September 8, 2015
by Jonathan Latham, PhD
http://www.independentsciencenews.org/science-media/the-puppetmasters-of-academia-ny-times-left-out/
“Reading the emails make(s) me want to throw up” tweeted the
Food Babe after reading a lengthy series of them posted online by the
NY Times
on Sept 5th. The emails in question result from a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request and are posted in the side bars of a
front-page article by
Times reporter Eric Lipton (“
Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show”). The article is highly disturbing, but, as the Food Babe implied, the
Times
buried the real story. The real scoop was not the perfidy and deceit of
a handful of individual professors. Buried in the emails is proof
positive of active collusion between the agribusiness and chemical
industries, numerous and often prominent academics, PR companies, and
key administrators of land grant universities for the purpose of
promoting GMOs and pesticides. In particular, nowhere does the
Times
note that one of the chief colluders was none other than the President
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
All this is omitted entirely, or buried in hard-to-notice side bars,
which are anyway unavailable to print readers. So, here is the article
Eric Lipton should have written.
First, The Lipton Story
The Lipton article seems, at first sight, to be impressive reporting.
Lipton describes how Kevin Folta, Chair of the Dept. of Horticulture at
the University of Florida secretly took expenses and $25,000 of
unrestricted money from Monsanto to promote GMO crops. On behalf of the
biotech industry, or via the PR firm Ketchum, Folta wrote on
websites and attended public events, trainings, lobbying efforts and special missions.
Food Industry Enlisted Academics
Parts of this were
already known,
but Lipton digs up further damning evidence and quotes from Folta. They
include an email to Monsanto that solidly contradicts Folta’s previous
denials of a relationship with Monsanto and the biotech industry: “I am
grateful for this opportunity and promise a solid return on the
investment,” Folta wrote after receiving the $25,000 check, thereby
showing both a clear understanding of his role and the purpose of the
money. The article goes on to similarly expose Bruce Chassy (Prof
Emeritus, University of Illinois) and David Shaw (Mississippi State
University). It also discussses, presumably for “balance”, agronomist
and GMO critic Charles Benbrook, then at Washington State University,
who unlike the others openly acknowledged his funding.
What Lipton Missed
But readers of the emails can find facts that are much more damaging
to perceptions of academic independence than that contained in the main
article. For one thing, the money Folta received is insignificant
besides the tens of millions his university was taking from Syngenta
(>$10million), Monsanto(>$1million), Pioneer (>$10million), and
BASF (>$1million). Money that it’s hard to believe did not have a
role in protecting Kevin Folta as he roamed zealously (and often
offensively) over the internet, via his twitter account,
blog, podcast, and OpEds, squelching dissent and ridiculing GMO critics wherever he went.
Also missing from the main
Times article is a sense of the
extensive and intricate networking of a small army of academics
furthering the interests of Monsanto and other parts of the chemical,
agribusiness and biotech industries. Folta rarely acted alone. His
networks are filled with economists, molecular biologists, plant
pathologists, development specialists, and agronomists, many of them
much more celebrated than Kevin Folta, but all of them in a knowing loop
with industry and the PR firms. Their job was acknowledged openly in
emails (“We are all bad-ass shills for the truth. It’s a pleasure
shilling with you.” Or, as Folta himself put it: “I’m glad to sign on to
whatever you like, or write whatever you like.”). More generally, the
group’s role was to initiate academic publications and other articles
and to firefight legislative, media and scientific threats to the GMO
and pesticide industries, all the while keeping their industry links
hidden.
The academics identified by these emails as cooperating with industry and PR firms include:
Profs. Bruce Chassy (University of Illinois) and Alan McHughen
(University of California, Riverside) who worked together to destroy the
credibility of Russian scientist and GMO critic Irina Ermakova. They
persuaded the journal
Nature Biotechnology to interview
Ermakova about her research and describe it. This interview was followed
by a detailed critique of her research (about which none of the authors
were expert). Ermakova was neither told of the critique nor given a
chance to answer it. This whole
elaborate subterfuge required her to be sent a dummy proof of the article she thought she was publishing in the journal.
Prof. Calestuous Juma (Harvard University) longtime advocate of GMOs for Africa.
Prof. Wayne Parrott (University of Georgia) a serial intervener in academic GMO debates.
Prof. Roger Beachy (Danforth Center, formerly USAID). Beachy is the
principal living exponent of a classic biotech strategy: to respond
rapidly to a report or publication critical of some aspect of the
technology with a multi-author “
rebuttal” [
Disclaimer:
the inaugural report of the Bioscience Resource Project (on the genome
damage caused by genetic engineering) was met, even before formal
publication, with both barrels from 23 professors, including Roger
Beachy (Altpeter et al 2005)].(2)
Prof. Ron Herring (Cornell) who has helped to promote GMOs in India and fought to
defuse the farmer suicide debate in India.
Prof. CS Prakash (Tuskegee University) is the convener of the
influential listserv AgBioWorld. AgBioWorld was the all-important
conduit for a petition signed by three thousand scientists calling for
the retraction of a 2001 scientific paper showing GMO contamination of
Mexican corn (
Quist and Chapela 2001). As detailed in an article called
The Fake Persuaders,
the scientists who initiated the petition, and made inaccurate and
inflammatory statements about the authors, were not real people.
However, their emails could be traced back to servers belonging to
Monsanto or Bivings, a PR company that was working with Monsanto at the
time.
Prof. Nina Fedoroff (Penn State) is the most prominent of all of the scientists looped into all of the
Times
emails. Nina Fedoroff was the 2011-2012 President of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS is the foremost
scientific body in the US. During her Presidency, Fedoroff, who is also a
contributor to the
NY Times, used her position to coordinate
and sign a letter on behalf of 60 prominent scientists. This letter was
sent to EPA as part of an effort to defeat a pesticide regulatory
effort. The real coordinator was Monsanto but Fedoroff participated in
phone conferences and email exchanges with them (including with the
prominent lobbyist Stanley Abramson) and gets credit in the emails for
“moving the ball far down the field”. Yet Nina Fedoroff is not once
named in the main article and nowhere at all is her position noted.
So the story that academia’s most vocal GMO defenders, and some of
its most prominent scientists, are copied into these emails is missing.
The focus on individuals like Folta occludes a demonstration, for the
first time ever, of long-suspected and intricate coordination and
cooperation among them.
Also looped in to various of the emails are supposedly independent
individuals and organisations who speak in favour of biotechnology,
self-reportedly out of personal passion. These include Dr Steve Savage,
Karl Haro von Mogel of Biofortified, Mischa Popoff (of the Heartland
Institute) and Jon Entine (then affiliated with George Mason University
and now head of the Genetic Literacy Project and a
Forbes Magazine columnist). All are revealed, by the emails but not the article, as biotech insiders.
Cooperation among academics is not a crime. But these emails show, as
in the EPA letter example, that a company (usually Monsanto, but also
Dow and Syngenta and a PR firm, often several of them, plus sometimes
the biotech lobbyists BIO or CropLife America) were invariably looped in
to these emails, and further, that initiatives usually began with one
of these non-academic entities, and were shepherded by them. Only rarely
is there even a suggestion from the emails that the various academics
were out in front, though that was always the intended impression of the
result.
But perhaps the biggest of all revelations within these emails is the
connivance of senior university administrators, especially at Cornell
University. The
NY Times article focuses on the misdeeds of
Mississippi State University Vice President David Shaw. But, looped into
one email string, along with the PR firm Ketchum and Jon Entine are
various Cornell email addresses and names. These are ignored by Lipton,
but the email addresses belong to very senior members of the Cornell
administration. They include Ronnie Coffman (Director of Cornell’s
College of Agriculture and Life Science) and Sarah Evanega Davidson (now
director of the Gates-funded
Cornell Alliance for Science).
The Alliance for Science is a PR project and international training
center for academics and others who want to work with the biotech
industry to promote GMOs. It is funded ($5.6 million) by the Gates
Foundation. Its upcoming program of speakers at Cornell for September
include Tamar Haspel (Washington Post reporter), Amy Harmon (New York
Times reporter) and Prof. Dan Kahan (Yale Law School). These speakers
are the exact ones mentioned in a proposal worked out between Kevin
Folta and Monsanto in a series of email exchanges intended to enhance
biotech outreach. These email exchanges also propose setting up “Ask Me
Anything” events to be held at universities around the country with
Kevin Folta as of the panelists.
On Sept 10th the Cornell Alliance for Science is hosting an event in
downtown Ithaca (home town of Cornell). It is called “Ask Me Anything
About GMOs” and Kevin Folta is a panelist. Somehow or other Davidson’s
Cornell Alliance for Science read Monsanto’s lips, perfectly.
Your right to know
Let me speculate at what is really going on behind the scenes of Lipton’s article.
Earlier this year, a newly-formed US group called
US Right to Know (USRTK)
set in motion
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests directed at 14 (now 43)
prominent public university scientists it suspected of working with (and
being paid by) the biotech industry and/or its PR intermediaries. Now,
if these 43 academics had nothing to hide, this request would not have
attracted much attention and hardly any emails would have been
forthcoming. However, the USRTK FOIA requests triggered a huge outcry in
various quarters about the “harassment” of public scientists. The
outcry has led to OpEds in the
LA Times and the controversial
removal of scientific blog posts defending USRTK, and much else besides, as reputedly tens of thousands of emails (from these FOIA requests) have landed on the desks of USRTK.
What would a good PR company recommend to its clients in such a
situation? In order to preempt the likely upcoming firestorm, it might
recommend that various media outlets run ahead of USRTK to publish a
version of events in which academic small-fry like Kevin Folta, Bruce
Chassy and David Shaw (of Mississippi State) are the villains. Making
them the fall guys lets others off the hook: high-profile scientists
like Nina Fedoroff and Roger Beachy; the pro-biotech academic community
in general; and prestigious Ivy League institutions like Cornell
University.
These much bigger fish are who the
NY Times should have
harpooned. Since they did not, or perhaps would not, let us hope that
USRTK will make better use of those emails, ideally by posting all of
them online.
Footnotes
(1) Others Professors cc’d into emails include : Peter Davies
(Cornell), Carl Pray (Rutgers), Tony Shelton (Cornell), Peter Phillips
(University of Saskatchewan), Prabhu Pingali (Cornell), Elizabeth Earle
(Cornell), Peter Hobbs (Cornell), Janice Thies (Cornell) and Ann
Grodzins Gold (Syracuse), Martina Newell-McGloughlin (UC Davis).
(2) Later published as A. K. Wilson, J. R. Latham and R. A. Steinbrecher (2006)
Transformation-induced Mutations in Transgenic Plants: Analysis and Biosafety Implications. Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews 23: 209-237
References
Altpeter F. et al (2005)
Particle bombardment and the genetic enhancement of crops: myths and realities. Molecular Breeding 15: 305–327.
David Quist and Ignacio H. Chapela (2001)
Transgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nature 414: 541-543
