A submission about academic freedom

And I do mean submission. In the November 2001 issue of the leading scientific publication Nature, there was an article by Dr. Ignacio Chapela of UCal Berkeley and one of his graduate students, David Quist (a founder of the campus group Students for Responsible Research). It reported on their research which

discovered strands of genetically modified DNA in the genome of native strands of corn cultivated in the heart of the region where maize was first domesticated.

That is, they said that GM corn was cross-breeding with native, non-GM corn - which could have the ultimate result, if such cross-breeding could happen so easily, of producing homogenized corn lacking genetic diversity with all the attendant risks: One of the advantages of genetic diversity is that some emerging blight is unlikely to affect all strains equally, a form of protection against a major food disaster.

The research was attacked viciously and a campaign was launched to inundate Nature will critical letters and counter-claims.

In 2003, Chapela was denied tenure by the university's budget committee, a decision confirmed by the chancellor. Last Friday, he taught his last class; he's supposed to be off the campus by the end of the month.

End of story? Not quite. It turns out that the campaign against Chapela could be traced back to the Monsanto Corporation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. What's more, when his tenure came up for consideration in 2003,

department members [voted] 32 to 1 in favor of tenure, followed by tenure recommendations from both his department chair and the dean of the College of Natural Resources.

On Oct. 3, a five-member Campus Ad Hoc Committee voted unanimously in favor of tenure.

And the chancellor's decision came in spite of "repeated tenure recommendations from the chair and dean."

In short, it wasn't his academic standing that was at issue. It was that he crossed Monsanto, which has shown no hestitation at using as much corporate muscle as it deems necessary to punish and silence critics.

If you'd like to protest the denial of tenure to Chapela to the new (and hopefully-more open-minded) chancellor, go here. For more on GM foods and the opposition to them, one source is the Organic Consumers Association.

Footnote: The fact that Chapela earlier had criticized the five-year, $25 million, deal Swiss biotech giant Novartis (now Syngenta) made with college for its obvious issues of conflict of interest undoubtedly did little to endear him to the budget committee, either.