Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: OGM

Biotech critics at risk
Economics calls the shots in the debate
Mark Dowie   "Sunday", January 11, 2004
Four biologists from Europe and North America met face to face for the
first time on the UC Berkeley campus last month.
Although none of them is particularly famous as a scientist -- not one
Nobel among them -- they know each other's names and work as well as
if they had been working together for 10 years in the same laboratory.
They share a painful experience.
Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each made a simple
but dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same
powerful industry -- biotechnology -- that by then had become the
handmaiden of industrial agriculture and the darling of venture
capitalists, who are still hoping they have invested their most recent
billions in "the next big thing."
If any one of the experiments of these four scientists is proved
through replication to be valid, the already troubled agricultural arm
of biotech will be in truly dire straits. No one knows that better
than Monsanto, Sygenta and other biotech firms that have so
aggressively attacked the four discoveries in question.
When he was the principal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute
in Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed
transgenically modified potatoes to rodents in one of the few
experiments that have ever tested the safety of genetically modified
food in animals or humans. Almost immediately, the rats displayed
tissue and immunological damage.
After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review
and were published in the United Kingdom's leading medical journal,
Lancet, Pusztai's home was burglarized and his research files taken.
Soon thereafter, he was fired from his job at Rowett, and he has since
suffered an orchestrated international campaign of discreditation, in
which Prime Minister Tony Blair played an active role.
While Pusztai was fighting for his professional life, Cornell
Professor John Losey was patiently dusting milkweed leaves with
genetically modified corn pollen. When monarch butterfly larvae that
ate the leaves died in significant numbers (while a control group fed
nongenetically modified pollen all survived), Losey was not
particularly surprised.
The new gene patched into the butterfly's genome was inserted to
produce an internal pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), intended
to attack and kill the corn borer and some particularly troublesome
moth caterpillars.
What did surprise Losey was the vehement attack on his study that
followed from Novartis and Monsanto, their open attempts to discredit
his work and the extent to which mass media leapt to their support.
Losey is still at Cornell, where his future seems secure.
Not true of Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist in the plant
sciences department at UC Berkeley. In 2000, Chapela discovered that
pollen had drifted several miles from a field of genetically modified
corn in Chiapas into the remote mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico, landing
in the last reserve of biodiverse maize in the world.
If genes from the rogue pollen actually penetrated the DNA of
traditional crops, they could potentially eliminate maize biodiversity
forever. In his report, Chapela cautiously stated that this indeed
might have happened. He expressed that sentiment in a peer-reviewed
study published by Nature in November 2001.
After an aggressive public relations campaign mounted for Monsanto by
the Bivings Group, a global PR firm that began with a vicious e-mail
attack mounted by two "scientists" who turned out to be fictitious,
Nature editors did something they had never done in their 133 years of
existence. They published a cautious partial retraction of the Chapela
report. Largely on the strength of that retraction, Chapela was
recently denied tenure at UC Berkeley and informed that he would not
be reoffered his teaching assignment in the fall.
When Tyrone Hayes, a UC Berkeley endocrinologist specializing in
amphibian development, exposed young frogs in his lab to very small
doses of the herbicide Atrazine, they first failed to develop normal
larynxes and later displayed serious reproductive problems (males
became hermaphrodites), suggesting that Atrazine might be an endocrine
disrupter.
Hayes' subsequent experience differed slightly from the other
panelists', but was no less troubling to academic scientists. As soon
as word of Hayes' findings reached Sygenta Corp. (formerly Novartis)
and its contractor, Ecorisk Inc., attempts were made to stall his
research. Funding was withheld. It was a critical time, as the EPA was
close to making a final ruling on Atrazine. Hermaphroditic frogs would
not help Sygenta's cause.
Hayes continued the research with his own funds and found more of the
same results, whereupon Sygenta offered him $2 million to continue his
research "in a private setting." A committed teacher with a lab full
of loyal students, Hayes declined the offer and proceeded with
research that he knew had to remain in public domain.
This time he found damaging developmental effects of Atrazine at even
lower levels (0.1 parts per billion). When his work appeared in the
prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sygenta
attacked the study and claimed that three other labs it contracted had
been unable to duplicate Hayes' results.
Hayes, who keeps his head down on the Berkeley campus, has obtained
tenure and continues to teach. But his studies that could affect
approval of the most widely used chemical in U.S. agriculture are
being stifled at every turn.
In a public conversation attended by 500 people and Webcast to 4,000
more worldwide recently on the Berkeley campus, Pusztai, Losey, Hayes
and Chapela shared their experiences and together explored ways to
prevent similar fates from ever happening to their peers. Their
similar stories provide a unique window into a disturbing trend in
modern science.
None of the four complained that his science had been challenged,
although in each case it had. All science is and should be challenged.
No one knows that better than a practicing scientist, who also knows
that if tenure depended on a perfect experimental record, there would
be very few tenured scientists anywhere in the world.
These four men were not attacked because of flawed or imperfect
experiments but because the findings of their work have a potential
economic effect. The sad part is that the academies and other
allegedly independent institutions that once defended scientific
freedom and protected employees like Hayes, Chapela, Losey and Pusztai
are abandoning them to the wolves of commerce, the brands of which are
being engraved over the entrances to a disturbing number of university
labs.
Mark Dowie lives in Point Reyes and teaches a science writing class at
UC Graduate School of Journalism.

 labs.
e questo e' un esempio. Secondo l'autore, chi osteggia Pusztai 
"evidentemente" lo fa perche' ha interessi biechi da difendere. 
L'ipotesi che quella ricera fosse bacata, che nutrire a forza dei topi 
con patate crude non fosse una cosa salubre, non gli sfiora neppure la 
testa.
Il fatto che la farfalla Monarca abbia aumentato la propria popolazione 
anche nelle regioni coltivate a mais BT, che evita foglie sporche di 
polline, che in quella ricerca glie ne davano a vagonate senza che 
avesse la possibilita' di sceglierne altre, non viene neppure accennato.