Novartis Uses Financial Muscle to Fire Professor for criticizing GM Crops

A well-respected and popular professor at the University of California in Berkeley has been fired after publishing a scientific paper regarding the uncontrolled contamination of irreplaceable native Mexican corn varieties by genetically engineered corn.

Dr. Ignacio Chapela, whose corn contamination article was published in the science journal "Nature," was mysteriously denied his tenure, despite the fact the UC Berkeley tenure review panel had actually voted almost unanimously to approve his tenure.

Chapela, who was kicked out of his office on December 31, 2004, has since filed a lawsuit against UC Berkeley. The former professor says the University removed him under pressure from Novartis, a multinational biotechnology corporation and customer of Huntingdon Life Sciences who had provided the school with $25 million in funding. Novartis is a company that does GM crop or animal testing at notorious animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences*. They also do xenotranplantation studies at HLS - after a 2 1/2 year legal battle, in 2004 was released the biggest leak of documents ever related to an animal experiment - in which Novartis violated over 500 Good Laboratory Practice Laws. This experiment involved transplanting genetically modified frozen pig hearts into the necks of baboons. One monkey which had a pig heart attached to the blood vessels in its neck was seen holding the transplant which was "swollen red" and "seeping yellow fluid" for most of the last days of its life.

Documents show that over a quarter of the animals died on the operating table or within a few days because of "technical failures" in the surgical procedures. In one experiment, this accounted for 62 per cent of lives. In another, 13 out of 22 monkeys died within two days of the operation, a fact not mentioned in their published paper. Imutron maintains all the relevant data was included in the scientific paper. There have been a number of awful mistakes. One monkey had to be "sacrificed" when researchers discovered the pig kidney it was about to be given had been mistakenly frozen.

In the documents, Imutran acknowledges that it has had "severe problems" with the data. The documents have gone to animal rights group which compiled a report - Diares of Despair - to present to the Government calling for a halt to xenotransplantation research and an independent judicial enquiry. Those animals are also transported halfway across the globe in tiny cages. In one shipment three animals died - probably from suffocation - in a 35-hour trip from the Philippines.



*In 1999, workers at Huntingdon were caught on film punching 4 month old beagle dogs in the face, and breaking animal welfare laws hundreds of times. HLS has tested dangerous pesticides, DDT, toxins, and other dangerous chemicals used in industrial developement or sprayed over our farms, into our food and drinking water; many of these are carcinogens. HLS makes money by testing the products "safe" even if they are not, and animal tests are easy to conceal and manipulate (as you can see in this case). (You can always use a different animal, and the drug or product might not harm them...you can always not publish a report and just say it never happened).

Continued approval of a customer's products (no matter how unsafe) means more business, so many dangeous products are tested safe, put on the market, and they wind up killing people. Such is the case with Merck's recent anti-arthritis drug Vioxx, which was withdrawn after causing 50,000 premature heart attacks.

Activists has forced over 200 companies, including some of the world's largest financial institutions (the worlds largest bank, insurance broker, stockholders, etc) such as Citibank, HSBC, Charles Schwab, and others, to abandon the lab. It's pillars of financial support are falling - they are $76 million dollars in debt - due back in June of 2006. HLS has come very close - within 2 hours - of filing for bankruptcy twice before.

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