeting the aide to the Biosafety Commissioner, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, told Chapela that his boss wanted to see him. 'The guy just sat outside the door and when I came out, he almost took me by the hand and put me in a taxi with him to see his boss,' he says. A Hollywood script-writer could have conceived what happened next. Chapela was hauled up to Monasterio's 'office' on the 12th floor of an empty building. 'The office space was absolutely empty', recalls Chapela. 'There were no computers, no phones, the door was off its hinges, there were cardboard boxes as a table. The official is there with his cell-phone beside him. We are alone in the building. His aide was sitting next to me, blocking the door.' With obvious emotion, Dr Chapela recalls what happened next. 'He spent an hour railing against me and saying that I was creating a really serious problem, that I was going to pay for. The development of transgenic crops was something that was going to happen in Mexico and elsewhere. He said something like I'm very happy it's going to happen, and there is only one hurdle and that hurdle is you.' Sitting stunned, Chapela replied: 'So you are going to take a revolver out now and kill me or something, what is going on?' Then Monasterio offered Chapela a deal: 'After he told me how I had created the problem, he said I could be part of the solution, just like in a typical gangster movie. He proceeded to invite me to be part of a secret scientific team that was going to show the world what the reality of GM was all about. He said it was going to be made up of the best scientists in the world and you are going to be one of them, and we are going to meet in a secret place in Baja, California. And I said, "who are the other scientists"', and he said "Oh I have them already lined up, there are two from Monsanto and two from DuPont". And I kept saying "Well that is not the way I work, and I wasn't the problem, and the problem is out there".' Then events took a very sinister turn. 'He brings up my family', recalls Chapela. 'He makes reference to him knowing my family and ways in which he can access my family. It was very cheap. I was scared. I felt intimidated and I felt threatened for sure. Whether he meant it I don't know, but it was very nasty to the point that I felt "why should I be here, listening to all this and I should leave".'"

-- Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org


So just what WAS Ignacio Chapela's research? And why was he given the impression it would be better not to make it public... It's illegal to grow GM maize in Mexico. But when Dr Chapela tested crops in the field he found GM maize - a huge embarrassment to officials.

GM maize CAN be imported for food. Dr Chapela believes peasant farmers grew the modified seed and that pollen blown in the wind carried the added genes into native varieties. He was shocked enough to warn the government. He says officials were split, with Environment concerned... and Agriculture keen that his finding didn't get out.

When he refused to keep quiet about what he'd found in the maize, he says the Agriculture official made an extraordinary suggestion... that he join a research project DESIGNED to show that what he'd picked up was just the NATURAL presence of the same infectious agents used by the GM companies...

"We were supposed to find this in an elite scientific research team of which I was being invited to be part of and the other people were two people from Monsanto and two people from Dupont supposedly so at that point I said I don't need that ...," Dr Chapela said. Newsnight asked both Monsanto and Dupont if they were involved in any such project. Monsanto said no and Dupont has yet to respond. The dispute about the Mexican maize centres on whether Dr Chapela is a poor scientist or the victim of vested interests....

Chapela's research made two points -- first that genetically modified material had found its way into maize growing in Mexican fields and second that these genes had become so embedded into the plants' genome they might be passed on from generation to generation. This second finding is disputed -- which allowed the critics to attack the whole research project.

Chapela's paper appeared in the world-renowned Nature science journal. Editor Dr Philip Campbell told Newsnight, in his first full interview on the subject "I published because I thought it interesting scientifically and for policy..."

But when the letters from critics came in Dr Campbell did something which had never happened in the journal's 133-year history. He retracted the whole paper, although the main conclusion, which Nature itself press released as "scientists have detected transgenic DNA in wild maize," was unchallenged. He said: "In terms of what we published as far as I'm aware the first part of the paper hasn't been disputed..." Asked why he had retracted, he said "the paper as a whole shouldn't have been published..."

Chapela's supporters thought Campbell was responding to pressure from industry-funded scientists, but he denies this. He sent the paper to three referees before deciding whether to retract. Newsnight has obtained their confidential comments. Only ONE thought the paper should be retracted -- though all said there were flaws in its second part.

New genetics & hazards of genetic modification

The rationale and impetus for genetic engineering and genetic modification was the "central dogma" of molecular biology that assumed DNA carries all the instructions for making an organism. This is contrary to the reality of the fluid and responsive genome that already has come to light since the early 1980s. Instead of linear causal chains leading from DNA to RNA to protein and downstream biological functions, complex feed-forward and feed-back cycles interconnect organism and environment at all levels, marking and changing RNA and DNA down the generations. In order to survive, the organism needs to engage in natural genetic modification in real time, an exquisitely precise molecular dance of life with RNA and DNA responding to and participating fully in "downstream" biological functions. That is why organisms and ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the crude, artificial genetically modified RNA and DNA created by human genetic engineers. It is also why genetic modification can probably never be safe.

1. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is anything but precise; it is uncontrollable and unpredictable, introducing many collateral damage to the host genome as well as new transcripts, proteins and metabolites that could be harmful.

2. GM feed with very different transgenes have been shown to be harmful to a wide range of species, by farmers in the field and independent scientists working in the lab, indicating that genetic modification itself is unsafe.

3. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is different from natural genetic modification done by organisms themselves for the following reasons: it relies on making unnatural GM constructs designed to cross species barriers and jump into genomes; it combines and transfers genes between species that would never have exchanged genes in nature; GM constructs tend to be unstable and hence more prone to further horizontal gene transfer after it has integrated into the genome.

4. Horizontal gene transfer and recombination is a major route for creating new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases and spreading drug and antibiotic resistance. Transgenic DNA is especially dangerous because the GM constructs are already combinations of sequences from diverse bacteria and viruses that cause diseases, and contain antibiotic resistance marker genes.

5. There is experimental evidence that transgenes are much more likely to spread and to transfer horizontally.

6. The instability of the GM construct is reflected in the instability of transgenic varieties due to both transgene silencing and the loss of transgenes, for which abundant evidence exists. Transgenic instability makes a mockery of "event-specific" characterization and risk assessment, because any change in transgene expression, or worse, rearrangement or movement of the transgenic DNA insert(s) would create another transgenic plant different from the one that was characterized and risk assessed. And it matters little how thoroughly the original characterization and risk assessment may have been done. Unstable transgenic lines are illegal, they should not be growing commercially, and they are not eligible for patent protection.

7. There is abundant evidence for horizontal transfer of transgenic DNA from plant to bacteria in the lab and it is well known that transgenic DNA can persist in debris and residue in the soil long after the crops have been cultivated. At least 87 species (2 % of all known species) of bacteria can take up foreign DNA and integrate it into their genome; the frequency of that happening being greatly increased when a short homologous anchor sequence is present.

8. The frequency at which transgenic DNA transfers horizontal has been routinely underestimated because the overwhelming majority of natural bacteria cannot be cultured. Using direct detection methods without the need to culture, substantial gene transfers were observed on the surface of intact leaves as well as on rotting damaged leaves.

9. In the only monitoring experiment carried out with appropriate molecular probes so far, China has detected the spread of a GM antibiotic resistance gene to bacteria in all of its major rivers; suggesting that horizontal gene transfer has contributed to the recent rise in antibiotic resistance in animals and humans in the country.

10. GM DNA has been found to survive digestion in the gut of mice, the rumen of sheep and duodenum of cattle and to enter the blood stream.

11. In the only feeding trial carried out on humans, the complete 2,266 bp of the epsps transgene in Roundup Ready soybean flour was recovered from the colostomy bag in 6 out of 7 ileostomy subjects. In 3 out of 7 subjects, bacteria cultured from the contents of the colostomy bag were positive for the GM soya transgene, showing that horizontal transfer of the transgene had occurred; but no bacteria were positive for any natural soybean genes.

12. The gastrointestinal tract of mammals is a hotspot for horizontal gene transfer between bacteria, transfer beginning in the mouth.

13. Evidence is emerging that genomes of higher plants and animals may be even softer targets for horizontal gene transfer than genomes of bacteria.

14. The CaMV 35S promoter, most widely used in commercial GM crops, is known to have a fragmentation hotspot, which makes it prone to horizontal gene transfer; in addition. it is promiscuously active in bacteria, fungi, as well as human cells. Recent evidence also suggests that the promoter may enhance multiplication of disease-associated viruses including HIV and cytomegalovirus through the induction of proteins required for transcription of the viruses. It also overlaps with a viral gene that interferes with gene silencing, an essential function in plants and animals that protects them against viruses.

15. The Agrobacterium vector, most widely used for creating GM plants is now known to transfer genes also to fungi and human cells, and to share genetic signals for gene transfer with common bacteria in the environment. In addition, the Agrobacterium bacteria as well as its gene transfer vector tend to remain in the GM crops created, thereby constituting a ready route for horizontal gene transfer to all organisms interacting with the GM crops, or come into contact with the soil on which GM crops are growing or have been grown.

16. In 2008, Agrobacterium was linked to the outbreak of Morgellons disease. The Centers for Disease Control in the US launched an investigation, which concluded in 2012, with the finding: "no common underlying medical condition or infection source was identified". But they had failed to investigate the involvement of Agrobacterium.

17. New GM crops that produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) for specific gene-silencing are hazardous because many off-target effects in the RNA interference process are now known, and cannot be controlled. Furthermore, small dsRNA in food plants were found to survive digestion in the human gut and to enter the bloodstream where they are transported to different tissues and cells to silence genes.

18. Evidence accumulated over the past 50 years have revealed nucleic acids (both DNA and RNA) circulating in the bloodstream of humans and other animals that are actively secreted by cells for intercommunication. The nucleic acids are taken up by target cells to silence genes in the case of double-stranded microRNA (miRNA), and may be integrated into the cells' genome, in the case of DNA. The profile of the circulating nucleic acids change according to states of health and disease. Cancer cells use the system to spread cancer around the body. This nucleic acid intercom leaves the body very vulnerable to genetically modified nucleic acids that can take over the system to do considerable harm.

-- Ban GMOs Now: Especially in the Light of the New Genetics, By Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji


The second referee said "none of the critics seriously dispute the main conclusion" and the third said,"none of the comments has successfully disproven their main result that transgenic corn is growing in Mexico and crossing with local varieties". Yet Dr Campbell published the retraction - citing only the FIRST referee.

Asked why he hadn't made the referees views clear Dr Campbell said "What we were doing was giving our judgement based on a variety of pieces of advice we'd received - our standard procedure is to make our own judgements and we wanted to make clear that there were problems with the evidence based on our judgement based on the advice of independent referees."


Newsnight also learned more about the alleged internet dirty tricks campaign. As soon as Chapela's paper was published, attacks on him started to appear on the Internet. His supporters suspected a PR company called the Bivings group - which helps Monsanto with its Internet work -- was using a new technique called viral marketing. On its website, Bivings advised: "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved".

Chapela's supporters claim to have tracked down several examples of messages that purport to have come from concerned individuals but appear to originate from Bivings computers. Bivings told us one email did come from someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services", but they deny running a secret campaign.

Now the Mexican government's biologists have carried out their own battery of genetic tests on cobs of native maize to find out if GM genes are really finding their way into Mexico's traditional varieties. They've used two independent labs to avoid the criticisms surrounding Chapela's work and Newsnight has learned that they've found the smoking gun - the new results strongly support Chapela's original claim - finding telltale signs of DNA from genetically modified maize throughout Mexico's remote regional farmland...

***

Transcript of Newsnight feature
7th June 2002


(Mexico City) The story starts on the frenetic streets of Mexico City after a scientist alerted his government to a discovery he'd made of national importance...

He soon found himself unceremoniously deposited into one of the City's familiar green and white beetle taxis ... and escorted on an unfamiliar journey up a long road out of the city...

(Chapela driving)

Here I am being led to a very important Mexican government official and under very strange conditions... we were driving into this very seedy part of town ...where people often go and hide from the police or dump people who have disappeared ...I really didn't know what was going to happen but there was this sense of intimidation going on and of course that was confirmed when ...he proceeded to tell me how terrible it was that I was doing the research and how dangerous it would be for me to publish.

So just what WAS Ignacio Chapela's research? And why was he given the impression it would be better not to make it public...

It all comes down to the humble tortilla...it's made from maize, and Mexicans are proud that this is the birthplace of this staple food. It's a cultural icon and it's illegal to grow GM maize here. But when Dr Chapela tested crops in the field he found GM maize -- a huge embarrassment to officials.

GM maize CAN be imported for food. Dr Chapela believes peasant farmers grew the modified seed and that pollen blown in the wind carried the added genes into native varieties. He was shocked enough to warn the government. He says officials were split, with Environment concerned... and Agriculture keen that his finding didn't get out.

When he refused to keep quiet about what he'd found in the maize, he says the Agriculture official made an extraordinary suggestion... that he join a research project DESIGNED to show that what he'd picked up was just the NATURAL presence of the same infectious agents used by the GM companies...

(Chapela) "We were supposed to find this in an elite scientific research team of which I was being invited to be part of and the other people were two people from Monsanto and two people from Dupont supposedly so at that point I said I don't need that ...."

(Newsnight) Both Monsanto and Dupont deny involvement in ANY SUCH project.

He went ahead and published his original research in Nature magazine. Almost immediately a wave of condemnation rolled in... This time from scientists in San Francisco... The criticism stung because Berkeley is where Dr Chapela has his OWN labs...

But Berkeley is also home to a giant programme of research backed by the GM industry - the university signed a $25 m deal to work with one of the world's most powerful biotechnology companies.

There are in effect two camps at Berkeley. Dr Chapela's supporters suspect a conspiracy when they see scientists using funds from the GM industry come out against his work... the critics dismiss this...

(FREELING) no...I can speak for myself ...I guess I'd be the head of the conspiracy - there was no such

(Newsnight) Michael Freeling is DELETING INDIVIDUAL genes from maize plants - one by one - ...this row shows the dramatic effect of deleting just one gene. ..

Dr Freeling uses money from the university's tie-up with the Syngenta company which develops GM seeds ...He also wrote a critical letter to Nature about Dr Chapela's work - but says the two are not linked...

(Freeling) Bad science is bad science -- anyone can see it...

(Newsnight) So the dispute about the Mexican maize centres on whether Dr Chapela is a poor scientist or the victim of vested interests....

Chapela's research made two points - first that genetically modified material had found its way into maize growing in Mexican fields, and second that these genes had become so embedded into the plants' genome they might be passed on from generation to generation. This second finding is disputed -- which allowed the critics to attack the whole research project.

Nick Kaplinsky is Dr Chapela's toughest critic... and another Berkeley scientist. But even he accepts that GM genes are probably out there.

(Kaplinsky) Their paper had two claims: the first one was that there's transgenic corn in Mexico, which is kind of a no-brainer. The second part of their paper claimed that the transgenes were jumping around or behaving like infectious agents, and that would've been a huge finding if it had been true, but their science was completely incorrect there.

(Newsnight) There now seems to be widespread agreement that this part of the paper was flawed...Kaplinsky calls it a "beginners' mistake" and says it doesn't matter if he IS partisan...

(Kaplinsky) Since our scientific critique is right -- and the independent referees agreed with that -- does it matter if we're biased -- you know I mean if you're right, you're right I guess.

(Newsnight) As soon as Chapela's paper was published, attacks on him started to appear on the Internet. His supporters suspected a PR company called the Bivings group -- which helps Monsanto with its Internet work -- was using a new technique called viral marketing. On its website, Bivings advised: "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved". Chapela's supporters claim to have tracked down examples of messages that purport to have come from concerned individuals but appear to originate from Bivings computers. Bivings told us one email did come from someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services", but they deny running a secret campaign.

The pressure now switched to London and the world-renowned Nature science journal in which Chapela's paper appeared. Since Charles Darwin's time it has published key discoveries, like the make-up of the atom, the Watson and Crick paper on the structure of DNA, and the decoding of the human genome ...then last November the paper on Mexican maize.

(Campbell: editor of Nature) I published because I thought it interesting scientifically and for policy...

(Newsnight) But when the letters from the critics came in, Campbell did something which had never happened the journal's 133-year history. He retracted the whole paper, although the main conclusion, which Nature itself press released as "scientists have detected transgenic DNA in wild maize," was unchallenged.

(Campbell) in terms of what we published, as far as I'm aware the first part of the paper hasn't been disputed...

(Newsnight) But you still felt it necessary to retract?

(Campbell) Uh hum yes...

(Newsnight) can you tell me why exactly....

(Campbell) yes, because as I said, the paper as a whole shouldn't have been published.

(Newsnight) Chapela's supporters thought Campbell was responding to pressure from industry-funded scientists, but he denies this. He sent the paper to three referees before deciding whether to retract. Newsnight has obtained their confidential comments. Only ONE thought the paper should be retracted - though all said there were flaws in its second part.

The second referee said "none of the critics seriously dispute the main conclusion" and the third said "none of the comments has successfully disproven their main result that transgenic corn is growing in Mexico and crossing with local varieties". Yet Campbell published the retraction -- citing only the FIRST referee.

(Newsnight) if it's your own judgement, why refer only to the one who disagreed, not the two who supported?

(Campbell) what we were doing was giving our judgement based on a variety of pieces of advice we'd received -- our standard procedure is to make our own judgements, and we wanted to make clear that there were problems with the evidence based on our judgement, based on the advice of independent referees.

(Newsnight) Just outside Mexico City, scientists funded largely by the World Bank, are working on modified maize for Africa that can resist four different insect pests at once...they see engineered crops as a solution to world hunger...their maize gene bank is a key element in global food security.

Inside this earthquake-proof vault is the world's largest collection of tropical maize -- there are 25,000 varieties stored in this cold room...when Chapela's paper came out, scientists here ran an urgent check to make sure GM genes have not found their way into this vital reference stock by accident...

So far they've found no foreign genes. Now the scientific discussion is over whether escaped genes will have any long lasting effect anyway.

First the Mexican government wants the extent of the problem settled once and for all. Its biologists have carried out their own battery of genetic tests on cobs of native maize. They've used two independent labs to avoid the criticisms surrounding Chapela's work. According to the experts in molecular biology, detecting positives in those additional 3 tests would be the smoking gun, and that smoking gun has now be found. These bio-containment greenhouses are one of the few places in Mexico where it's still legal to grow GM maize... But it's too late to worry about keeping modified crops apart. Newsnight has learned that the results strongly SUPPORT Chapela's original claim - finding telltale signs of DNA from genetically modified maize throughout Mexico's remote regional farmland...

(ends)
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 7:52 am

The Great Mexican Maize Scandal
By Fred Pearce
New Scientist (UK)
Published June 17, 2002

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For environmentalists, the work was proof of the dangers of genetic modification. Transgenes had spread to traditional maize varieties grown in Mexico. Then the journal Nature disowned the research paper, prompting claims that it had given in to a campaign orchestrated by the biotech industry. But why were the authors' strongest critics their own colleagues? Here, we reveal the extraordinary goings-on behind the headlines.

The saga began in September 2001. The Mexican environment ministry announced that DNA from genetically modified maize had been found in native varieties grown on small farms.

The results were, not surprisingly seized upon by campaigners opposed to GM crops. And in November, they were given more ammunition when the findings were published in the prestigious journal Nature. Then, this April, things took a confusing turn. In an unprecedented move, Nature declared that it regretted publishing the paper, and ran two letters that claimed the research was fatally flawed.

The turnaround has generated even more coverage than the original finding. It is the first time Nature has ever disowned a paper in defiance of its authors and referees. Some suspect foul play, claiming that representatives of the biotechnology industry orchestrated a campaign of letters and petitions criticising the original paper. But the paper's critics at the University of California, Berkeley where the key protagonists in this saga have all worked, may not have needed any outside encouragement.

The paper's authors -- graduate student David Quist, an environmental scientist, and his professor, Mexican plant biologist Ignacio Chapela, were already hate figures on the Berkeley campus. In 1998, they had campaigned unsuccessfully to prevent the university striking an extraordinary alliance with the Swiss biotech company Novartis. The deal, signed amid student protests and piethrowing, gave Novartis the rights to cherrypick the best plant research for development in exchange for up to $50 million. But while the protesters see it as compromising academic freedom, many in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology owe their jobs to the deal with what's now called Syngenta.

Two years later, on the night of 11 October 2000, environmental activists destroyed GM maize being grown at Berkeley by students of Mike Freeling, who is a member of the department. The group told a local paper that they had tested the maize to make sure it was genetically modified.

The angry researchers feared an inside job, and initially pointed the finger at Quist. "Just prior to the vandalism, Quist had requested primers from some of the corn geneticists in my department that might be used to identify transgenics in the field," Steven Lindow, a senior professor in the department, told New Scientist. His colleagues "became concerned, and became even more suspicious after the vandalism", he says.

A fortnight after the crops were destroyed, Lindow spoke to Quist's professor, Chapela, about the allegations. Today Lindow says he quickly accepted that Quist was innocent. But Quist says that the allegation festers on, and "has led to irrevocable damage to my academic credibility".


At the time of the field trashing, Quist was in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, collecting samples of maize from farmers' gelds. When the research based on these samples hit the headlines a year later, it was potentially far more damaging to the careers of biotechnologists at Berkeley than heavy boots in a field at midnight.

Quist and Chapela first used PCR, the standard DNA amplification technique, to detect the DNA sequences engineered into Bt maize grown in the US. "This is a standard method of detection used by regulatory agencies in Europe and elsewhere," says Quist. It can generate false positives, he agrees. But the pair say that results from their controls show "beyond reasonable doubt" that the sequences are present in a few samples of the native strains from remote regions in Mexico.

The pair then used a related technique called inverse PCR to discover the precise position of the transgenic sequences. This seemed to show that the added DNA had fragmented and scattered throughout the maize genome -- the finding that triggered an outcry among scientists.

The authors are still fuelling the dispute. "It suggests that transgenic DNA can move around the genome with a range of unpredictable effects, from disruption of normal functions to modification of expressed products that become toxic agents to the generation of new strains of bacteria and viruses," Quist told New Scientist this month.


The two critical letters published by Nature in April attacked this second finding. And Quist and Chapela conceded that there were flaws, when, in a letter that Nature published at the same time, they said: "We acknowledge that our critics' assertion of the misidentifying of sequences . . . is valid."

New genetics & hazards of genetic modification

The rationale and impetus for genetic engineering and genetic modification was the "central dogma" of molecular biology that assumed DNA carries all the instructions for making an organism. This is contrary to the reality of the fluid and responsive genome that already has come to light since the early 1980s. Instead of linear causal chains leading from DNA to RNA to protein and downstream biological functions, complex feed-forward and feed-back cycles interconnect organism and environment at all levels, marking and changing RNA and DNA down the generations. In order to survive, the organism needs to engage in natural genetic modification in real time, an exquisitely precise molecular dance of life with RNA and DNA responding to and participating fully in "downstream" biological functions. That is why organisms and ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the crude, artificial genetically modified RNA and DNA created by human genetic engineers. It is also why genetic modification can probably never be safe.

1. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is anything but precise; it is uncontrollable and unpredictable, introducing many collateral damage to the host genome as well as new transcripts, proteins and metabolites that could be harmful.

2. GM feed with very different transgenes have been shown to be harmful to a wide range of species, by farmers in the field and independent scientists working in the lab, indicating that genetic modification itself is unsafe.

3. Genetic modification done by human genetic engineers is different from natural genetic modification done by organisms themselves for the following reasons: it relies on making unnatural GM constructs designed to cross species barriers and jump into genomes; it combines and transfers genes between species that would never have exchanged genes in nature; GM constructs tend to be unstable and hence more prone to further horizontal gene transfer after it has integrated into the genome.

4. Horizontal gene transfer and recombination is a major route for creating new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases and spreading drug and antibiotic resistance. Transgenic DNA is especially dangerous because the GM constructs are already combinations of sequences from diverse bacteria and viruses that cause diseases, and contain antibiotic resistance marker genes.

5. There is experimental evidence that transgenes are much more likely to spread and to transfer horizontally.

6. The instability of the GM construct is reflected in the instability of transgenic varieties due to both transgene silencing and the loss of transgenes, for which abundant evidence exists. Transgenic instability makes a mockery of "event-specific" characterization and risk assessment, because any change in transgene expression, or worse, rearrangement or movement of the transgenic DNA insert(s) would create another transgenic plant different from the one that was characterized and risk assessed. And it matters little how thoroughly the original characterization and risk assessment may have been done. Unstable transgenic lines are illegal, they should not be growing commercially, and they are not eligible for patent protection.

7. There is abundant evidence for horizontal transfer of transgenic DNA from plant to bacteria in the lab and it is well known that transgenic DNA can persist in debris and residue in the soil long after the crops have been cultivated. At least 87 species (2 % of all known species) of bacteria can take up foreign DNA and integrate it into their genome; the frequency of that happening being greatly increased when a short homologous anchor sequence is present.

8. The frequency at which transgenic DNA transfers horizontal has been routinely underestimated because the overwhelming majority of natural bacteria cannot be cultured. Using direct detection methods without the need to culture, substantial gene transfers were observed on the surface of intact leaves as well as on rotting damaged leaves.

9. In the only monitoring experiment carried out with appropriate molecular probes so far, China has detected the spread of a GM antibiotic resistance gene to bacteria in all of its major rivers; suggesting that horizontal gene transfer has contributed to the recent rise in antibiotic resistance in animals and humans in the country.

10. GM DNA has been found to survive digestion in the gut of mice, the rumen of sheep and duodenum of cattle and to enter the blood stream.

11. In the only feeding trial carried out on humans, the complete 2,266 bp of the epsps transgene in Roundup Ready soybean flour was recovered from the colostomy bag in 6 out of 7 ileostomy subjects. In 3 out of 7 subjects, bacteria cultured from the contents of the colostomy bag were positive for the GM soya transgene, showing that horizontal transfer of the transgene had occurred; but no bacteria were positive for any natural soybean genes.

12. The gastrointestinal tract of mammals is a hotspot for horizontal gene transfer between bacteria, transfer beginning in the mouth.

13. Evidence is emerging that genomes of higher plants and animals may be even softer targets for horizontal gene transfer than genomes of bacteria.

14. The CaMV 35S promoter, most widely used in commercial GM crops, is known to have a fragmentation hotspot, which makes it prone to horizontal gene transfer; in addition. it is promiscuously active in bacteria, fungi, as well as human cells. Recent evidence also suggests that the promoter may enhance multiplication of disease-associated viruses including HIV and cytomegalovirus through the induction of proteins required for transcription of the viruses. It also overlaps with a viral gene that interferes with gene silencing, an essential function in plants and animals that protects them against viruses.

15. The Agrobacterium vector, most widely used for creating GM plants is now known to transfer genes also to fungi and human cells, and to share genetic signals for gene transfer with common bacteria in the environment. In addition, the Agrobacterium bacteria as well as its gene transfer vector tend to remain in the GM crops created, thereby constituting a ready route for horizontal gene transfer to all organisms interacting with the GM crops, or come into contact with the soil on which GM crops are growing or have been grown.

16. In 2008, Agrobacterium was linked to the outbreak of Morgellons disease. The Centers for Disease Control in the US launched an investigation, which concluded in 2012, with the finding: "no common underlying medical condition or infection source was identified". But they had failed to investigate the involvement of Agrobacterium.

17. New GM crops that produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) for specific gene-silencing are hazardous because many off-target effects in the RNA interference process are now known, and cannot be controlled. Furthermore, small dsRNA in food plants were found to survive digestion in the human gut and to enter the bloodstream where they are transported to different tissues and cells to silence genes.

18. Evidence accumulated over the past 50 years have revealed nucleic acids (both DNA and RNA) circulating in the bloodstream of humans and other animals that are actively secreted by cells for intercommunication. The nucleic acids are taken up by target cells to silence genes in the case of double-stranded microRNA (miRNA), and may be integrated into the cells' genome, in the case of DNA. The profile of the circulating nucleic acids change according to states of health and disease. Cancer cells use the system to spread cancer around the body. This nucleic acid intercom leaves the body very vulnerable to genetically modified nucleic acids that can take over the system to do considerable harm.

-- Ban GMOs Now: Especially in the Light of the New Genetics, by Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji


In less fraught circumstances, a partial retraction of the original paper might have been enough to satisfy both sides. But Nature demanded the authors retract the whole paper, and they refused. So the journal ran its own unprecedented disavowal, in the same issue as the critical letters. This asserted that "in the light of diverse advice received . . . the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper".

Quist and Chapela point out that, whatever technical failings might have emerged after publication, their paper had been approved by three anonymous referees. It must have had some merit. And when it and the letters of complaint were submitted to three more referees, two of them specifically noted that none of the comments disproved the conclusion that transgenic corn is growing in Mexico.

"The main finding is not controversial or really being challenged, " says Quist. "Neither of the two letters published in Nature, purportedly showing fatal flaws in our paper, ever questioned our main discovery." Nature has not responded directly to New Scientist's questions about why it would not accept the authors' partial retraction. "Nature has never said that the paper's conclusions are wrong," is all editor Philip Campbell will say. "We have said that they are not convincing on the basis of the evidence that we have published." He denies that a campaign against Quist and Chapela influenced his decision to demand a retraction of their paper -- and to disown it when they refused.

But a campaign there certainly was. Demands that the paper be retracted appeared on Internet biotech forums the day it was published, and continued with mounting vehemence. Yet two of the first, most persistent and apparently scientifically qualified complainants on the Net, "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", appear not to be real people. A British anti-GM campaigner, Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network, claims to have tracked their electronic personas to the offices and computer equipment of the Bivings Group in Washington DC, a PR company that has Monsanto as one of its clients. Bivings initially denied everything but has since admitted that one of the emails came from a Bivings' employee or client.

But what has raised most eyebrows is the identity of the scientists whose two letters attacking the paper appeared in Nature. "The antagonists signing the letters are all connected directly with [Berkeley's] local political scandal," says Chapela.

One was co-written by Freeling and Nick Kaplinsky who is also a senior figure at the same department at Berkeley. The other was by Matthew Metz, a former Berkeley microbiologist who was a vocal supporter of the Novartis alliance, and Johannes Futterer, a young Swiss researcher whose boss, Wilhelm Gruissem, was at Berkeley four years ago and was widely regarded as "the man who brought Novartis to Berkeley".

Quist and Chapela believe the animosities created by the furore over the deal, and inflamed by the crop trashing, must be an element in the row over their paper. Kaplinsky denies this. "This issue is strictly about science. Quist and Chapela published bad science and should have done the honourable thing -- retract their paper and apologise."

June 22, 2012

What I did not do was what some experts advise when hit with a DIRA, which is to issue apologies on Twitter. Marc Randazza suggested this, but I just blew it off. Seriously, why would I apologize for doing things I do all the time, and will very likely keep doing for the rest of my employed life? Basically my entire employment is threatening companies and people, except when I’m protecting them from threats, which, however, I do by means of counterthreats. So if Inman gets a pass because he’s an asshole, I’m fucked. In response to my perseverance in inflicting legal punishment upon those who have besmirched the memory of my mother, Tech Crunch and Popehat are posting that “Carreon is still digging,” and really clever jokes about China begin to pop up. Displays of true wit in this crowd are extremely rare. The business of rapeutationing is serious. After all, we’re trying to destroy somebody here. So clichés are more appropriate to this type of work, true humor has no place here, and all these posters have, in my view, declared that they do not hold their mothers, or anyone’s mother, in special regard. They are, to quote The Three Amigos, the “sons of a motherless goat.” Hehe.

Why not go out and address the mob? The opportunity to comment and reply in online forums is entirely illusory once you have been tagged as a douchebag, and thousands of trolls are roaming around online, just aching with a desire to declare that they went mano-a-mano with Charles Carreon and handed him his ass. These trolls are networked, and will collect like cops around a crime-in-progress with endless amounts of verbal ammo to dispatch. I watched a good friend of mine who tried to say good things about me on his own blog eight months after the initial rapeutation kickoff in June 2012. These networked trolls obviously have Google alerts on “Charles Carreon,” so they can immediately attack or add fuel to any fire where the fires of the neverending DIRA are still burning. They discovered that my friend was engaging in douchebaggery by trying to help me out with a little good press, truthfully posting that I had been helping him a lot with his business, and that I was the kind of lawyer who was helpful when times are tough. Like Scientologists descending upon a suppressive who’s been newly-marked as “fair game,” the Charles Carreon rapeutationists simply added my friend to their list of people to fuck and set his reputation on fire at a thread in Tech Crunch. Some of his competitors showed up to declare him a disgrace to his profession for even working with Charles Carreon. When my friend started posting at Tech Crunch to answer the abuse, his bold sallies were quickly repulsed with loads of invective that would have sunk a garbage ferry. He quickly retreated, punched silly by a gang of rapeutationists who had finally got a chance to release that blast of hateful steam I’d been avoiding for the better part of the prior year. I’d sooner try and wrestle a zombie for a fresh brain than engage those TechCrunchers on their terrain. You don’t have to read Sun Tzu to know that.

-- The Real Diary of Charles Carreon, by Charles Carreon


But Kaplinsky doesn't stop there. "Since they seem incapable of admitting their mistakes, they are raising non-scientific issues like the Novartis agreement with our department, vendettas, global conspiracies. Anything so they can avoid talking about the fact that they published artefactual data and then misinterpreted it."

Campbell says he wasn't aware of the allegations surrounding the crop trashing incident when he accepted the letters. But he says it would not have influenced his decision to publish. Neither Nature nor Campbell are poodles of the biotech industry. Campbell himself wrote a hostile editorial about the Berkeley-Novartis deal. But Quist still insists that it was political pressure that brought about the journal's actions. Whoever is right, the row reveals an alarming breakdown in scientific discourse. In the aftermath of the affair, Campbell wrote that it must have been Murphy's law that ensured the journal's embarrassing climb-down "was in relation to one of the most hotly debated technologies of our time". Others see it as more than an accident. They fear that the affair has put the system of peer review to the test, and found it wanting.

The spectre of unseen actors manipulating events is particularly worrying. In its disavowal, Nature asked its readers to make up their own minds about the science behind the row. But it failed to alert them to the private rows behind the public letters. Nor did it reveal the identities and affiliations of the five referees who broadly supported the original paper, or the sixth who appears to have persuaded Nature to make a retraction.

Also out of sight are the individuals behind "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", not to mention the people who trashed Freeling's field two years ago. Strange what dark shadows are thrown up by the harsh glare of publicity.

While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an email fiercely denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the Nature paper. Last week I checked the email's technical properties. They contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The message came from the same computer terminal that "Mary Murphy" has used. New research coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked the fake persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in Hyattsville, Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the company's chief internet marketer.

-- Corporate phantoms: The web of deceit over GM food has now drawn in the PM's speechwriters, by George Monbiot
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 8:22 am

SCIENTISTS IN A SPIN...
by Zac Goldsmith
Editor, The Ecologist
The Guardian, Letters
May 16, 2002

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George Monbiot's allegations about Monsanto and its incognito spinmeisters (The fake persuaders, May 14) tell only part of this tale of manipulation of science and scientists. At the Ecologist we have seen at first hand just how easily even eminent scientists can become caught up in PR operations. After reporting that the Herald newspaper had had to pay out damages for publishing libellous allegations in an anti-Greenpeace letter, we were contacted by Prof Anthony Trewavas who had been named in the high court as the letter's author. Not so, said Professor Trewavas. He had merely been circulating material written by Andura Smetacek. Who she? One of the PR operatives Monbiot shows has been involved in smearing GM critics.

While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an email fiercely denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the Nature paper. Last week I checked the email's technical properties. They contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The message came from the same computer terminal that "Mary Murphy" has used. New research coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked the fake persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in Hyattsville, Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the company's chief internet marketer.

-- Corporate phantoms: The web of deceit over GM food has now drawn in the PM's speechwriters, by George Monbiot


Zac Goldsmith
Editor, The Ecologist
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 9:59 am

Amaizing Disgrace - Monsanto Up To Its Old Dirty Tricks Again
The Ecologist Vol 32 No 4, May 2002
4-29-2

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A dirty tricks campaign leads straight to the door of a Monsanto PR company, says Jonathan Matthews in the launch of his new column.

The journal Science reporting recently on how the Mexican "maize scandal" was driving the battle over GM crops "to new heights of acrimony and confusion", noted the part played by, "widely circulating anonymous e-mails" accusing researchers, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, of "conflicts of interest and other misdeeds".

These accusations surfaced first in late November on the day of Nature's publication of Chapela and Quist's findings of GM contamination of maize varieties in Mexico - the global heartland of maize diversity. Samples of native criollo corn were found to contain a genetic 'switch' commonly used in GM crops and one sample was even found to contain a commonly inserted gene that prompts the plant to produce a poison. The results were particularly surprising as Mexico banned the growing of GM maize in 1998, and the last known GM crops were grown almost 60 miles from where the contaminated maize was found.

For the biotech industry this could not have come at a worse time. Its efforts to lift the European, Brazilian, and Mexican moratoria on GM seeds or foods were all coming to a head.

Chapela and Quist came under immediate attack in a furious volley of e-mails published on the AgBioView listserv. AgBioView correspondents calling themselves 'Mary Murphy' and 'Andura Smetacek' claimed Chapela and Quist's research was a product of a conspiracy with "fear-mongering activists". The conspirators' aim, apparently, was to attack "biotechnology, free-trade, intellectual property rights and other politically motivated agenda items."

These claims prompted a series of further attacks from others. Prof Anthony Trewavas, for example, denounced scientists like Chapela who had "political axes to grind". Trewavas demanded Chapela be fired unless he handed over his maize samples for checking.

This was not Trewavas's first controversial intervention in the GM debate in response to material put into circulation on AgBioView. Last October, for instance, Trewavas was named in the High Court as the source of an anti-Greenpeace letter at the centre of a libel case. Trewavas subsequently claimed that the letter originated on AgBioView.

The last piece in question was posted by one Andura Smetacek, who regularly posts vitriolic attacks on critics of the biotech industry. In Smetacek's early posts, interestingly, repeated reference is made to one particular website, CFFAR.org. Ostensibly, CFFAR - or the Center for Food and Agricultural Research, to give it its full title - is "a public policy and research coalition" concerned with "food and fiber production." But despite links to CFFAR.org from the websites of US public libraries and university departments, there appears to be no evidence this organisation really exists.

To judge by the frequent usage of words like "violence", "terrorism", and "acts of terror", the real purpose of the site is to associate biotech industry opponents with terrorism. This mission is faciliated by fabricated claims. In its "vandalwatch.org" section, for instance, CFFAR.org accuses Greenpeace of engaging in multiple attacks on British farms. Greenpeace is accused of commandeering farmers' tractors and crashing through fences in pursuit of farmers' families.

The domain registration details for CFFAR.org show the registrant to be one 'THEODOROV, MANUEL'. Among early signatories to a pro-agbiotech petition launched by AgBioView list editor, Prof CS Prakash, the following details can be found: NAME: emmanuel theodorou. POSITION: director of associations. ORGANIZATION: bivings woodell, Inc. DEPARTMENT: advocacy and outreach.

What kind of "advocacy and outreach" do Bivings Woodell, Inc., aka the Bivings Group, do? According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, "The Bivings Group has developed 'Internet advocacy' campaigns for corporate America since 1996... Biotechnology giant Monsanto [is] among the Bivings clients who have discovered how to make the Internet work for them."

As part of its brief, Bivings designs and runs Monsanto's websites and Theodorou is believed to have been part of Bivings' Monsanto team. Mary Murphy would also seem to connect to Bivings. Or so it would seem from the evidence of a fake Associated Press article on the bulletin board of the foxbghsuit.com website. It was posted by "Mary Murphy (bw6.bivwood.com)".

Between them Smetacek and Murphy have had 60 or more attacks published, often very prominently, by Prakash on the AgBioWorld listserv. Prakash presents AgBioWorld as a mainstream science group reliant on the support of individuals and philanthropic foundations. However, a website design specialist who took a detailed look at the AgBioWorld site reported that there appeared to be evidence that part of its content was held on a Bivings' server. Furthermore, agbioworld.org, vandalwatch.org and the Bivings'-designed thebivingsreport.com, all seemed to be the work of the same designer.

Perhaps it's time for Prakash to clarify where AgBioWorld finishes and biotech industry PR begins. Come to that, the Royal Society might like to tell us why Trewavas, one of its media advisors, seems so keen to promulgate PR industry smears. And, finally, Monsanto needs to explain how its much vaunted pledge to abide by principles of openness, transparency and respect tallies with a dirty tricks campaign.
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Re: Monsanto's Mexican Maize Mischief, by sourcewatch.org

Postby admin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 10:02 am

Seeds of Dissent: Anti-GM scientists are facing widespread assaults on their credibility
by ANDY ROWELL
The Big Issue n.484,
April 15, 2002

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Andy Rowell is the author of 'Green Backlash: global subversion of the environment movement', Routledge, London and New York, 1996

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 issues of genetic pollution in a centre of unique 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 it had concluded "that 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 that 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 says 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. "I think it 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 over 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 website. On the list serv the first attack was posted by someone called 'Mary Murphy' within hours of publication. She wrote: "It should also 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 list. So who are they?

Mary Murphy's email is mmrph@hotmail.com, 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 Monsanto'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 gleaned 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 fake website called CFFAR as well as via articles and attacks on listservs under aliases. The attack on the Nature piece is a continuation of this covert campaign.

Andura Smetacek is no stranger to such dirty tricks. The Big Issue South West can also reveal that she was the original source of a letter that was published under the name of Tony Trevawas, 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 a 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 South West 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, by 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, saying that it is run on a "shoestring". He 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."

Thanks for sending this article go to Norfolk Genetic Information Network (ngin), http://www.ngin.org.uk
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