12 June 2002
MATT METZ'S GUARDIAN LETTER
1. Matt Metz's Guardian letter
2. Comment on Metz's letter
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1. Matt Metz's Guardian letter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,735781,00.html
The Guardian, Letters
Wednesday June 12, 2002
What the Mexican maize fiasco has demonstrated to me is that the press is almost entirely unaccountable for what they say. Some serve an agenda. For George Monbiot the agenda is what I have come to call the anti-corporate faith.
The server at Berkeley crashing took out Quist and Chapela's email, but it also took out email of the authors of one critique (Kaplinsky et al). Though Conko and I have both written in to Agbioview, we have never exchanged so much as a single message with each other. My research is publicly funded, and my political stance is far from rightwing. The difference between Monbiot and Rush Limbaugh is which wing is flapping.
Dr Matthew Metz
Department of microbiology, University of Washington
metzilla@u.washington.edu
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2. NGIN Comment on Metz's letter
According to Matt Metz, co-author of one of the two letters critcising Chapela and Quist's work published in Nature, "Though Conko and I have both written in to Agbioview, we have never exchanged so much as a single message with each other. My research is publicly funded, and my political stance is far from rightwing."
For a moderate unsullied by contact with the likes of Conko, Metz has a curious choice of bedfellows.
In March 2000 Metz collaborated on the production of a special questions
and answers sheet called 'critical issues in agricultural biotechnology'.
The document hypes Metz's scientific credentials, describing him as 'Professor,
University of California at Berkeley', although at the time he was only
a graduate student.
[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~iazelaya/Newsletter_Vol_1_No_3-Addendum.pdf]
These are the people Metz was working with:
Barun Mitra of the Liberty Institute - "a free market think tank in India" - http://www.libertyindia.org - which supports the unregulated introduction of novel technologies such as genetically engineered crops.
Andrew Apel, editor of the industry newsletter, AgBiotech Reporter one of the most extreme of Prakash's supporters. Apel used the Sept 11 attacks to put forward the view that critics of GE, like Drs Mae-Wan Ho and Vandana Shiva, had "blood on their hands".
and
Gregory Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and co-founder of the AgBioWorld Foundation - the man Metz says he's never exchanged so much as an e-mail with.
The document Metz worked on for agBioWorld can be found on its website
but, funnily enough, it now omits Matt Metz's role in compiling it:
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_info/articles/critical.html