UC and BP sign deal to create GMO frankenfuels

[Guest guest]

people never learn

 

 

The Berkeley Daily Planet

Web www.berkeleydailyplanet.com

 

 

Text Only Front Page Regular Format Article Index of Sections

 

 

Reich Warns of UC-BP Deal’s Consequences

By Richard Brenneman

 

 

UC Berkeley professor and former cabinet officer Robert Reich must be feeling

prophetic today, since the warning he issued about the use of a university’s

good name to greenwash an oil industry giant has just cost Stanford $2.5

million.

During Thursday’s Academic Senate discussion of the half-billion-dollar

planned pact between UC Berkeley and British oil giant BP, Reich cited ads run

by Exxon Mobil shortly after it signed a 2002 agreement establishing a $100

million, 10-year research accord with the school across the bay.

 

The ads, which ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times, announced Exxon’s

alliance “with the best minds at Stanford,†and carried the university’s

seal and the signature of the Stanford professor heading up the research.

 

“One such ad read, ‘Although climate has varied throughout earth’s history

from natural causes, today there is a lively debate about the planet’s

response to more greenhouse gasses in the future,’†said Reich, drawing

gasps from some in the audience.

 

That ongoing ad campaign has just cost the university a $2.5 million donation

already pledged by film producer Stephen Bing, a major Democratic contributor.

He recently gave $50 million to Proposition 87, the failed November 2006 ballot

measure that would have levied a 4 percent tax on oil companies to fund

alternative energy research.

 

The San Jose Mercury News reported Sunday that Bing killed his pledge in

response to the ads. His father, real estate mogul Peter S. Bing, has served on

Stanford’s Board of Trustees, and the family has given millions to the

university.

 

The speakers at Thursday’s discussion either lauded the UC-BP project as the

hope for evading an unthinkable future or blasted the eagerness of

administrators and academics to surrender to the lure of big corporate bucks at

the possible loss of integrity and the sacrifice of alternative research.

 

The project’s biggest booster, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau,

scorned those who said the university should reject the half-billion-dollar

package, labeling as “abhorrent†and “a violation of the most basic

principles of academic freedom†any effort to halt the funding.

 

The only cautionary notes among the seven designated speakers Thursday came from

Reich and Associate Professor Ignacio Chapela, an outspoken critic of

corporate/academic alliances as well as of the genetic tinkering that dominates

the winning proposal UC Berkeley sent the oil company.

 

While most of the faculty members in the audience applauded the proponents,

graduate and undergraduate students and several faculty members from the social

sciences had strong criticisms of the proposal that would create the Energy

Biosciences Institute (EBI).

 

The project would be formalized by a contract between Cal and big oil, with

Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at

Champagne-Urbana (UI) as subcontractors.

 

 

New details

 

A search of the original proposal selected by BP from five competing responses

from Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC San Diego,

Cambridge and the Imperial College, London, reveals no occurrence of the word

“waste.â€

 

Instead, the document focuses on production of ethanol, with the main potential

source listed as miscanthus, a tall, perennial grass that would be engineered to

be super-prolific with little need for irrigation or fertilizers.

 

Yet Jay Keasling, EBI faculty scientist and director of the Physical Biosciences

Division of LBNL, told faculty Thursday that waste wood and paper waste from

landfills would form a major source of biomass to be converted into fuels.

 

He also said that ethanol—the primary fuel cited in the proposal—is

expensive to distill, can’t be shipped in pipelines but must be trucked

instead and yields low energy concentrations. “Why not produce fuels like we

use in our cars right now?†he asked. “Why not produce oil, for instance?â€

 

While any examination of the human, environmental and social costs of converting

land to producing genetically altered crops that may be refined with genetically

altered microbes was relegated to last place in the proposal BP accepted,

Keasling said during the questioning period that monitoring would be done

throughout.

 

He also faulted the draft for leaving oversight to the last.

 

The proposal, a 93-page document, was drawn up with the assistance of the

university’s media relations department. The document only contains one

mention of the phrase “genetically modified organisms,†although creating

gene-altered species to produce and harvest energy is at the core of the

proposal.

 

The proposal would also oblige the university’s media handlers to work with

their counterparts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University

of Illinois and—most controversially—the oil company itself “to ensure

that the EBI maintains national and international visibility as the world’s

premier energy research institute.â€

 

 

Origin of proposal

 

Vice Chancellor for Research Beth Burnside said the proposal began in June of

last year when BP announced it would fund an institute to research a “biomass

conversion approach to energy conservation.â€

 

That approach dovetailed with already existing efforts at LBNL, where director

Steve Chu was already spearheading efforts to use GMOs to create new fuel

sources under the umbrella of the Helios Project, using the research facilities

of the lab’s Joint Genome Institute.

 

Chu acknowledged that biofuels aren’t the sole answer to climate change,

“but if you could have a 10, 15 percent effect on this issue,†it would be

“a huge part†of the solution.

 

After sending a letter in September to “all deans, chairs and directors,â€

Burnside said 60 faculty members responded with ideas for proposals, and all

were included in the document’s appendix.

 

While Burnside said she then began working closely with the Academic Senate’s

budget committee, under questioning she revealed that she didn’t consult with

the Committee on Academic Planning and Resources Allocation about the seven new

full-time hires proposed until after the proposal was submitted Nov. 22, two

days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had pledged $540 million toward a new

building if UCSD or UCB won the contract—a sore point with some of the

critics.

 

“Our objective was to treat this as an ordinary though a little bit oversized

industry-sponsored research project,†she said, a remark that led several

back-of-the-hall critics to roll their eyes.

 

The estimated $50 million a year that would flow from the agreement is more than

three times the university’s current annual corporate research funding of $16

million, or 3.1 percent of the $550 million total in external research funding

the university received, mostly from the federal government, in 2006. Assuming

half the $50 million went to the lab—an affiliate of the university—and UI,

the remaining $25 million would raise Berkeley’s corporate total to the 5

percent level, which Burnside said was still well below the 7 percent national

average and the 12.1 percent levels of Stanford and MIT.

 

Panelist Shankar Shastry, a professor of electrical and bioengineering and

director of the university’s Center for Information Technology Research in the

Interest of Society (CITRIS), hailed the agreement as the latest in an ongoing

series of joint academic/industrial collaborations.

 

“That’s what we’re good at in Berkeley. There are few other places that I

feel have this magic sauce to be able to put such coalitions together,†he

said.

 

 

Corporately responsible?

 

Just how responsible a corporation is BP? David Vogel, a professor at Haas

School of Business and the Goldman School of Public Policy, said, “On balance,

BP is a relatively responsible institution and I’m delighted that it has

chosen to associate itself with a relatively responsible university.â€

 

He cited the company’s adoption of a policy to disclose all payments to

governments in developing countries and its efforts to clean up oil spills in

Alaska and repair a Texas refinery where 15 people were killed and 200 injured

in a 2006 explosion.

 

He also cited the retirement benefits given Lord Browne, the CEO during the

spills and the era leading up to the Texas disaster. Browne “retired with

£5.3 million and an annual pension of £1 million ... this may seem like a lot

of money, but his counterpart the same year, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, retired

with a retirement package of $400 million. Even if you do the currency,

there’s a big difference.â€

 

Vogel’s list of BP’s corporate sins neglected to cite allegations of

murderous relations with repressive regimes in Africa and Latin America.

 

Claudia Carr, a professor in the College of Natural Resources who specializes in

energy issues in Africa, said the company had an “abysmal reputation†on

human rights issues in the Niger Delta and was fully involved in massive human

rights violations in Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

 

Peace and Conflict Studies student Matthew Taylor faulted the university for

dealing with a company which had aided in the CIA-planned overthrow of the

democratically elected premier Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 after he

nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, BP’s earlier corporate name.

 

 

Humanists respond

 

Reich was the most cautious of the panelists except for Chapela, citing five

major areas of concern in joint research agreements.

 

The first was the one raised by Birgeneau, “the academic freedom of

researchers to contract with whomever they wish in terms of funding,â€

including the issue of whether Berkeley researchers can take tobacco industry

money, an issue “still pending before the regents right now.â€

 

Second was the question of prior restraints on publication of results of

privately funded research, and Berkeley’s approach remains an open question,

“a question I hope we have time to discuss,†he said.

 

Third on Reich’s list was the ability of funding to distort the research

agenda, an issue raised by agroecologist and Professor Miguel Altieri, whose

research that he and Chapela do on eco-friendly farming techniques is doomed by

corporate funding that looks to patents and rights.

 

Reich also cited the $2.9 million Exxon Mobil handed out in 1998 “to

researchers who would raise doubts about climate change†and pharmaceutical

industry funding designed to “create an intellectual echo chamber of

economists†opposed to regulation.

 

His fourth issue was the potential impact of funding on hiring and promotion of

university staff, and the possibility that critics of corporate funds would be

discouraged or not hired at all. “The danger here is potential

intimidation,†he said.

 

The fifth issue, already cited, was exploitation of the university’s image and

reputation on behalf of the corporate sponsor.

 

Professor Timothy J. Clark of the university’s History of Art Department said

he had “grave misgivings about this deal being struck with British

Petroleum,†a name he insisted on using and which slipped into Vogel’s

discussion at several points.

 

The boardroom wants products and profits, he said, while scientists in the lab

want the truth—setting the stage for an ongoing conflict and the need for

oversight.

 

“The evidence suggest so far that transparency has been notably absent,†he

said.

 

Burnside disagreed.

 

Anthropology Professors Paul Rabinow and Laura Nader offered their own sharp

criticisms of the way the proposal had been handled.

 

Rabinow, whose specialty is medical anthropology and who has studied genomics

extensively, said his main conclusion was “that what was damaged was faculty

trust, but there’s not much of that left anyway.â€

 

Rabinow, who is working jointly on a project with Keasling, said he isn’t

opposed to all GMO research and cited LBNL’s development of GMO production of

the anti-malarial drug artemisinin as one positive use of the technology.

 

Nader said she was “rather shocked by the cavalier attitude of the

administration in discussing something as significant†as the

commercialization of the university, which would now be devoted “to serving

two masters, the bottom line and the truth.â€

 

 

Chapela’s statement

 

The activist professor, one of the leading critics of Berkeley’s last major

corporate partnership (the Novartis agreement), delivered an impassioned address

that was ended by moderator Linda Schacht after he went two minutes over the

eight-minute limit.

 

Blasting the proposal as a document that would lead to the prostitution of the

academy, Chapela was the only panelist to remind the audience that GMOs were at

the heart of the proposal, while deriding the euphemisms it adopted to describe

the highly controversial technology,

 

“In the BP-Berkeley spirit, I would suggest we rename ‘science’ what we

used to call ‘magic’ in my childhood,†he said.

 

Chapela also charged that a Walnut Creek-based company called Mendel

Biotechnology is a partner in the deal, a firm which has a $40 million alliance

with Monsanto, a multinational corporation which has a vice president on

Mendel’s board.

 

Two professors included in the agreement are on the board of the firm, he said.

 

He echoed Altieri’s concerns that the agreement would end research that

focuses on non-patentable technology.

 

“If we signed the agreement, can anyone seriously imagine that Berkeley would

be in a position to undertake significant research to show the problems with the

BP strategy?†Chapela asked. “Can anyone believe that after signing the

contract we would be working on alternatives that do not involve patents,

immoral profit margins, economies of scale and command-and-control

governance?â€

 

A complete video recording of the senate meeting is available online at

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events.php.

 

 

 

" NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may

have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this

without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor

protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President. "

[Guest guest]

cute, vegan and political...have you met my friend John? Jesus loves you!

Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Mail