I have every intention to fight these motherfuckers with my bare knuckles. Of course, the best strategy isn't always the most direct one. If people have suggestions about strategy and tactics, please e-mail me offlist.
Chuck Infoshop.org
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I've got some advice, but it only applies to a very limited context. The short form is, if you go after them (righwing enemies or corporate power) in an academic context, then make absolutely certain that everything you write is thoroughly backed up with unimpeachable evidence from some third party source that has no conceivable stake in the facts at hand.
Normally in a forum like LBO it doesn't matter. In all political forums it doesn't matter because partisanship is taken for granted and is just part of the game. This is how the Right and corporate hacks can operate freely through press outlets and make any charges they want. They prefer to attack from press forums and then let the integrity ridden liberals struggle with ethical issues of truth, accuracy, and objectivity.
But if you want to really discredit these kinds of assholes in an academic forum of some sort, then you need to play a different game. If you pick an outside forum, then you are free to assault them at will. But if you want to hit them inside academia, then you have to be more careful about it, especially if the forum is scientific or scholarly.
I am going to post an article on the controversy over Novartis and the Dept of Plant and Microbial Biology at UCB. Consider it as background on how not to go after these issues lightly in an academic context.
The story is about GM corn in Mexico that was banned 1998, but it has since likely genetically altered naive species by jumping via pollen crosses. The first scientific study that attempted to prove this was conducted by a UCB PMB dept. critic (Chapela) of the Novartis deal with the Dept. The critique of Chapela's work was conducted by a supporter of the Novartis deal, Michael Freeling. (Novartis is a bio-tech corp who entered a deal with this UCB dept to sponsor research in return for first cut on research ownership, patents, deals, etc. The division that originally signed the deal was sold by Novartis and is now owned by some other corp.)
This story continues to spin. Chapela was denied tenture and he appealed. The appeal was turned down this fall.
I had a low paying job in this dept as a lab tech assistant but the job (and the grant) ended about a year before the Novartis deal was under negotiation. I knew Mike Freeling and his chief assistant Sara Hake, but had never met Chapela. I worked with corn crosses and assisted in trying to identify some of the genetics responsible for a particular corn mutant we worked on. (The post-doc I worked under had some his research sponsored by Freeling who had been one of his thesis advisers.)
Freeling specializes in corn genetics and his lab and its work is absolutely un-impeachable. It's quite likely that Chapela jumped the gun and made a scientific mistake. That doesn't mean that Chapela's work might not be vindicated in some later work using a different approach. But for now he has lost this round. This kind of mistake is very easy to do. We made a similar mistake, jumping the gun, but it had no more importance than a wasted six months with no paper to publish.
I have very mixed feelings about Freeling. I like him a lot and admire him. I can't figure out how Freeling can know exactly how his work can be used by corporate power, and then turn around and support bullshit like Novartis. The only human answer I can come up with is power and and maybe intellectual greed---in the sense of possession of more `breakthroughs'. Something like a Faustian bargain.
Freeling should know better. If anything he should have helped Chapela. But then maybe there were personal reasons that they became adversaries or at least competitors.
The bottom line lesson here is if you tackle some political issue within a scientific or scholarly community, you have to do your homework. If you don't, then you will be ratted out on faulty methodology. The arena will become so clouded in questionable methods that the case will get lost, even if it is likely true.
Notice in the next article, this:
``Although transgene content in traditional corn races is undisputed, allegations that these transgenes are self-sustaining in traditional corn races, as Quist and Chapela suggest, is a point of great debate.''
What they mean here is that the altered genetic content is likely to be permanent, that it will not naturally disappear in later generations.
What makes Freeling's critique of Chapela important is that Freeling's work studies the natural processes of genetic mutations, and specifically includes Mu transposons in corn as a tool to examine various genes' functions and expressions. In other words Freeling is an expert in exactly the sorts of processes involved in any potential self-sustaining mechanism for transgenes.
CG