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Monsanto's World Wide Web of
Deceit
Excerpts from
NEW SCIENTIST's
by Fred Pearce, June 15, 2002
...In less fraught circumstances,
a partial retraction of the original paper might have been enough to satisfy
both sides.
Nature has not responded directly
to New Scientist's questions about why it would not accept the authors'
partial retraction. "Nature has never said that the paper's conclusions
are wrong, " is all editor Philip Campbell will say... He denies that a
campaign against Quist and Chapela influenced his decision to demand a
retraction of their paper—and to disown it when they refused.
But a campaign there certainly
was. Demands that the paper be retracted appeared on Internet biotech forums
the day it was published, and continued with mounting vehemence. Yet two
of the first, most persistent and apparently scientifically qualified complainants
on the Net, "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", appear not to be real
people. A British anti-GM campaigner, Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk
Genetic Information Network, claims to have tracked their electronic personas
to the offices and computer equipment of the Bivings Group in Washington
DC, a PR company that has Monsanto as one of its clients. Bivings initially
denied everything but has since admitted that one of the emails came from
a Bivings' employee or client.
The spectre of unseen actors manipulating
events is particularly worrying.
Strange what dark shadows are thrown
up by the harsh glare of publicity.
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