By Brian Carnell

Friday, May 24, 2002

George Monbiot wrote an odd column recently in which he accuse corporations and their public relations outfits of using deception to advance their cause. Of course Monbiot engaged in the exact same pattern of behavior in his column.

Monbiot's column, The Fake Persuaders, concerns a study published in Nature last Fall that was formally retracted by the science magazine a few weeks ago. The paper, by researchers Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, claimed that their tests showed that wild corn in Mexico had been cross-contaminated by a genetically modified version produced by Monsanto. The paper received enormous attention upon its publication for offering proof of the environmental dangers of genetically modified organisms.

By April of this year, however, Nature ran a report criticizing the paper and concluding that, "the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper." To Monbiot, of course, this can have only one explanation -- the corporations got to Nature.

In Monbiot's version, research Chapela has his life and the lives of his children threatened over the paper, and Monbiot is convinced that several posters to the AgBioWorld list-serv that attacked the flaws in the paper were, in fact, aliases used by employees of a public relations firm used by Monsanto (though, Monbiot offers no proof of this, aside from the fact that the posters used freemail accounts and promoted the Center for Food and Agricultural Research.)

In Monbiot's view,

There do appear to be methodological problems with the research Chapela and his colleague David Quist had published, but this is hardly unprecedented in a scientific journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he published, alongside two papers challenging Quist and Chapela's, a retraction in which he wrote that their research should never have been published.

For someone so concerned about deceptive practices, Monbiot's column is a string of one deception after the other, mostly deception by omission (it could be that Monbiot simply does not understand the topic he is writing about, which would not be the first time for him).

First, Monbiot forgets to tell his readers that Chapela and Quist are hardly disinterested researchers. Chapela is a well know anti-GMO activist who sits on the board of the Pesticide Action Network and has signed a petition calling for a moratorium on genetically modified crops.

This by itself does not, of course, say anything about the quality of his research, but it is interesting given the mistakes in the Nature survey which, like Monbiot's, are ones of odd omission.

Chapela and Quist used a technique called inverse polymerase chain reaction (i-PCR) to look for DNA segments that were present in both the wild corn and the genetically modified corn. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but i-PCR is a sensitive process which is known to have a high likelihood of false positives.

So, when a positive match is found, the standard procedure is to then proceed to more accurate techniques to ensure that the researcher has not found just another false positive.

The problem with Chapela and Quist's paper is they never took this second step. They simply found positive matches using i-PCR and then wrote up those results. And, for whatever reason, Nature chose to publish their results without demanding more refined and accurate testing. As a review of Chapela and Quist's research published in Transgenic Research summed up the whole debacle,

What is very surprising, however is that a manuscript with so many fundamental flaws was published in a scientific journal that normally has very stringent criteria for accepting manuscripts for publication . . . It is very disappointing that the editors of Nature did not insist on a level of scientific evidence that should have been easily accessible if the interpretations were true.

Genetically modified corn may in fact be capable of cross-contaminating wild corn, but not only is there no evidence for that in Chapela and Quist's paper, but moreover the researchers never conducted well-known tests that would have allowed them to rule out the possibility of a false match. Given Chapela's anti-GMO views, it is difficult not to conclude such tests were avoided because Chapela thought they would weaken the results.

Despite Monbiot's claim, the problem was not with the results of their paper, but rather with their methodology which was faulty -- the paper never should have been published in Nature as it was submitted because it relied on shoddy methods and practices.

Source:

The Fake persuaders: Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the Internet. George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK), May 14, 2002.

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