The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

248 the world according to monsantoeries. The affair had created two camps in Berkeley representing two conflictingconceptions of science: on one side, those who, like me, wanted it toremain independent, and on the other, those who were prepared to sell theirsouls to obtain funding.”In June 2002, New Scientist identified these colleagues, who wrote an inflammatoryletter to Nature in December 2001 asking the journal to retractthe article, an unusual step. They were Mathew Metz, Nick Kaplinsky, MikeFreeling, and Johannes Futterer, a Swiss researcher whose boss was WilhelmGruissem, who worked at Berkeley, where he “was widely regarded asthe man who brought Novartis to Berkeley.” 11“But the worst campaign came from Monsanto,” Chapela said. He concludedthat it “had quite obviously received a copy of our article before itwas published.”Monsanto’s Dirty TricksMonsanto really did carry things to an extreme in this case, and the story Iam about to tell is hard to believe. The very day Quist and Chapela’s articlewas published in Nature, November 29, 2001, an obviously well-informedwoman named Mary Murphy sent an e-mail to the pro-GMO science Website AgBio World in which she wrote: “The activists will certainly run wildwith news that Mexican corn has been ‘contaminated’ by genes from GMcorn. . . . It should also be noted that the author of the Nature article, IgnacioH. Chapela, is on the Board of Directors of the Pesticide Action NetworkNorth America (PANNA), an activist group. ...Not exactly what you’d callan unbiased writer.” 12The same day, a person named Andura Smetacek posted on the same Website a comment titled ”Ignatio [sic] Chapela—activists FIRST, scientist second,”in which she had no qualms about spreading lies: “Sadly the recentpublication by Nature Magazine of a letter (not a peer-reviewed research articlesubject to independent scientific analysis) by Berkeley Ecologist IgnatioChapela are being manipulated by anti-technology activists (such asGreenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Organic Consumers Association)with the mainstream media to falsely suggest some heretofore undisclosedill associated with agricultural biotechnology. ...Research into Chapela’s