The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

252 the world according to monsantothe 32–1 vote in favor by his department; he would have to leave the universityat the end of his contract six months later. In other words, he wasfired. He filed suit and won in May 2005: “Since then,” he told me, “I bearthe burden of being known as a whistle-blower. I have no funding to conductthe research that interests me, because in the United States now you can’twork in biology if you don’t accept funding from biotechnology firms. Therewas a time when science and the university loudly proclaimed their independencefrom governmental, military, and industrial institutions. That’sover, not only because scientists depend on industry to survive, but becausethey themselves are part of industry. That’s why I say that we’re living in a totalitarianworld, ruled by the interests of multinational corporations whorecognize their responsibility only to their shareholders. It is hard to resistthis absolute power. Look at what happened to Exequiel Ezcurra.”Unfortunately, I was unable to meet the former director of the MexicanNational Institute of Ecology, who, a few years after denouncing Nature’s rejectionof his study of the contamination of criollo corn, was in 2005 appointeddirector of scientific research at the San Diego Natural HistoryMuseum, where he had headed the Biodiversity Research Center from1998 to 2001. I was surprised to find that in August 2005 he had co-signeda study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a publicationof the National Academy of Sciences. Conducted at WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis,* the study found an “absence of detectable transgenesin local landraces of maize in Oaxaca.” 31 But in October 2006 I didmeet one of his colleagues, Dr. Elena Alvarez-Buylla, in her laboratory at theMexican National Institute of Ecology.“How do you explain the fact that Dr. Ezcurra signed a study that contradictshis previous work to such an extent?” I asked.“Only he knows,” the biologist answered cautiously. “What I can say isthat we began that work together and that I was pushed out. I was replacedby an American, Allison Snow from the University of Ohio, who picked upthe study in progress. They decided to publish preliminary results, whichI don’t consider scientifically very rigorous.” She is not the only one whothinks so: five international researchers—including Paul Gepts, whom I hadmet in July 2004 at the University of California, Davis, to discuss the patentingof life—also found that the “conclusions [of the study] are not scientifi-*It should be noted in passing that Monsanto has deposited its archives at Washington Universityin Saint Louis, but they are unfortunately not accessible for journalists.